Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

The best DNS service? Why?

This may be limited to Germany:

Apparently you can get free vouchers (from 2 to 5 euros in value) on the website "pizza.de".

There is a lottery kind of game right now on this URL: https://pizza.de/casino/

If you just open the developer console and run "win()", you "win" the game and can enter your phone number to get your voucher 🤔

What idiot programmed this?
What idiot reviewed this?
What idiot put this live?

Trying to setup server monitoring for one server (will deploy it on all my servers once this works well).

Getting these email notifs to work is a bitch 😅

(can't do pushover etc since those require GCM and I've got Google blocked out of my phone)

The director of then dutch intelligence agency AIVD (nsa/gchq equivalent) said, because the new mass surveillance law is getting loads of heat/criticism, that before the Dutch citizens should worry about the new surveillance law, they should look into which online companies they trust with their online data and why they trust those companies.

Nice try, sir. You're (probably deliberately) missing the entire point.

I get serious anxiety when someone is doing something on a computer and I know that the way they are doing it is the slowest way possible.

API? More like Aπ

Favorite development tool: Thesaurus.

Method/variable names are difficult dammit.

Strongly typed SMS

Hey! How do I do machine learning?

Well first you start off with a metric shit ton of data.
And then you .fit() your data
from there you can .predict() your data

Trust me, the algorithms are already there. All you need to do is get the data.

Just installed linux (Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS x64) because windows update was being a cunt, instantly, it all fell into place and I got it fully running with minecraft (using generic driver, but it actually works pretty well, don't worry I will get the proper one tomorrow) and a desktop icon for it within two hours compare to windows (update) taking 4 days to do barely any updates, not accepting java or graphics drivers, which it requires because fuck opengl with the default drivers.

Fuck windows. Hooray for linux!

Now back to programming...

Thanks for putting up with me but I just need to vent because I felt like I couldn't program (and I didn't) because of FUCKING DOOLALY WINDOWS 8!

Btw thanks to the local charity shop for introducing me to (SUSE) linux when I was like 11, giving me a hope in hell of using linux. I now have around 11 bootable linux disks and 1 bootable flash.

Someone clearly had fun coding this page up

When your computer literally can't anymore

I had a secondary Gmail account with a really nice short nickname (from the early invite/alpha days), forwarded to another of my mailboxes. It had a weak password, leaked as part of one of the many database leaks.

Eventually I noticed some dude in Brazil started using my Gmail, and he changed the password — but I still got a copy of everything he did through the forwarding rule. I caught him bragging to a friend on how he cracked hashes and stole and sold email accounts and user details in bulk.

He used my account as his main email account. Over the years I saw more and more personal details getting through. Eventually I received a mail with a plaintext password... which he also used for a PayPal account, coupled to a Mastercard.

I used a local website to send him a giant expensive bouquet of flowers with a box of chocolates, using his own PayPal and the default shipping address.

I included a card:

"Congratulations on acquiring my Gmail account, even if I'm 7 years late. Thanks for letting me be such an integral part of your life, for letting me know who you are, what you buy, how much you earn, who your family and friends are and where you live. I've surprised your mother with a cruise ticket as you mentioned on Facebook how sorry you were that you forgot her birthday and couldn't buy her a nice present. She seems like a lovely woman. I've also made a $1000 donation in your name to the EFF, to celebrate our distant friendship"

Oh this subject 😍 I'll post stuff once I've got my keyboard. This is going to be fun 😊

I'm signing up for steam for playing a specific game.

Entered a freaking difficult/long password: "Choose a less commonly used password"

Yeah right, what in the actual fuck.

To the people who kept telling me that LMMS (Linux MultiMedia Studio) was shit and you can't produce music with it properly, go fuck yourself. I stupidly enough believed this for years and kept on searching for other good open alternatives: nothing.

Tried it again last night, especially the drum machine since I'm going towards electronic music: motherfucker this thing is powerful!

No need for expensive software, LMMS works awesomely 😃

Another one, teach secure programming for fucks sake! This always happened at my study:

Me: so you're teaching the students doing mysql queries with php, why not teach them PDO/prepared statements by default? Then they'll know how to securely run queries from the start!
Teachers: nah, we just want to go with the basics for now!

Me: why not teach the students hashing through secure algorithms instead of always using md5?
Teacher: nah, we just want to make sure they know the basics :)

For fucks fucking sake, take your fucking responsibilities.

I've found sites like Udemy/Khanacademy/Codecademy/Brilliant/Edx to be very useful — possibly more useful than expensive education.

But they still need:

1. Better correction/update mechanisms. Human teachers make mistakes and material gets outdated, and while online teachers are rectified faster than classroom teachers, the procedure is still not optimal. Knowledge should be a bit more like a verified wiki.

2. Some have great interactive coding environments, some have great videos, some have awesome texts, some have helpful communities. None has it all. In the end, I don't want to learn a new language by writing code in my browser. It could all be integrated/synced to the point where IDEs have plugins which are synced to online videos, with tests and exercises built in, up to a social network where you could send snippets for review and add reviews to other people's code.

3. Accreditation. Some platforms offer this against payment, but I think those platforms often feel very old school (pun intended), with fixed schedules, marks and enrollments. Self paced is a must.

4. Depth is important. Current online courses are often a bit introductory. We need more advanced courses about algorithms, theoretical computer science, code design, relational algebra, category theory, etc. I get that it's about supply/demand, but we will eventually need to have those topics covered.

I do believe that for CS, full online education will eventually win from the classroom — it's still in its infancy, but has more potential to grow into correct, modern education.

Is there any practical reason why we can't develop native iOS on a non Apple mashine?

I'm tired of having to use my sisters old shitty MacBook Air while my new XPS 15 is dusting up 😡😡😡

Much-security.nl is down.

No, no hack or whatsoever. I just reinstalled the wrong server through my control panel.

The new blog version will hopefully be up tonight. 'you keep promising that' - I don't have a backup of the old version and I only just started using git so I can only upload the new version (or git pull). Next to that, except for the front-end, everything works now.

😐

I call my git repos the field hospital.

I didn't finish my studies, but I seem to be the most qualified person to pick up the scalpel. Big corner of body bags. New brilliant ideas arrive, I do what I can with the time I have. Sometimes something survives, but it's usually too heavily mutilated to fully function. Unfinished refactorings develop into hardened scar tissue, the feature creep starts festering and leaking.

I should get better at triaging, just deleting old crap, pick one project and nurse it back to health.

But it's not easy to start with fresh focus, when your keyboard is still soaked in booze and the blood and tears of all the victims you've butchered.

My classmates are such hypocrites. They pretend to be programmers, but they can't fool me.

"Oh sorry. I can't show you the result of my html code. I have to compile it first, but there's no WiFi."

There's so many things wrong with that.

Is anyone else excited about Mycroft and the Mycroft Mark II? If I had any disposable income, I'd throw money at their Kickstarter cause it looks very promising.

"could you please just use the standard messaging/social networking thingies? That way it'll be way easier to communicate!!"

Oh I don't mind using standard tools/services which everyone uses at all.

Just a few requirement: they don't save information that doesn't need to be saved, leave the users in control of their data (through end to end encryption for example) and aren't integrated in mass surveillance networks.

Aaaaaand all the standard options which everyone uses are gone 😩

So I just wrote a Ruby script to encrypt some files in AES.

I started it, it's designed to show the key when it's finished. It encrypted 7 files, then Kaspersky pops up and deletes my entire Ruby installation.

okeh

Best quotes from IT teacher:

- "C# is a language to program your IDE."
- "C# is a language for beginners, and is not really used in production."
- "We won't use Python to learn programming, because Python is a very old, slow and useless language, and is not really used anymore."
- "Yeah, your algorithm is fantastic, but you wrote 'The answer is: ' instead of 'Answer: ', so it's just a B."
- One of my classmates was bored and opened Notepad++, and when the teacher saw it, she said "I have been teaching programming for years, but I've never seen this program, what do you use it for?"

I feel so lucky that I have started learning programming years before at home, I just couldn't start if I had to learn this way.

Came across an app that I really liked, but unfortunately, development has ceased for it. That also means I can't pay for it in order to get a license key. So what's a developer to do?

DECOMPILE it

After decompiling it, I placed inside the code that I paid for the app 😂

.field public static final MARKET:Ljava/lang/String; = "paid"

Gf: "Why are you such a typist"

Me: "I promise not to buy more keyboards with blue switches..."

Gf: "No, I mean like being racist or sexist, but you discriminate types"

Me: "Uhhh"

Gf: "You are always bitching about how awful date/time types are, with timezones, leap seconds and daylight savings"

Me: Face turns pale, thousand yard stare, vietnam-flashback to when I was writing a calendar scheduling/meeting/matching tool which used 3 databases, with timestamps in different formats, and web frontends for people in offices around the world.

Me, with a soft broken voice: "So?"

Gf: "You've been working on that palette tool this week, and you keep talking about how interesting all these colorspaces, white balances and conversion formulas are"

Me: 🤔

Uhmm... okay...