"The Fire Department has traditionally considered architecture a priority only when it’s burning down. " - Justin Davidson

This is how you do it, holy shit. I should not have to opt out of shit like this but rather opt in. Fucking thank you cordova

Today, a video appeared online of a game called StoneHearth, which is currently in open Alpha.

The video is about adding multiplayer functionality to this (originally) singleplayer game.
'Tony' is a hero! Because he initially designed the singleplayer game according to a strict client-server model, adding multiplayer is now a piece of cake. Good thinking there.
The structure of the game even made it harder for developers to hack around it, than just to follow the model. That is awesome. Kudos to Tony!

https://youtube.com/watch/...

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

Git merge :)

Me: "Today I'm going to study real hard for that logic exam I have next week. I am already late."

Brain: "Remember tekkit classic, that game you used to play? It would be totally fun to play that again."

Progress after two days of gaming, two days of studying: page 94 of 400 😭😭😭

Taking value analysis to a whole new level.

Playing "de boerderij van Piet Precies" on an old windows 98 machine of my parents. It's a game for little children about this farmer, "piet precies", who is quite a perfectionist and has everyting on his farm go in orderly fashion, but one day his animals start to "revolt" or something, and make a big mess (a cow in his bedroom for example).

Yup, late 90's kid ☺

Argh!
My driving instructor reserved an driving exam and I just discovered that it's 4 days after my theory exam expires!
I already paid for the exam.
Now I have 20 days to arrange AND PASS the theory exam again! 😤😤😤
If not, I won't be allowed to do the exam 😤😰

"Hello darkness my old friend."

Switched to dark theme.
Liking it already 😃

The algo strikes again

One of my supervisors once said: "A computer without mutable state is just a glorified electrical heater."

Meaning that at some level you'll need some mutability.
A processor/memory unit without mutability is not worth very much, except if you want to build a new one for every clock tick...

Created a simple bot for an online game using puppeteer.

After an evening (and night) of dev and debugging (quite some rejected promise errors), it worked fine and was ready for a 10-minutely cron job.

Fixed a couple bugs in the first three hours. Then started playing minecraft, which lagged like hell.

Opened task manager and saw a list of about 25 headless chrome processes. They had not been closed because of unhandled errors before the close method call 😵

Now added some basic error handling ☺

I study both mathematics and computer science at Delft university. There's a difference between the approaches these two studies have.
Mathematics is usually about going to lectures, learning complicated stuff there and then using the obtained knowledge in a exam at the end of the course.
The CS courses are kore about engineering. They have practicals way more often than the math courses and the exams usually are of les importance.

It feels as if the "academic level" of the CS courses is lower. In math, we learn the real deep, abstract matter, while CS is more about "tinker up something nice in the practicals and you'll be fine."

I'm not sure if either approach is better, but I'm sure I like the maths version more. The CS approach is more HBO-like (HBO being the lower-level universities)
It is even that, generally speaking, the people who study maths seem more serious about studying than the cs people.
Not all of them, and no offense meant, just an observation.

Well, that was not really a rant. If you read up to here, I'm curious what you think about this.

Actually finishing a project I (once) started.

EasyJet! Why do you do this to me?!

I'm usually on the tabs camp, because anyone can have their editor (not notepad) render them any way they want. I prefer showing them as 2 spaces. It just feels cleaner and more subtle than 4 😀

Thanks a lot for the ++ spree, bitsnpieces! (For some reason, your name makes me think of a merchant in Skyrim)

Alice! Thank you so much for the ++! So much ++, very wow.

I finally can have my C# T-shirt 😃

I guess anybody as dumb as me using Windows 10 for work would hate the new stupid automatic updates. But it went to the highest level for me.
I was working on a huge ugly ass PHP script. My hands were frantically pressing keys as I witnessed Windows restarting itself without warning to install updates. Which failed. Then restarted two more times.
I ragequitted W10 as fast as light I swear.

When I was finishing my telecommunications engineering degree, my aunt told me that a friend of her had a work offer for me and we arranged a casual interview.
After some small talk, the first thing this dude told me was: "as you have studied telecommunications, you must be interested on selling telecommunication devices right?". It happened to be a pyramidal phone reselling "work" offer.
I have never felt so attacked. My family thinks I studied 6 years to fucking sell phones.

mfw the client says he wants his e-commerce site SEO optimized, and his "computer guy" friend has had a default cms installation set on their domain for months and it's already indexed by every engine probably with a negative score 🙆🙆

<table> ftw

When the IDE says that you are overly clever and enlightens your day.

Watching Google's keynote, every time they say "OK Google" my idiotic phone wakes up and starts listening...

I told the designers how a web works a hundred times.
I thought they got it.
Today they handed me a "web design" as an InDesign file.

Saturday plan: serious switch to Linux.
1. Installs Fedora, lookin nice.
2. Let's update it, fails to boot.
3. Nouveau driver fails, lets install proprietary one.
4. dnf install dependencies, repo returns 503
5. Be stuck on a 640x480 bash.
6. Boot windows, start overwatch.

A friend of mine is finishing his telecomm engineering degree, currently on an internship.
Turns out that his new job consists on managing their trainwrecked WordPress and making pictures for their Facebook page. His boss is also the biggest a-hole I've never heard off.
He is so fed up of their bullshit he made a lil backdoor on the web. We are planning on injecting a script that replaces every char on the site with \uFD5. Any better ideas?

!rant
Any tips on fixing a mechanical kb that registers certain keystrokes twice or even more?

That magical moment when you finally merge into master and more than 20 issues close