Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

I had just started my new job and deleted 3 years of data that the client had spent over £450,000 collecting 😱

another developer used my PC to quickly access the clients database while I was out the room as I had sql management studio open. I went back to my PC thinking I was connected to my local database, did a few truncate tables to test my software and :0 minutes later I get a call asking why there was no data on the server!

Thank god for backups 😓

I finally built a new PC with 8GB memory, i7 4790K and SSD for OS.

My old system was a core2duo with 2GB memory. Android studio used to take 20mins for gradle sync and another 20min for signing apks. "Live preview" and "emulator" was a thing of the future for me. Never used it.

But now things have changed. This thing boots up in less than 5 sec and studio gradle takes less than 30sec. I'm so happy right now! Its like a dream come true! *cries in happiness*

Day 1 10:00 am
Login to email account (Zimbra)
Your password is incorrect (I entered it correctly, this was a permanent issue ,used to happen in the company with many employees)
Reset your password by logging into internal company portal.

11:00 am
Logged into company portal, somehow. 2 Mbps internet shared among 104 people, you can imagine the speed.
Reset email password
* your password has been sent to your email id*
Are you fucking kidding me? U have emailed me the password to the same email I can't log in to?
Where did the architecture designer get this top notch weed from?

Day 2
Asked HR to reset my password (using a colleague's email)

Day 3
No reply from HR yet

Day 4
I went to meet HR, she's on vacation. So they have 1 person managing the password reset, for 5000 people with no backup person. Cool.

Day 5
Your internal company password has expired. Check your email for link to create new password. This is some next level shit going on.

Day 6
I called up Internal IT team to generate a new email for me.
They asked me to raise a ticket.
I can't raise a ticket because the only way to do so, is through the portal.

Day 7
Nothing. Btw, personal email and all social networks were banned. You can't even open stackoverflow.
And this was a research lab, amazing huh?

Day 8
Loss of pay for 4 days since I can't login to company portal to fill timesheet.

Day 9
HR comes back. Resets my password.
I try to generate my new password for portal.
The password policy:
Password can't be same as last 10 passwords
Passwords expire every week
8 characters minimum, 2 upper case, 2 lower case, NO SPECIAL SYMBOL. WTF. How long do u think its gonna take to crack that?

Fuckers had a company wise policy to automatically lock PC every 1 min if not used. Who the fuck can keep on using it continuously! I'm reading an article, and bam ! Locked. 2 wrong entries and that's it, repeat all steps again. Fuckers really didn't want to let me do my job, just keep on logging in all day.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

So, so many. How do I chose?

- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Once I moved to new flat that had no internet connection yet, so I went to restaurant located under my apartment, that had WiFi secured with password. I asked for it while waiting for the order - it was "A1B2C3D4". After a while I got anoyed that it was so slow, so checked if can acces router admin page and restrict access for their clients. It turned out I can and they used default login and password, so they ended up with only my MAC whitelisted. Seemed they had connected their own business PC ("office PC") via LAN too, so I was curious if they call ISP to check it out. I checked the router settings every day, even after I got my own internet connction and they had it blocked for about 3 weeks. Then they changed WiFi password, so I came again, asked for password (another shitty one), checked router admin page and... still default login and password...

My "new desktop PC".
6 core xeon CPU with hyperthreading x2 (24 virtual cores) over clocked to 3.9ghz

128gb ddr3 ecc ram
256gb SCSI hard drives in RAID 0
256 Samsung ssd
AMD r9 something something 8gb ddr5 vram gpu

Got it for £120 on eBay (except for the ssd and gpu). Still missing a sound card :(

I have no idea on what to use it yet except for development but I thought it'd be cool to build a pretty good "desktop pc" for around £350-£400.

Let me tell you how shit flies in Aerospace&Defense companies in certain place in on earth

1. Your dev. PC is isolated from the internet. You can not download any software/library etc directly. "Legal" way takes literally days and you must all effort for it to work. I will not discuss the details of legal way but it is not asking IT team to download it for you, you do it yourself.

2. You use an archaic requirement standard that is somehow used by all other similar companies too. These companies f*ck each other in the arse when they are working on projects together(hiding details from each other which is necessary most of the times etc.) but they were kind to each other when it came to share shitty req. standard.

3. When you try to switch to new requirement standard, you waste weeks only to amend the old one, because everyone is using old one for all projects, so changing it would upset old guards in the company(which are people works in same project for 10 years, no personal development)
4. You came 1 minutes late, you fill the "minutely permission" form.

5. You already work long hours per day and they remove your small breaks during day, because developers use those breaks longer than intended(I wonder what might be the reason...)

6. A technology can not be adopted into current projects even it has objective advantages proven many times in the outer world, because old guards(developers), IT team and configuration management guys(poor man's dev ops role sometimes) can not change their ways.

I hate this shit...

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

He asked me for help on something, i didnt find the problem so i asked him to create a new branch and let me figure it out.
I went back to my PC, cloned the project, but it took me like forever ..
node_module was removed from .gitignore, i asked him why ? He said "i changed on the source of a package i used, what can go wrong? " ...
I almost hit him with a chair c:

Hi all, just signed up and wanna let you know that you are all great. Didn't see any kind of hate or disrespect here at all, so thanks for being a great community:)

Of course I'd also like to get some opinions here. Tomorrow, I'll get my new PC and am wondering what Linux distros you are using and especially WHY it is your favorite..

I will mainly develop on it in C and Java and will most likely choose Debian, just because I'm used to it.

A huge new hospital opened up.
it looks very modern and nice, lots of new doctors and facilities.. but..

Why is everything wireless?!
everything's connected to different APs across the hospital!

Receptionist's pc? has a wifi adaptor sticking out to the side.

in-patient's smart tvs? Wireless, connected to their own ap

etc etc.

conveniently enough, the SSID's were labeled with where they were being used and didnt bother to hide it
"Office A" "Smart TVs" "DB".

now im not saying wireless is bad, it's convenient! but why make everything in the building connect wirelessly.

any kid who's feeling naughty could do:

aireplay-ng -0 0 [BSSID] wlan[#]
and it's good bye connectivity.

or maybe flip put wireshark or any kind of sniffer.

i dont wanna have to come here for surgery only to find out the machine's wireless too.

imagine it stopping halfway through your surgery.. Yikes..

School sucks.
Paying quiet a lot of money(not having that much) to a private school that used to impress me two years ago.
Now I can see all the hidden crap:
- Project work is graded after written lines

- "Do this project with scrum" Got two hours in the room with scrum board in a whole semester

- Exams are pushed if the teacher is to lazy to deal with bad results. A 3 ( or C ) became best grade.

- They could not find a teacher for OS & Networks. So instead of 1 semester Server architecture we got 5 days.. 1 of them for exam (exam = final grade)

- Guy took part with us during the 5 days. "How did you do that?!? Doesn't work on my PC I think" - half year later he is the new Network teacher

- Surpassingly he sucks at that, being half a week ahead of his lessons by googling shit together. Can't answer a single question beyond that..

Once he created a multiple choice exam. Questions in a word document online, answers on paper. Not just that he never blocked the internet during the exam, he also publicly uploaded the document a week ahead. Securing it with a 5 letter password... Somehow we all passed that one with a pretty good average.

Besides there a some teachers who are actually really good.

On my first week in the internship, I have to create a small website and it has to be finished ASAP. So I used Bootstrap.

After finishing I tested the website in chrome debugger tools for every screen size (design responsiveness), it was working fine. My stupidity was that I haven't tested on actual mobile/tablet.

The site was live, I send the link to one of my friends and he said "why everything is so small? looks like I'm browsing on PC". I quickly grab my phone and visited the site and it was not responsive on mobile. Started to check the code again, tested again on chrome tools it was working. But not on mobile. Changed the bootstrap file but no fucking changes on mobile.

After few moments of thinking, I realized that I haven't included the "meta viewport" tag. I felt so stupid and it was kind of embarrassing for me.

Now I first include meta tags before working on new project.

My idea of a crazy night : wipe an old windows pc I have and install a new Linux distribution that I've never used before.

So there was that paranoid schizophrenic person, a blonde girl with a buzz cut, and somehow she was a friend of mine. She used a Linux distro called “!!!!!!!!____!!!!!”, and convinced me it was the best distro out there. But the way she used it was… very specific.

She called me. She told me the new distro was out, this time it was called “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, and _this_ was the best one. It finally allowed her to observe the area around her neighbourhood right from her PC, through some app, and make pits in the ground. It was done with a touchscreen of a Nintendo DSi connected to her PC with something that looked like an IDE cable. You touch the area of the screen, and the pit will appear outside IRL. This was needed to trap swine-looking creatures in those pits, as they infested the land and were attacking people in packs, turning them into dirty, greyish, half-transparent lumps of gel.

I went to see her, and somehow I knew exactly how it's going to end, as if I decided to replay a game level. She lived in a rotten, mouldy, dark, half-abandoned condo building. She was also a terrible hoarder. I approach the old wooden door of her flat. It was painted over 1000 times and was barely closing. She knew I would come. She rushed outside, looked at me with her moon-sized eyes, grabbed my arm and told me:
“We have to run.”

I felt a sudden crippling rush of anxiety. I woke up. My heart was absolutely racing. My sight became darker and darker. The chest pain was consuming me, and I could barely move. I almost vomited.

That was quite a night.

Primarily IntelliJ IDEs.

I'm using IDEA for Rust & Kotlin, PHPStorm, Datagrip (DB), and sometimes PyCharm CE.

IDEs can feel a bit dirty with how heavy they are, and the lack of customization/control. But at the end of the day there's just nothing that can measure up against IntelliJ's inspections, integrations and project indexing.

My ideal product would be one universal IntelliJ IDE, but combined with the openness of VSCode/Atom, having everything transparently configurable through stylesheets and scripts.

As an editor though.... I use Vim for LaTeX, Markdown, plain text and Haskell code... but not so much for other programming languages.

Vim was my first editor when I moved from C64 to PC development 25 years ago, and while you get used to balancing keybind vimgolfing with being actually productive, i've always found maintaining plugins and profiles too cumbersome -- the reality is that Vim is an awesome TEXT editor, but it's really awful as a CODE editor out of the box.

When you want to try out a new programming language, you don't want to have to mess around with your Vimrc and Vundle and YCM for half a day just so you can comfortably write "Hello World" in Rust or Elixir... you just want to click one install button, press F10 to compile and see if it flies.

Oh, and I use Xed a lot for quickly editing files... because it's the default GUI editor on Mint desktops, and it's quite good at being a basic notepad.

So here I am sitting on my dusty laptop gaming laptop (because supposedly it would offer me better performance in compiling code and working with CUDA according to the people above me) at a research institute where I just started working at. I am told that there are some issues with the code and that it fails to build on Windows with MSVC that ships with Visual Studio 2017 and later.

I poor some hot tea from my insulated bottle I brought from home and start reading.

I look in this header file and what do I see - a custom uint24_t struct. Interesting...

I keep sifting through the code base. I find some functions that check and change Endianess. Ok, but the software is developed, built on and runs only on Win7 and later desktop systems. Never mind...

Further I find a custom "allocator" that is used throughout the whole code base. It has three inline static class member functions: allocate, copy and deallocate plus some private constructors. And these just wrap around the standard new and free calls. Some flavours of this class actually only deallocate (with a comment above them: "This allocator does not allocate. HANDLE WITH CARE!!!", which is btw the only "code documentation" I have managed to find).

But wait! What is this? A custom thread and mutex. Oh, and string, and vector.

Further down the rabbit hole I find a custom math library with a matrix class that does not support multiplication between a matrix and a vector. Perhaps not a use case I guess...

I continue and come across some UI-related calls. Interesting, I wonder what they are using as a framework. Oh, my...We have an extensive GUI custom framework written from scratch (drawing buttons and all).

All of this is to load an OBJ file and render it on the screen on a standard Windows PC in some way.

Very nice... ;_;

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

Feeling pretty accomplished for someone who did no "work" today lol. I needed to work on side gigs but instead I:

1) Factory reset a 2011 Macbook Pro I'm selling and reinstalled Mojave using a patch (this laptop is officially unsupported by Mojave as of June).

2) Migrated all personal files from my windows desktop to my NAS. I'm turning this computer into a gaming rig now that I exclusively use my 2017 Macbook Pro for development.

3) Setup RDP from my macbook to my desktop.

4) Fixed registry errors and deleted junk apps off my desktop.

5) Erased and formatted all USB drives I had lying around.

6) Packaged up an old Xbox One for my brother-in-law which will get mailed tomorrow (included a few USBs for him since I rarely use'em).

7) Tested streaming my Xbox One X from my PC but it's laggy as F (both are wired, have static internal IPs, and use my router for DNS...it's just the app I guess).

8) Scored a like-new Scuf Vantage for my PS4 for $140 (the guy who was selling it paid $214 a month ago lol). I traded my spare Xbox One S for a PS4 slim and in an attempt to get used to it, I got this controller with thumbsticks in the same position as Xbox's.

9) Fixed and updated my Synergy app (mouse/keyboard sharing - I can use PBP on my 38" LG ultrawide and it's fairly seamless going between them).

10) Cloned a buddy's repo and set the project up to work locally.

11) Starting to get some work done while watching the Vikings game.

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

So, these guys came to me at work, asking if I knew how the "Low Orbit Scanner" worked...
I said: "no, what's that?"
They said: "It's that tool used for DDoS attacks"
So I replied: "Oh you mean Low Orbit Ion Cannon"
them: "yea that, you know how it works?"
me: "ye, but what do you want to use it for?"
them: "just want to learn how it works"
me: "you download it, run it then fill out the things?"
them: "but I tried it and it doesn't take out the server I tried"
me: "Means your PC is to much of a filthy casual, buy a new one"
them: "can't you help us getting it more effective"
me: "yes, but I rather not end up in jail... I have a job and a clean document..."

The looks of their faces, love to see that disappointment of my colleagues when I say (or atleast hint): "go figure it out yourself"

They've been in a meeting with some clients the whole morning.
12PM, time for me to go. Say Happy New Year and am on my way home.
12:20 Got home, took shirt off, got something to eat from the fridge.
12:22 Bit the first slice of pizza. Phone rings.
- "Yo' we wanted to show them app 2 but I can't log in."
+ "I left the laptop (and the whole dev environment) there, and there's no PC on in my house (and no dev environment whatsoever)."
- "Well check with your phone. [SIC] Tell me when you fix it."
12:32 I had turned my personal computer on; checked the problem was what I imagined (unpkg lib with no version defined on the link had a new major/non-retrocompatible version); grabbed an online FTP tool; remembered IP, user & password; edited the single line that caused the problem; and checked it worked. Calling back.
+ "It's fixed."
- "Thanks!"
12:38 CEO sent me an image of the app not working, due to a known bug.
+ "That happens if you try to access app 1 having accessed app 2 and not logging off." (app 2 isn't being used / sold, as it's still in development) "Try logging off and logging in again from app 1."
- * radio silence *
+ * guess they could get in *

They had the whole freaking morning. 😠
I'm the hero CMMi's level one warns you about. But at what cost.
Happy early New Year's Eve everyone.

Back when I started my career (12 months ago lol), I was in IT support. Having to deal with people who have hard times locating and reading off a sticker, let alone telling me their IP adress, only to realize it's the whole store that's offline, not only their PC (gosh do they ever talk with each other). So I decided to code a small tool that shows your hostname and IP adress, and pings the router, firewall and Google DNS. Aaand just in case the number for the IT hotline. Plan was that we could just tell them to double-click on that one icon on their desktop and read out what it says. We deployed it and I was happily waiting for it's time to shine (still a trainee I was also kinda proud of it), but when the network engineer found out, he wasn't happy about it at all. He was afraid too many people would open that new tool without us telling them to do so and/or forget to close it, producing a number of pings to the router, firewall and google. He went on about Google maybe blocking our IP if we produce too many pings and so on.
In my opinion he was kinda overreacting, but he wasn't that wrong and is a nice guy and responsible for our network, so we recalled the tool and never actually used it.

In 11th grade I had a shitty teacher who would make students go away from this one computer he always used in the computer lab. It was pretty annoying because he only ever used it to watch YouTube videos of fuckall Bollywood news and other garbage like it.
It was extremely annoying and inconvenient to everyone.
One day, I went to his PC, when he was not there, and reallocated the default way to open all .exe files to nothing, using the Windows Registry.
He came back and saw that none of his applications work and his PC is basically unusable now.
It was extremely funny for a few days to watch the IT guys try to fix but they weren't able to.
Now I don't know what they told the school but a month later they bought a completely new CPU and placed it instead of that one.
So fucking stupid.

Still new to dev, so I'm only used to windows but I want to try Linux. Don't want chance messing up my expensive pc, so instead, installing on old laptop I've been keeping in the closet. Installing Ubuntu Gnome, looked like a safe choice for beginner. This way I can try it out without consequence and possibly get new life out of an old machine.
Incidentally, any Linux specific apps/programs you'd recommend to a newbie?

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

Not sure if it's my first encounter, but definitely the most memorable, when I was young we had a windows xp pc (quite new at the time) and we had a program called Nero burn (used to burn images to cd's)

The pictogram of neo burn was a pc on fire, and so I thought for the duration of my xp time that that program would blow up the pc if I ever started it...

Looks like my new years resolution is to be more controversial.

I realize that all the OSes can easily have 10s with the correct setup, however that wouldn't be much fun.

Bit of background:

After I almost threw a Windows pc against the wall for not being able to ssh from the cmd after I had already spent ages trying to install something, which was one command on the Linux and Mac terminal, I thought about the differences between the 3. Then, when a friend of mine (who has used Linux for many years) spent many hours trying to connect a pair of headphones to his Linux computer, I decided to make this graph to spark a debate and hear your opinions.

Question: What was the worst mistake you made in Linux?

So... Because I've finally upgraded my PC (rip money on bank account) I can now run a VM with Linux all the time that isn't slow as a snail.
I installed Linux mint, with 4Gb of Ram and 6 cores, and it runs like a brize, while I play on windows and stuff. BTW I'll be using the VM for programming stuff, since I'm finally at home (homesick because of burn out), when I'm better I'll finally have the patience and memory to learn new stuff and get my projects up and going.
And because I've never really used Linux I'm watching YouTube videos about Linux, and found a Perl I've watched before, #Linux Sucks
And It's great... I get so many laughs, but also, learn stuff I didn't know, like, how Linux Pros make mistakes that Windows users can't even do, like breaking the OS.
So... I would love to know, what was the worst mistakes you ever done on Linux? How did you brake you're system?
BTW this would also be great for noobs like me to not make them... I hope. Since I'll be moving full Linux when I'm comfortable.

BTW @dfox this would be a great wk ...

when I was like 11yrs. old, my father has bought a new phone for himself. I used to play a lot of gta vice city those days on my PC. one day i got to use a card reader to exchange multimedia between PC and the phone.
so, i copied gta vice city in my phone. bcoz i knew that i can move around the players using the phone's d-pad. I was left broken when I saw the error msg. in the phone: "file not recognised"
:-/
After few days, my friend wanted to play gta-vc, so he asked for the game CD. but this guy didn't have a computer in his home and he won't listen to me when I try to tell him, "you can't just play a video game in your DVD-player with a TV remote??" So, I gave it to him.
Next day, he was angry at me, bcoz the game didn't worked, obviously it was me who hve messed something in it. :-/

What utterly stupid things you guys or your friends have done?

Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.

Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.

Thinking how this feature came to be....

1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!

I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.

**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.

Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.

IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....

Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

In my new job I'm supposed to get a macbook.

I've never used a mac but I'm a long time Linux PC user.
What should I expect/note?

Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?

I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.

This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.

Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.

I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.

The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.

Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.

Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.

Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.

But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.

Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.

My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...

Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?

The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T

I recently started a new job and wanted a way to use devrant on the office. Jsrant and xmlrant both work well but I wanted something on the cmd. There are some options, but what I found relied on npm or python, which I don't have installed on the company pc.

So to browse devrant on any platform and without having to install anything, I made this simple thing using .net core. I used an existing library (GitHub.com/olegrumiancev/devRantNetCore) so that's most of the work.

It's a really stupid app and I made it for my personal use but I'll share it here in case someone else finds it useful.

github.com/CristoferCD/devrant-cli

There are compiled packages for Windows and Linux as a release.

I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).

TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.

As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.

When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.

He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.

The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...

Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.

After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.

He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.

I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special.

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

This may be obvious, but debugging is all about input / algorithm / output. If there's something wrong, it's one of the three. Work with the method of elimination. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not.

I'll give you an example from my situation:

I wanted to play an old DOS game on my modern PC and so I used DosBox. I made an iso from the original CD, mounted it, referred to it in the game's mount settings and launched the game.

Then, after I had saved the game and I tried to load it again, the game would say: "Could not read/write savegame". And so I thought something was amuck with my mount settings and I started fiddling with those, but it only made it worse and it gave me more (cryptic) errors.
The next approach was to save a new game and load that one. Nope, same problem.
Finally I decided to follow a DosBox tutorial for the game and load the game again.. same problem. So I think hmm.. my algorithm is correct.. my output is wrong.. so then my input must be wrong. So I decided to save the game again with these new and correct settings and low and behold, it finally loaded.

One thing to note was that when it failed to load the savegame, it was because it had done a partial save because due to incorrect mount settings it couldn't figure out all the right config folders/files/paths and my savegame ended up being corrupt with 80% of the files having 0 Bytes, which was suspicious. That usually means a file became corrupt.

And then it hit me.. if the game says: "Could not read/write", that doesn't mean the same as "Could not access the file/folder". It could access it, it just couldn't parse it. And of course.. the 'write' part of the message indicates that it messed up in writing, causing it to misread. Sometimes you really have to think about it..

Anyway, input, algorithm, output. :)

Technically not andev rant but fuck it. This pusses me off no no end.

PC gaming as I used to love it, is ending.

E3 for pc gamers was a death march. With the exception of hitman and just cuz 4, which are both more of the same. Don't get me wrong, I'll play them both because they're good fun, but look at the PS4 lne up. Control, Anthem, Detroit and more, all NEW IPs.

Meanwhile over in PC world we get the 50th billionth Battle Royal and (surprise) another JC.

I couldn't even being myself to finish Origin (WHICH WANT EVEN A GOD DAMN ORIGIN STORY)
sigh

I'll have to get a PS4. I just LOATHE playing FPS with a controller.

Oh, yeah, and a new fallout. With one mode. Which is great because it means I get to be fragged and tea bagged by 9 year old Asian kids..

Okay. So finally I moved into a new pc. Because I never worked in a company, I have absolutely no idea what is the proper standard workflow of developing a website. My work flow was the same in past 12 years, how I have learned in the school: Used xampp, developed everything, used git only locally, when stuff was ready I fired up Filezilla and uploaded everything, and used ssh to make the final adjustments. When I have made some changes, I just uploaded the files I have touched, in the same way, optimized if it was necessary, done. I wonder if someone can clarify me how a proper workflow looks like for php/laravel, mysql, nothing fancy. Is using xampp still okay? Or what is the industry standard procedure?

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

Fun fact: Busses in our town... or is it a city now? Haven't checked the population count in a while... anyway, they've got some... what would you call it... double-sided weird thing with monitors inside hanging from the ceiling and they are supposed to be used to play ads but only thing that airs there are videos from RedBull TV and an occasional "ad" reminding everyone who's paying for some fancy new buildings in the city(the EU), now that would be fine... But why the heck does the PC that runs them reboot every time the bus hits a bump or a pothole in the road and most of all why does it run a full-blown Ubuntu 10.04?!! I mean it's still better than running Windows but just why... why are they even using PCs... A Raspberry Pi would be more than enough for the job...

So I'm basically fucked.

There's a major bug on an SPA I developed for a client, but I can't reproduce it because I don't have a recent iPhone or iPad (the only ones I have a way too old and either way I can't debug them without a mac) and I can't reproduce the bug on my android.

To overcome this in the past I installed a hackintosh on my pc and used it's iphone emulator, but I fucked it up and had to reinstall all my OSs but was too lazy to reinstall macos. Now I don't remember how to install it anymore, idk where I downloaded the fucking mojave virtual box image and the macos bootable usb stick I have just doesn't work anymore (probably some missing kext or whatever).

I really do not know what I'm gonna do. There's this ios-webkit-debug-proxy thing that might help me, but it just looks like it's a hassle to install and since I don't know what I'm doing the chances of it working are pretty slim. I might try that but I'm fairly confident it won't work. And even if it does, I still can't install chrome on the iphone I own because it's too old and my dad probably won't let me upgrade it to a new version.

I don’t understand why people hate windows, especially windows 11??

Running Windows 11 on a Dell Latitude 3520 with an 11th Gen Intel Core i5 processor, I was able to go from the computer completely shutdown to a new 3D unity project fully loaded and ready to go in only 1 minute and 25 seconds!!! That’s from completely shutdown!

I haven’t overclocked the PC or anything and have used half of the 465GB storage!

Me: Ok I'm not going to bother upgrading my PC, just going to use it and buy a whole new system later on...
PC: Yo' bro, remember when you had no clue at what you were doing and you didn't buy an 80 Plus certified PSU and used stock intel cooler? Yeah man you're going to need to replace both of these things, that'll be $280!

Of course this fucking happens, knew I should have waited till I actually knew what I was doing with PC hardware!

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

!rant/story:

Aaayoo issya boi the OG rapper straight outta Compton, wassup?!

Nah, for real, though.: How are y'all doing? It has been a long time. I hope y'all are having a great time (can sense some peoples' incoming negative comments due to corona).

I built my completely new first gaming rig like a few weeks ago after my school laptop stopped showing any signals.

The specifications are the following.:
- Mobo: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (no iGPU)
- dGPU: KFA2 RTX 2070 SUPER OC
- 2nd dGPU: GTX 550 TI (this one gets a new rant/post)
- RAM: 2x G.SKILL Ripjaws V 8 GB 3600 MHz
- PSU: Be quiet 650 W (It was the platinum edition afaik. I originally bought the 600 Watt Gold edition, but somehow they sent me the 650 Watt for no additional charge... which is great for me haha)
- HDD: 2x 4TB NAS HDD in RAID1 configuration (to load all of my games around 2 TB right now. Got the two HDDs for 110 Euro including the SATA Data cables)
- SSD: One Intenso 240 GB SSD and a reused Samsung 256 GB SSD from my old broken Lenovo laptop
- Case: Be quiet Pure Base 500 black with a glass panel on the side

While building my first PC, it was one hell of a challenge. I knew how it all was working in theory, but to put it all together, practically, was a bit of a challenge, but it was a nice challenge. I learned a lot and have a performance gain I could only ever dream of.

I used to play my games first on a Toshiba satellite l750d laptop (around 40 fps in cs:go with the lowest gfx settings) and then on a Lenovo e51-80 laptop (around 30 fps max minecraft with no shaders and texture packs).

Now I play cs:go on Kubuntu with 400 fps at peak with ultra high graphics. It is unbelievable.

I couldn't trust the system when I turned on the fps display the first time I saw it.

Soo Guys,

I am thinking of a new Laptop for developing abroad. Also because my PC is to much power crunching.

I first thought of an MacBook. Thanks to my human intelligence I have thrown away this idea.

I may want to use an surface pro (not the beefiest one, just like i5, 8gb RAM and 265ssd) or an laptop with Linux flash.

Because I am used to develop in Windows environment I might choose the surface. I really love Linux but as I progress in my (jet many, but not enough) languages I might stay at windows.

I wouldn't choose any HP or Lenovo laptop any more, only bad experience.

What do you guys think? Any other opinions?

Edit: I want to use it for:

- WebDevelopment
- Java Application Development
- C#/C Development
- Server Development
- Game Development
- Network Adminstration
- Server Administration
- Some Random Stuff

Ok... Can someone explain me this?
Happen a few weeks ago.
My pc would crach on any 3D program or game.
Did some tests, was the graphic card.
Send it to repair (amd, Asus made)
Placed my old Nvidia, installed drivers all good.
My new card came, nothing repaired, nothing found, passed all stress tests.
Placed the card back ok, no OS.
Bios detects both ssds but don't start (windows 10.... Ya tryed Linux but doesn't work for my main past time in pc, Arma 3).
Loaded the USB with the windows instalation, used command line drive C is completely empty but has 160gb used.
Ended ip formating.
GC works perfectly.
So... Wtf happen?

!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.

Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.

I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.

At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.

Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.

But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.

So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.

With software, that doesn't apply though.

So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:

*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.

*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills

*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.

*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )

I was in the first grade and my dad worked at the government as a budget officer. We didn't have a computer at that time, though. So, my Dad let me use his PC at his office. My first interaction with computers, started with just one program, Microsoft Word, which Dad used most of his documents.

What I did to immerse myself with computers for the first time as a first-grader was by typing my name in Times New Roman and printed it with my dad's printer. I was very impressed of how a computer can do at that time.

And that sole program was my starting point of my fascination with computers and how it motivated me to learn more about computers.

I thinking about new PC with around 1500 USD budget.

1) I don't play new games, so there si no need for more powerfull PC.
2) I'm mainly coder, PHP developer and sometimes graphic designer, so there is no need for more powerfull PC.
3) PC is also used as multimedia centrum, so there is no need for more powerfull PC.

Sometimes i have wierd thoughs.

The customer service dept at Koss Headphones sent me an adapter gratis for my Pro 4/AA headphones so I could listen to loud rock and roll on my pc. I've been using Koss exclusively since I rec'd a pair for Christmas in 1971. Despite the natural deterioration in sound quality on a PC, I found I could hear more on certain Rolling Stones soundboards [the ones in question are Philadelphia 1972 and New York City a week later]. So I penned a rather whimsical email to Michael Koss, who actually replied with a letter, the kind we used to lick stamps for and put in a mailbox.
OK, that PC died. And the HP I have somehow has a really loose jack so the whole mechanism will slide out if you move the least little bit. It happened so often I became shell shocked about listen to loud music on my headphones at night when my nabes were sleeping because I didn't want to wake anybody up.
Finally, after too much jiggling, the end bit of the adapter got stuck in the headphone jack. Koss sent me another adapter gratis. Last night, I got out my headphones, removed the new adapter from its envelope, and inserted tweezers into the jack to pull the broken off bit out.
Except the broken off bit slid deeper into the jack. On my own, I have been able to rig the pc so I can use the speakers. And a friend who can remove the bit of the jack stuck in the jack will be over in a couple of days.
I went online and googled the methods others have used to remove broken off bits. That was worth the keystrokes!
In any case, I just wanted to say something about the irony of expecting the problem to be over and then having a few days more to live with the broken bit.

I was so bored the other day, that I wrote a fat client in C# to calculate happy numbers. I used BackgroundWorker class, because I was hoping to be able to cancel the calculation process. It turned out I couldn't. Rats.

Out of pure frustation, I wrote the same program in Java using Swing and SwingWorker. Here, the cancel feature worked just fine.

And then I had this "Wait ... What?!" moment, when I realized, that one of the programs was incredible slow. So I rewrote both codes, so that they used the same algorithm and similar classes. I compiled the C# program as release and ran it stand-alone, while I started the Java application from within the eclipse IDE.

The C# program needed 42.681 seconds for 100,000 happy numbers, while the Java application completed the same task after 0.986 seconds. The result sets of both programs are the same.

Maybe I need a new PC (2007, 64 bit, 8 GB RAM, Windows 10). Or I'll get rid of C#.