Just called Asus for a problem with my router, went to send them my systemlog.txt for analysis

"Oh we don't have an email you can send that to"

Me: "(me calling bullshit) let me talk to the tech team.."

*Get transferred*

"Hello this is the supervisor"

Me: "fml"

"Ya we don't have an email you can send that to, but we can use a different departments verification services to get a file from you, has to be a picture though"

Me: "What? I got a .txt file here, I just want to get it to you, does it really have to be a picture?"

"Has to be a picture or a PDF, we can't take txt files"

Me: "fkin.. srsly? Fine"

I can't believe Asus's system srsly. I think it's for virus protection, but viruses can be embedded in both picture formats and PDF, but not in txt. So wtf is going on lol

Receives email from warranty guy in work.

Warranty: "Hi, see attached scan in PDF form.
I normally fill the boxes in manually, scan as pdf to myself and then email it on to the higher ups, but they now say they need it in excel form from now on! Can you convert it for me?"

Me: "It looks like your scan's quality isn't good enough for a convert to excel.
Where do you get the original form?
Is it from a website?"

Warranty: "Hang on and ill send you an email with the file and give you a call"

*receives email and a phone call"

Warranty:
"There you go. Theres an excel sheet in that email. what do i do?"

Me: "So.... just so I understand the question... you just fill in this excel sheet, scan as pdf and send it on... but they want it sent as an excel form and not a pdf?"

"Yes."

"So.... Could you not just fill in the excel sheet and email it to them?"

"What do you mean?"

"....fill in the excel sheet as normal, and go to file, share and email... send the original one on."

"And what would that do?"

"...you... you'd be sending the form as an excel sheet, as requested??"

Warranty: *silence for 10 seconds* Oh, i see now. I get you! You're a genius! Well done for figuring it out. Thanks a million!!"

O.O

First off I dont mind what OS you are using. This rant isnt about the OS but about hypocrisy for some of the users. Secondly Im sorry for typos, I typed it on my phone while waking up.

People are calling Windows spyware, so they are using Linux or MacOS. Even though I disagree with the term spyware I would be fine with that if you weren't a hypocrite.

How many of the people who use Linux and call windows spyware uses Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitter once in a while? I highly doubt you if you say you don't.

A few years back Ive tried to live without anything of google, this also meant blocking YouTube, their trackers an javascript libraries.
Not much of the internet still works if you block google servers.
Google is everywhere and always collects data.

Facebook and twitter also collects data about you. Everyone who has your number in their phone will share it with Whatsapp and google so they can build up a profile. Even if you dont block it.

What I am telling you is that its impossible to avoid being tracked by these companies (including MS).

Every company I mentioned here has a profile on you, if you want it or not.

So let's check which of these companies tries to follow European laws.
Google gets fine after fine but doesnt really try to avoid it.
It looks like Apple, MS, Facebook and Twitter are doing it better on this.

But if you check the European law every European citizen is allowed to request their complete profile collected by a company. And that means complete and not the public part you volunteered to give away.

So I tried it out.
Google didnt want to give it, apple didnt want to give it, Facebook didnt want to give it and Twitter doesnt want to give it.

The hypocrisy is becoming clesr with the following. I did get my complete profile from MS. It was a messy PDF file which crashed most PDF readers.
It contained a list of people I know and how I know them. It contained MS accounts I had in the past and my hobbies. (and quite a lot more)

So from these big companies MS is the only one following the European Law.

So yes they do collect data, but they are open in what they collect.

And Im not saying here that Microsoft is great just because they follow the law.

You can have your own opinion about this and do with it what you want. I just wanted to share some, maybe alternative, facts.

And again this isn't an OS rant or whatever. I dont mind what you do, but I do mind hypocrisy.

Teacher: Make a PPT presentation on *blah blah* with no animations or colors and present it next week.

*Next week*
I go and connect my laptop and open my presentation in a PDF file.
Teacher: Wait! You are using pdf. I said ppt.
Me: Yeah, you said no animations and a pdf file is much lighter than a ppt file.
Teacher: you are disqualified!

*facepalm*

Pedophile......
PDF file….......

knowing the difference could save your life

pm: our client wants a proprietary pdf compression app.
me: Okay gimme 3 days and some sample PDFs.
pm: they won't supply any sample PDFs because they contain confidential information.
me: okay fine, I'll download some from the interwebs.

** 3 days later **

me: here is the pdf compression app. all done and works with all of about 100 PDFs we tested with.
pm: okay great I'll have the client take a look.

** half and hour later **

pm: the client said that the compression app errors out.
me: okay I'll go look at the server logs to see what's up.

** 10 seconds later **

me: what the shit is a "foxit phantompdf" file.
pm: it's the proprietary pdf format that they are using.
me: oh joy. I'll go try to find some sample files and see if I can fix it.

** 1 hour later, no sample files found **

pm: got anything?
me: *sobs obnoxiously*

1. Spend a week learning InDesign and create an awesome resume.
2. Upload and send the PDF resume around with applications.
3. Have ppl ask for a Word file...

My dad came with a windows laptop and asked me to convert a lot of jpg files to pdf on a usb stick (wtf?) he showed to me a tool on the laptop that convert files one by one ... and there is 58 jpg file.
Soooo I unpluged the usb key and pluged it into my linux laptop and ...

for f in *.JPG; do convert "$f" "pdf/$(basename "$f" .JPG).pdf"; done

My dad could not believe I had finished in 5 minutes

Linux Powaaaa !

It's done! Network printer and scanner, hosted by a Raspberry Pi Zero W. I used CUPS to host the printer, but the scanner was much more difficult. I installed apache2 on the Pi to host a HTML front-end that I wrote. Once you set up the scan, the front-end makes an AJAX call to a PHP script, which then calls my Python script that does the scanning and converting. Once that's done, it returns the file name via the AJAX call, then the front-end downloads the scanned PDF on the computer. I even managed to impress my girlfriend, who didn't really understand what I was doing until I showed her the end result 😄

I might try to pipe the output of the conversion straight back via AJAX, to be downloaded without a second call.

I once had a client who wanted a system where no matter what type of file someone uploaded we'd make a PDF out of it. I don't mean "print to PDF", I mean like a straight conversion. A picture, a doc file, a speadsheet, an MP3, a video, a CAD file, a .ivt file format you and I make up right now and tell no one else about for storing Iowan votes, anything.

I told him that was impossible.* There are indeed things out there where you can print to a pdf, but it would mean that a program that knows what a .grml file is, and how to represent it on paper, assuming it even can be, is involved in the middle.

He refused to believe me, and found a company where the sales person swore up and down their product could do it. I said "then you explained it wrong" and we went back and forth. It culminated in me being put in contact with THEIR programmer. I explained what he was looking for. Their programmer replied along the lines of "but that's impossible, and also what would a PDF of half these examples even look like?" I basically said "I know, but your guy is telling my guy you can do this, so you need to tell your guy to STFU before we ALL get roped into trying to convert Duke Nukem maps and zip files full of dlls to pdfs."

Luckily it finally died after that, but the whole ordeal took months.

*I'm being direct/blunt for the sake of brevity when recapping what I said, just fill in the usual "talking with a client niceties"

Public sector. Guy wants to upload a PDF file into our system that exceeds our file size upload limit by a factor of more than 10. The PDF contains a lot of pictures.

His idea: print the hundreds of pages of the PDF on paper in b/w and scan it because b/w takes less space then colored pictures.

I am perplexed. He asked first though, so we could prevent the actual printing.

DO NOT USE JAVASCRIPT FOR PUBLIC WEBSITES IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE IT!!!

Almost every fucking day, I click a fucking button and NOTHING HAPPENS. I open the console and find tens of JavaScript errors, that *I* have to debug and fix in order to proceed.

FUR FUCK SAKE, JavaScript is not strictly needed, those fucking React and Vue are also not needed. Just now I wanted to download a form: IT'S A FUCKING PDF FILE, why the fuck are you putting your broken JavaScript function to let me download it!? PUT A FUCKING DOWNLOAD LINK YOU FUCKING MORON!

Nobody is forcing anybody to use JavaScript or those fucking fancy frameworks, SO WHY THE FUCK PEOPLE OVERCOMPLICATE THINGS THAT USED TO WORK SO WELL!

So lately I’ve been sending an http request with ajax instead of using classic form submit. Pdf and images need to be converted into byte64 string then send it to the backend, problem is if the size gets too big chrome crashes and showed me ‘Aw snap’, but it works on firefox. Thr file is size could be 3 to 100 mb (for pdf). So my question; is this my problem or just browser limitation?

I love my wife, God bless her, sent her a pdf file via email. Couple of hours later she replied with (and only) 'Can't view the PDF document'
That's it. No reason why, nothing. I was afraid to respond and ask why. "Oh..I accidentally knocked your laptop on the floor and it caught on fire, so I dumped a bucket of water on it." rolled around in my head a few times.
I get home, open the email, click on the document, opened just fine.
Me: "Um, why couldn't open the attachment?"
Wife: "Attachment? What did you do? It wouldn't open for me."
Me: "I just clicked the file. What did you do?"
Wife: "Oh. Supper is ready, help me set the table."
It was all I could do from screaming "OMG! THIS IS NOT THE FIRST ATTACHMENT I HAVE SENT YOU!!"
She made me baked chicken breasts marinated in Italian dressing and some other spices with melted cheese...big baked potato, pile of mix veggies......mmm...so all is forgiven.

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

My System Analysis professor wants to fail me because I refuse to store PDF files in the database in my project.

He wants me to store THE WHOLE BINARY FILE in the database instead of on the filesystem.

When I tried to explain why that would be bad, he interrupted me and began the "you think you know more than I do? I've been teaching this for X years" speech.

How do such people become professors?

Warning: long read....

I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.

So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.

It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.

So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.

Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.

Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.

The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.

TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.

Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.

After finishing up a resume on Photoshop:

"Please submit a Word or PDF file not more than 2MB."

I got the following question from the client:

After last batch of changes the name of the downloaded file is now `<file name > (2).pdf`, can it be like before, without `(2)`

Working with a delivery ordering API. Response:
Shipping label type: PDF
Label: base64encoded string

I was like, that's easy, literally two lines of code. Proceeds to convert and save the file. Then on open, bam! Format ubreadable. What the actual fuck?! Found an online converter, and tried to convert it to pdf, to see if I was missing something, but the results was the same.

Then checked the decoded string. First 3 characters: GIF

Well fuck you too! This carrier uses GIF's for it's shipping labels for 2years at least, how hard is it to change that in your fucking api response, you pice of shitbag.

I'm writing my bachelor thesis in LaTeX. As people who use LaTeX might know, it generates shitloads of files while compiling (like 10 files per .tex file).
To unclutter my project folder, I wrote a simple one-liner bash script that deletes all files which are not .tex or .bib files (literature references) and of course it will not delete itself (although that one also took me longer to figure out why my script 'kept disappearing for no reason after I ran it' than I'd like to admit).

However, I forgot that images are also files which are stored in the project-folder.
And this is how I suddenly lost all of my images for no reason at all, resulting in my PDF not building anymore. Luckily we all commit and push all regularely, right...

Edit: I just figured out that I'm even stupider than originally thought... My .gitignore ans more importantly, the '.git' folder also neither end in .tex nor .bib. Guess I'll just go fuck myself.

Long time ago, back in a day of Microsoft Office 95 and 97, I was contracted to integrate a simple API for a payment service provider.

They've sent me the spec, I read it, it was simple enough: 1. payment OK, 2. payment FAILED. Few hours later the test environment was up and happy crediting and debiting fake accounts. Then came the push to prod.

I worked with two other guys, we shut down the servers, made a backup, connected new provider. All looked perfectly fine. First customers were paying, first shops were sending their products... Until two days later it turned out the money isn't coming through even though all we are getting from the API is "1" after "1"! I shut it off. We had 7 conference calls, 2 meetings, 3 days of trying and failing. Finally, by a mere luck, I found out what's what.

You see, Microsoft, when you invent your own file format, it's really nice to make it consistent between versions... So that the punctuation made in Microsoft Word 97 that was supposed to start from "0" didn't start from "1" when you open the file in Microsoft Word 95.

Also, if you're a moron who edits documentation in Microsoft Word, at least export it to a fucking PDF before sending out. Please.

Sigh. This again.

We have Windows users complaining all the time about having their settings reset for each update. Then again, I don't remember default applications on Linux not breaking as soon as you are looking the other way. Why do I have to clarify that I don't want to open text files in LTSpice, or that nobody should ever want to launch first Wine, then Chromium for every PDF file?

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

Nothing big, but the time I felt the most useful and awesome guy in the world was when I wrote a script creating PDF cover letters from a csv file with contacts names for my gf. A bit of Latex and python, a few hours to make it resilient to special characters, but the look of relief (she would have done it by hand) and admiration in her eyes truly made me feel proud :)

Online applications are so much worse than the classic snail mail ones, because some companies just don't seem to give a single fuck about the quality of their application application (hehe).

This results in such joyous things like:

• "Allowed file types: doc, docx, pdf, jpg, zip"
• "Max filesize 3mb"
• "One of your files does not meet the requirements" (doesn't tell you which)
• "Upload timed out, please try again"
• 403 forbidden
• "Your account does not have the necessary permissions to upload more than 4 files at once"
• clicking the submit button leads to a 404
• "Please explain why you want to work for us." 500 character limit
• Google forms

Not exactly dev stuff, but LaTeX low-key makes me nervous.

In writing my thesis it seems that through some keyboard-fuckery I managed to slip in some weird unicode bullshit character somewhere, so that it doesn't compile. Alright, I just do \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0301}{ASDF} so that it gets replaced by ASDF. Searching for ASDF in the output pdf file does not yield results, so I can't even find the location of the fuckery in the text. It seems that unicode character is somewhere in my .bib-file and I guess my citation style doesn't even render the part of the data that character is in after all. So the above hack works, but still there is some weird-ass character in my bibliography file that I can't find.

On another note: I get that modularity is cool and all, but who thought that it is a good idea to give people zero transparency over what macro stems from which included package? No namespaces etc. I end up including a whole lot of packages that are needed for exactly one macro. That bloats up the file and you have no way to trace back which macro came from which of the quazillion included packages.

...then again maybe I'm just a lazy piece of shit whose google searches end before success and all of the above has some easy fix.

Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

First day out of 10 exam days today! Have to use windows which I'm obviously not a fan of but oh well I'll manage.
But really, at first it didn't recognize my headphones (regular headphones input). Fair enough, after the admin fiddled around for half an hour we got it working.

*lets install Firefox and chrome*
The installers wouldn't launch at all, bit of fiddling around aaand it works.

*lets use Ms word again then*
Every time I try to save a file it gives shit tons of errors.
Found out that it does save but only with those errors.

*alright let's open up some pdf files*
"Error: no permission to use this application*

Oh come the fuck on just work I've got important stuff to do with a lot of time pressure!

I DON'T MIND USING IT ONCE IF I HAVE TO BUT COULD THAT COCK SUCKING PIECE OF SHIT JUST FUCKING WORK?!

The worst part, I wasn't the only one with trouble, multiple people still don't have the jackplug thing working :/

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

I feel like "programmers are not computer technicians" joke is kinda overused lately. It doesn' matter if we are not technicians, we are very knowledgeable in computers and people knows that. People of course will try to get help from you when they can so it's not a wonder that they ask you to help with something they are not confident. Everyone that exercises practical professions lives through that. If your sister-in-law is a mathematician it's normal to ask for help if you are not able to come up with the right algorithm for the task. People depend on each other. That's how we survive.
But I'm not saying start helping everybody that can't open a pdf file. Just know who to choose to help. If they are a capable person or someone that's a part of your everyday life they will most likely repay you when you are also in need. Believe me everyone needs help time to time.

I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.

Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.

I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.

So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.

Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.

But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.

The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”

And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?

So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.

But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.

When a Client is supposed to send you sponsor icons for the new website and all you get is a single PDF file containing all of them. Why ??!! This is even more work to do for them ???!!!

I heard good things about Edge recently and thought that I should give it a try for a few days.

I’ve opened the same pdf file in multiple Edge windows and and tabs, each scrolled to a different page.

#1
The middle-mouse button scrolling is broken on half of the windows and tabs. You press the button, you see the scroll mouse curser. But it doesn’t scroll.

#2
Scrolling horizontally to an area which wasn’t visible before, the content there is extremely blurry. Scrolling vertically to different pages doesn’t fix it. Is it the pdf? No. It’s just Edge. Zoom in and out again and the blurriness is fixed for now. Until it comes back later on a random page.

#3
Duplicate another tab and suddenly it crashes all of the tabs and windows of Edge. Now I need to open them all again and scroll to the positions that they were before…

If you think that it was just a one time issue, you are wrong. All of them happened multiple times and after Windows reboots.

I’m back to Firefox again.

We found a binary string on our Loggly server. It's a PDF file .. the entire PDF file, being sent, to our logging service.

Our smart and very professional sales guy strikes again,

I had to do some research on if I could print a pdf file directly from the server (be it php / nodejs)

When I told him I had found a solution he said, good job and went away, I was like...hmm k..

A few days later he came to my senior being mad that the project wasn't done in time.. And we were like.. Dude... What project!?

Apparently he made a deal to have a working demo in two weeks, but we (our dev team) never got that message...

A friend just asked me if I can convert a pdf to an image file.
Me: yes sure (easier to do than to ask why)
Me: What format do you want it in JPG or PNG?
Friend: yes
Me: ...

Sometimes it's easier to just do it than to start asking and teaching people how to use computers...

Oh boy I got a few. I could tell you stories about very stupid xss vectors like tracking IDs that get properly sanitized when they come through the url but as soon as you go to the next page and the backend returns them they are trusted and put into the Dom unsanitized or an error page for a wrong token / transaction id combo that accidentally set the same auth cookie as the valid combination but I guess the title "dumbest" would go to another one, if only for the management response to it.

Without being to precise let's just say our website contained a service to send a formally correct email or fax to your provider to cancel your mobile contract, nice thing really. You put in all your personal information and then you could hit a button to send your cancelation and get redirected to a page that also allows you to download a pdf with the sent cancelation (including all your personal data). That page was secured by a cancelation id and a (totally save) 16 characters long security token.

Now, a few months ago I tested a small change on the cancelation service and noticed a rather interesting detail : The same email always results in the same (totally save) security token...
So I tried again and sure, the token seemed to be generated from the email, well so much about "totally save". Of course this was a minor problem since our cancelation ids were strong uuids that would be incredibly hard to brute force, right? Well of course they weren't, they counted up. So at that point you could take an email, send a cancelation, get the token and just count down from your id until you hit a 200 and download the pdf with all that juicy user data, nice.

Well, of course now I raised a critical ticket and the issue was fixed as soon as possible, right?
Of course not. Well I raised the ticket, I made it critical and personally went to the ceo to make sure its prioritized. The next day I get an email from jira that the issue now was minor because "its in the code since 2017 and wasn't exploited".

Well, long story short, I argued a lot and in the end it came to the point where I, as QA, wrote a fix to create a proper token because management just "didn't see the need" to secure such a "hard to find problem". Well, before that I sent them a zip file containing 84 pdfs I scrapped in a night and the message that they can be happy I signed an NDA.

Dear client,
If you provide me a PDF file that you name a design, and don’t provide any info I can’t do much with it.

So I got a PDF design for the program I was building. I tried to rebuild the elements and copy your photos. As you said this was the only file the designer had. But don’t expect me to look for your fonts, sizes etc. And then complain that I need to be more specific in the design... and sending me by once do I need to ask her something?

Just f*** off

every PDF file launches a virtual machine.

Meet Android, years of development by thousands of developers and still can't open a PDF file downloaded via chrome

'Can't open file'

I am here on devRant now for a while. Althought, reading amy of your stories and taking care of websites is not what I usualy tend to do, I started doing it as a favour for a friend of a friend.
Baaad bad decission :-(

"pls, dis is urgnt! uplood dis pics asap on page"
*mail notification*
*face palm 1* because who sends pictures by mail these days ... I like my 50MiB Inbox, dont spam it with garbage!
*opening mail - lists attachments: 1 file, ~900KiB* ok whats happening now?
*facepalm 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9* (10 if there still would be a face to palm on)

the person seriously send me the pictures in an attachment, within a pdf document that was created with MS Word.
No - Just NO!

I should have known better ... sooo much better :(

this morning i felt so inspired and very productive so i finished the whole project in a few hours! they posted the pdf file explaining what the program should do and i just told myself "im going to start doing it before class so i can ask if i have questions later." but in the end i finished it all on my own so i am so proud of myself!

p.s. it's supposed to be submitted in December so i guess i have more free time or maybe i'll do the next project which will be submitted next year and be more advanced 😃

This semester, we have a lecture called IT Security by a guy, who absolutely know his subject.
Nevertheless, he wanted to show us that sha256 is broken by an existing collision. (Google that, fellow ranters!)
There are two pdf files by google researchers, that show the caption „SHAttered“ both on different backgrounds, although they give the same SHA-hash.
He then tried to share us these two files by moodle and wondered, why he uploaded the same file twice.
Guess what happened? The moodle backend checks new uploaded files for their ... hash ... and then decides, weather to upload or the file is already existing. So, it did just a new symlink to the old file.
Ironic, that an exercise, that should show us sha collision failures on sha collision 😃

hey do you know if there is a JavaScript libary for naming newly created files acording to user convention? Instead of "Unamed file".
Like [DATE]_[0000]_[NAME]_[SIZE].[Filetype] --> 20210708_0001_Pictureofme_1000x1000.jpg

There is a brand new service of the swiss post office that scans all your mail. But in the app it says only "unnamed document" for each new letter.
I'd like to suggest them, that you can set up a naming convention for each new pdf to my liking.
thank you 🙂

Today we had a cryptolocker running through our file servers. The locker came from a mailicious e-mail from a strange address. The email contained a strange pdf file with an embedded docm file. 6 people out of a workplace of 80 opened that file. These people...

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

I was pretty upset at my loved one today. She asks me how to save a file into a PDF, so I explained how to print to PDF from chrome, pretty simple, good so far. Then...
-"Hey, the file has an 'e' for internet, will they need internet to open the file?"
-No, why would they?
-The file has an 'e'
-Did you name it 'e'?
-No, but it has an 'e' like internet
-... You mean the icon?
-Yes
-Right click, click on properties and change the default program to Adobe...
-Oh God, it's so complicated, I'll ask someone else to do it
-What? It's literally 2 clicks!
-Why does it need internet?
-It doesn't! It's just the default
-The what?
-Cheez! Doesnt matter, just go to properties and click on 'Change'
-Fine! Done now what?... Ooh...
-Now click on Adobe Acrobat
-Awesome! Thanks! Now it's fixed, I'm so glad because I'm about to send it on an email and I'm sure my boss would have thrown a fit if they weren't able to open it offline
-😒

In an IT management class, the professor wanted us to estimate the operation costs for a small IT company, breaking them down by service offered. I remember creating a markdown file, multiple times executing the line `echo $RANDOM >> estimations.md`. We rounded the numbers slightly, pimped the document a bit and submitted a nice PDF. When we had to present our work, the professor asked us how we had proceeded to calculate those results. We told him a story about an Excel file we worked on, but did not submit, because we thought he'd be interested in the end result and not care about those details. He asked us to submit that Excel calculation, because he wanted to comprehend our method. So we got together, created an Excel sheet, copied our "estimations" into column C and called it "service cost". For column B, we used the same "cost per man hour" value (scientifically estimated using the RAND() function) for every row. Finally, we divided the "service cost" by the "cost per man hour" for every row, put the result in column A and called it "effort (in man hours)". The professor, being able to "reproduce" our estimation, accepted our solution.

Work Rant, again.

Working on a project, it has a messages feature.
Currently it supports text messages and images.

The guy before me had to leave, so I was put in charge on this project, to develop it.. all alone...

Project Manager : "Please add PDF support to messages"

Me : "Sure its an easy task".

1 day later:
-Starts working on that feature
-PDF files can now be sent.
-Looks at the sent messages-
-Message is there but I... I cant see the PDF file-

Hmmmm...
Moments later I discover the entire system is non-modular... hard-coded images only support.
Fuck me.

Last year, 2nd year of Uni, we had to create an app that read from CSV file that contained info on the no of ppl in each class and things like grades and such and had to display graphs of all the info tht you could then export as a pdf.

This had to also be sone in a team. I, however, hate doing anything other than programming (no team leader, pm bullshit) so I tell them I want to be one of the programmers (basically split the roles, rather than each one doing a bit of everything like my professor wanted) and we did.

I program this bitch wverything works well, I am happy. Day of the presentation comes, one of the graphs is broken... FUCK. I then go past it and never discuss the error. We got a 70.

I swear to God it worked on my computer -.-

I also have to mention that our professor was the client and he had set an actual deadline until we can ask him questions. After the deadline I realized I didn't know what a variable in the csv file was for and when I went to ask him he said "You should've asked me this before. I can't tell you now". My team was not the only one that didn't know and he gave the exact answer to everybody else. Got the answer from another team. Turns out it was useless.

He was the worst client ever. Why tf would you put a deadline on when you can ask the client questions?! I should be able to fucking ask questions during production if you want the product as you want it >.<

Fuuuuuuuuucking hell. I have a program that parses and generates information from shit I have in a database into a csv file. Shit was simple enough to be done in Python.

Trying to present that shit into fucking pdf files? without drawing shit on x,y coordinates like a retard or without downloading a fucking obscure number of bs shit into the computer? on a fucking WINDOWS machine? fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Ok no problem. Do it in Node. WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK more bullshit with drawing shit line by line. fuck this.

Lol not even going to touch java or c# for this, this is quick.

mmmh perl? nah, php? nah

Well shit I just need to generate data from a csv into a html template and send it away as a docume....go? ok lets....ah....done

Go wins again in my book ladies and gentlemen

It even has fewer lines of code than the php experiments

This rant can basically be boiled down to the name of the software in use/question:
FileMaker Pro 8.5

Please chime in if you have ever had the privelege of working with this gem of a database program, especially the scripting capabilities...

Trying to make it print/save/export an individual PDF file into a folder specified/created by one field with the filename set from another field. Will probably get it to work but the drag and drop scripting style reminds me of setting up an autoclicker for runescape; so fricken painful. Love to hear your comments.

Also happens to be running on an ancient PPC G5 iMac with 1 Gig of RAM running 10.4.11 hidden in the back room of an old warehouse with extra creepy flickering lights...

EFFF EMMM ELLL

So yeah thats my rainy Friday rant, hope you all are having this much fun.

This phising email I just received in my yahoo account almost got me fooled with the very convincing email design, but thankfully the culprit didn't smart enough to spoof his email address.
Ohh and they attach a suspicious pdf file too despite the message didn't say anything about attachment.
Apparently the spam detector in yahoo is not very good as this one was received in my main inbox.

rant/!rant

So I just started working at the beginning of January and I have no fucking clue about anything especially Web development.
But now I have a week to figure out how in the world I am going set up a workflow for some secretaries so that the higher ups get a printed coupon with a password on it, so they can log into our WLAN via a captive portal that I also need to set up.
I am thinking about a website that takes a list of names and settings (probably excel or smt) passes them to the WiFi management softwares API and then generates some PDF file for download that just needs to get printed.
Did I mention that I have no Dev tools (I have notepad, yeah the one without ++), no test environment, no prior experience and no clue how to do it?
But somehow I love this challenge and am glad that my colleagues don't send me to get coffee but let me work.
Am I insane?

I have just slept for a minimum of 5 hours. It is 7:47 PM atm.
Why?
We have had a damn stressful day today.
We have had a programming test, but it really was rather an exam.
Normally, you get 30 minutes for a test and 45 minutes for an exam.

In this "test" we have had to explain what 'extends' does and name a few advantages of why one should use it.
Check.
Read 3 separate texts and write the program code on paper. It was about 1 super class and 1 sub class with a test class in Java.
Check.
Task 3: Create the UML diagram of the code from above. *internally: From above? He probably means my code since there is no other code there. *Checks time*. I have about 3 minutes left. Fuck my life.*
Draws the boxes. Put the class names in each of them. A private attribute for the super class.
Teacher: Last minute!
Draw the arrow starting starting from the sub class to the super class.
Put my name on each written paper. And mentally done for the day. Couldn't finish the last task. Task 3.
During this "test", I heard the frustrations of my classmates. Seemed like everyone was pretty much pissed.
After a short discussion with the teacher who also happens to be the physics professor of a university nearby.
[If you are reading this, I hope that something bad happens to you]
The next course was about computer systems. Remember my recent rant about DNS, dhcp, ftp, web server and samba on ubuntu?
We have had the task to do the screenshots of the consoles where you proof that you have dhcp activated on win7 machine etc. Seemed ok to me. I would have been done in 10 minutes, if I would be doing this relaxed. Now the teacher tells us to change the domain names to <surnameOfEachStudent>.edu.
I was like: That's fine.
Create a new user for the samba server. Read and write directories. Change the config.
Me: That should be easy.
Create new DNS entries in the configs.
Change the IPv6 address area to 192.168.x.100-200/24 only for the dhcp server.
Change the web server's default page. Write your own text into it.
You will have 1 hour and 30 minutes of time for it.
Dumbo -ANGRY-CLIENT-: Aye. Let us first start screenshotting the default page. Oh, it says that we should access it with the domain name. I don't have that much time. Let us be creative and fake it, legally.
Changes the title element so that it looks like it has been accessed via domain name. Deletes the url and writes the domain name without pressing Enter. Screenshot. Done. Ok, let us move to the next target.
Dhcp: Change lease time. Change IP address area. Subnet mask. Router. DNS. Broadcast. Optional domain name. Save.
Switches to win7.
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
Holy shit it does not work!
After changing the configs on ubuntu for a legit 30 minutes: Maybe I should change the ip of the ubuntu virtual machine itself. *me asking my old self: why did not you do that in the first place, ass hole?!*
Same previous commands on win7 console. Does not work. Hmmm...
Where could be the problem?
Check the IP of the ubuntu server once again. Fml. Ubuntu did not save when I clicked on the save button the first time I have changed it. Click on save button 10 times to make sure it really is saved now lol.
Same old procedure on win7.
Alright. Dhcp works. Screenshot.
Checks time. 40 minutes left.
DNS:It is your turn. Checks bind9 configs. sudo nano db.reverse.edu.
sudo nano db.<mysurname>.edu.
Alright. All set. It should work now.
Ping win7 from ubuntu and vice versa. Works. Ping domain name on windows 7 vm. Does not work.
Oh, I forgot to restart the bind9 server on ubuntu.
sudo service bind stop
" " " start
Check DNS server IP on win7. It looks fine.
It still doesn't work. Fuck it. I have only 20 minutes left. Samba. Let us do this!
10 minutes in. No result. I don't remember why. I already forgot why I have done for it. It was a very stressful day.
Let us try DNS again.
Oh shit. I forgot the resolver!
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf
The previous edits are gone. Dumb me. It says it in the comments. Why did not I care about it. Fuck it.6 minutes left. Open a yt video real quick. Changes the config file. Saves it. Restarts DNS and dhcp. Closes the terminal and opens a new one. The changes do not affect them until you reopen them. That's why.
Change to win7.
Ping works. How about nsloopup.
Does not work.
Teacher: 2 minutes left!
Fuck it.
Saves the word document with the images in it. Export as pdf. Tries to access the directories of the school samba server. Does not work. It was not my fault tho. Our school server is in general very slow. It feels like they are not maintained and left alone like this in the dust from the 90s.
Friend gets the permission to put his document on a USB and give the USB to the teacher.
Sneaky me: Hey xyz, can you give me your USB real quick?
Him: sure.
Gets bombed with "do you want to format the USB?" pop-ups 10 times. Fml. Skips in a fast way.
Transfers the pdf. Plug it out. Give it back.
After this we have had to give a presentation in politics. I am done.

Does anyone know any offline program like jsonresume to create pdf resumes..? It seems jsonresume is broken, and everytime i try it builds a pdf with no theme at all..

I need a resume where space is not wasted and i dont want to rewrite the entire css to make that happen. Suggesting a specific jsonresume theme i.e. style.css and .hdr file would also help because i found a blog where it was explained how to build a html resume using these..

And is there any offline html to pdf converters ?

I started an e2e encrypted Dropbox clone, meaning file names and contents get encrypted client side prior to uploading. It also has a fairly advanced system for sharing links to files etc. But I got stuck at PDF previews which can't be generated on the server cause the file can't be decrypted there and I never finished it.

About a decade ago I built a force download script, to get the browser to download the script instead of trying to open it in a new window (eg pdf), all you had to do was pass in the location of the file and it would download it regardless. i didnt put any restrictions in place, so you could download all the server files etc!!! Needless to say i fixed it ASAP

Writing documentation is one of those tasks that most developers don't like doing. Especially when it comes to writing in say a Word/PDF file, an online wiki, or Confluence. It's time consuming and a pain in the ass.

But even if you don't like it, at least write comments in your source code! I hate having to keep writing "Write the PHPDocs for this class/function" in every pull request that I review. It's wasting my time writing such comments when it's such a basic thing to do when writing source code.

Fuck Apache TIKA.
Its supposed to be a "universal file reader" or some shit. Im trying to use it as a PDF/image parser that does OCR when needed and yelds a full-file string. It does so, but the text ends up being IN THE WRONG FUCKING ORDER.
WTF would I want to parse the text out of a PDF in any order that is not the one the text is supposed to be read?!?!
"It is more efficient to work in random ordering", says the docs. No shit, really? Wouldn't it be even more efficient to just spit out random strings? Just as useful and 100% CPU-bound.
"You can add a property to forcefully put the text in the right order". THEN WHY THE FUCK IT IS NOT THE DEFAULT SETTING?
Srsly, what's the use case to a parser that yields scrambled text?!?

Be careful with scams. The last scam-looking thing I've seen pop up a lot is a mail from Paypal saying my account has been terminated due to a breaking a rule that encompasses a lot of different things (from scams to illegal activity).

I don't even use Paypal all that much so I knew this had to be a mistake. I just have a CardA that sometimes gives me trouble when paying online because the bank is kind of shit, but doesn't give me trouble when paying with it through Paypal.

Naturally, I'm curious about this. However all the details are in some mystery PDF attached.
At this point I just opened the PDF out of morbid curiosity in another machine. The mystery PDF contained a link to an external site where I could "view what was wrong". Naturally, I just deleted the file.

What tipped me off originally was the domain name. the mail didn't come from paypal.com, but paypal-live.com.

They told me Xamarin Forms could create an app for many platforms
They didn't tell me that the Forms extensions for APIs would not work at all with the Android extensions, iOS extensions and I would need to reinstall them for each platform
They didn't tell me that at the end, I have to write individual code for each platform.
I was promised an all-in-one toolkit. I'm just writing code for Android and iOS apps, PLUS forms
I can't even find a reliable PDF generator for this. Documentations are outdated and don't work, either that, for it takes a million steps to generate a PDF file

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

I need to use the ugly Windows to create a dammit dynamic pdf file because the Adobesoftware isnt avaiable for Macintosh...
#FirstWorldProblems

I just really want to pluck my eyes out...
My sister is abroad for a music festival where she is attending as a speaker.
Her speech got almost ready at the last moment. The slideshow presentation was sloppy cause she gave some half-assed points to put. I saved the files (PDF and PPT) on her laptop and on her USB stick, I didn't keep any copies for me. She rehearsed her speech and I added some more points to enrich it and fill a bit more time. When she got there, she messaged me if it was possible to add those extra points to the presentation. I asked her to e-mail me the new points and the presentation on time (which it didn't happen), expecting a file attached to the e-mail. And guess what:

SHE FREAKIN' TYPED EVERYTHING EXCEPT OF THE TITLE!!!
AND NOW I HAVE TO REDO THE WHOLE PRESENTATION!!!

I can't facepalm myself hard enough to hop onto another universe...

markdown4documentation is a tool that can either convert a single markdown file, a complete directory or a complex structure to HTML or PDF. You can choose between several build-in themes (called templates) or define a custom theme.

This is more of a story than an actual rant, but here it goes.

I was at my class and we were doing a small introduction about JavaScript. Our teacher tells us to build a small website using buttons and text boxes in order to make a calculator. He then says that, afterwards, we must copy and paste a segment of JavaScript code which he supplied on the PDF file (our teacher uses PDF files as some sort of worksheets).

I paste his code correctly on my HTML document and I try to test it. On the first box, I put 10, and on the second box, I also put 10. I was expecting that in the result box there would appear 20, but, to my surprise, nothing happened.

Instead of asking my teacher what was wrong, I decided to pay a visit to my good old friend Stack Overflow and I learned how to use getElementById().

I had some experience with coding earlier so I just sorted myself out. When my teacher comes to check my work, I said that his code wasn't working so I googled a solution and eventually came up with one.

He said: "Well, that's weird. That code is right, at least it worked for me."

I outsmarted my teacher.

I also realised why there are so much "it worked on my machine" jokes.

!devrant
helpdeskrant

Because number of reasons I happen to be part time working as help desk...

Problem 1: Could you teach us how to use a scanner?
Problem 2: I cannot open this (PDF) file.
Problem 3: My personal thumbdrive doesn't work, could you help me.
Problem 4: How do I use vlookup in excel
Problem 5: How can I connect my Iphone to my printer.

I don't know why IT people would choose to work in HD instead of Development.

Again, there are some reasons I'm doing support right now, don't judge me.

I hate myself right now....

Any source code or program to print
selected portion sections of a pdf file on a web page? For example you only wana print some part on a PDF file.... Any nerd out here to help?

From the last 3 years, i have accumulated interest and experience in android dev. Not sure about the future, but that's probably where i will be.
But this fact is moot to our 50 year old grumpy professors teaching 1000 year old rusted computer syllabus, who rejected my idea of a video streaming app as major project, simply because i projected it as a social media app, and "everyone is making a social media app, its such an old topic". yeah right sir, its younger than your daughter that fucks in the lobby

Now we are doing a project on file conversions website, a project suggested by my team member and my good friend. its such a shitty topic, there is no resources available, even the research papers are bad , every search points to a shitty site, and i don't know shit about web dev.

Technically i am the team leader, but my team mate won't let me make the project as android native app, because "Brooo, i am going to make a react app that would be completely offline, completely client side, full secure and shitt small" and sometimes "Bro its my idea" .

Well, 1. the whole point of client side is stupid because the 18 mb jsfile isn't going to get downloaded first in the client's cache(or whatever the process is, idk). The top stack overflow answers i saw told me to buy an ec2 instance and run liberoffice commands on it for every request, and that's SERVER SIDE. even if we could, i am sure its going to be bigger than what i would have made in kotlin.
2. what am i supposed to do? look at you coding while make all the ppts and research paper? you are going to use undocumented libs that "just works" , and i am suppose to curate the theory behind this, looking at all the researches of the world?well i guess okay that's a light job since THERE AREN'T ANY.

And we are targetting all types of conversions, nice. from what i know, handbrake.fr: video conversion s/w = 16 mb. photoshop: image conversion s/w=1gb and ms word: doc to pdf/other formats= 500mb.
Plus all those proprietary and undocumented formats, ugh. Thank you ugly ass companies.

Internet is great but web dev has become a whole lot mess. "I am going to build a software that is going to run in your system only using your device's processor" is a desktop/mobile app, not a website

I have been in work 25 minutes before my colleague asks me to help him save and email a file to someone, AGAIN. I have showed them so many times how to do it but they keep losing the file (saving it to the local disk rather than network so they cant find it then forgot how to export the file as a PDF)

which software/research/project you created in your free time as a hobby recently?

I personally created a small widget app that would allow users to create widgets of PDF files on their mobiles.

i have noticed a personal trend : i tend to spend my free time on language/tools/framework that are somewhat different than my daily job. I am a software engineer building sdks in my job that provide a very commercial set of features for android apps, but ended up creating an hobby app that would utilise android's other cool APIs ( storage, file, permission etc) .

before this project too i was exploring backend and web development, creating small react websites in my past time.

do you also spend time exploring outside yhe frameworks/tools used in your work life? or if not, how do you keep yourself motivated? the lateral part os important for me as i am soon going to a job where i might be exploring android APIs in daily work life and therby making android apps will become boring for me .

i remember before joining an SDK making company, i was trying to come up with an SDK myself lol, which at that time was opposite yo rhe work i was doing in the day

Here's a daft thing: a lot of browsers, typically on phones and Macs, won't re-download a file if it's been downloaded before. I can understand caching pages, images and CSS, that's good, but caching downloaded files? Meaning that when a user clicks to download a Word doc or a PDF, the browser will decide that they don't need to! Even though they think they do! I'm now having to add ?v=time() to PDFs, Excel files and similar, which feels really hacky. Some browsers will ask if the user wants to re-download, which is fine, but taking people to old and obsolete versions of documents when they want the current version is just stoooooopid.

Client: bug: downloading invoice pdf filename is F0000%20client%20project.pdf, fix this!

Dev: Safari browser has this problem since 2014, options are installing chrome on mac or saving file as F0000_client_project.pdf

Client: no, fix this!

Dev: 😫

Once one my teachers asked me to write the code for insertion sort and mail her as she didn't know how to do it. OK, whatever. And then she asked me to send it as pdf or word file. I gave up.

So today my teacher told me to do that project for some competition or something(frankly, I don't remember clearly what this is for). He gave us the machines we need, the CDs with the systems we have to work with. We are supposed to make a properly working Beowulf cluster from the things I've been given.

Well, no.
Fucking no.

I am really okay with making this the way my teacher wants us to do. I am okay with installing an ubuntu 16.04 server that is completly irrevelant to the project, because it's not part of the cluster. I am really okay with using some weird linux distribution on the master nobody has ever heard of. But I'm not okay when the software we've been given(including operating system) has seven pages of documentation, escpecially when fucking screenshoots of how PXE booting should look like are roughly 70% of it. No, I couldn't find a thing on the internet about it. I couldn't read the fucking manual. There was no fucking manual. There was no fucking --help. There was no motherfucking english language. Everything was motherfucking spanish, including that 7 pages long document that was supposed to guide us through our work. It was planned to be done until march. The only reason I can think of about why doing the stuff the document tells us to do would take four motherfucking months is that we'd have to learn spanish to do this. And I'm not going to do that. Not because I don't like spanish or learning. Simply because I didn't sign up for this to learn languages.

And no. I can't switch to other, human purposed software. I am only allowed to use the things the teacher has given us. Because somebody has worked on it already couple of years ago and they had left a pdf file about how to install that ubuntu server I've been writing about a while ago. Which, by the way, was the "installation guide for animals". Showing how to install a system, screenshoot after screenshot.

It took about an hour to figure out the thing supposed to handle pxe booting computers all the time was telling us that it can't work because we had to configure ethernet interface manually. Because why the fuck not.

is there a Go module for editing Flat Open Document Text? I'll like to edit placeholder text from a fodt file and send the results to thecodingmachine/gotenberg to convert the file to a PDF

Gf asked me to help her with getting science articles. She had some page that her university suggested students to use, but had troubles with downloading documents.

At first I was like "Hey, it says use IE, other browsers are not supported. Thats bad but.. whatever". Then it popped that she needs Java enabled - well, I guess we have to... Even updated it cause it was needed.
Restarted IE, clicked download again and... Java security blocked web app... Eh, I don't trust it but whatever, just let's check what if I whitelist it.
Got some basic view, 1 dropdown list for "file name format" (like anybody cares), path selection where to save file, and some checkbox. Lame, but let's just leave it behind.
Downloaded, it turned out to be html file, not pdf, fishy that it was single file, but hoped for some text styled with css, so I opened it and got redirected to page where I clicked download.
Checked that file content - html with empty body and script tag containing js that redirects on load.

Srsly?😐

Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.

Me [as Android guy for years] getting an iPad and navigating on the internet.
*Finds an interesting PDF file* Wow let's download it for later.

WHAAAAAT DEF... it's just a PDF download, why it should take all of this???

Can we say that "a basic website is a type of app that serves documents", implying a website is more specific than an app, and the most common type of data served is in the form of a document (html, pdf, json, xml).

I'm trying to see how this argument does for/against flat-file cms'es in specific/ general cases per type of app/ website.

Win of the day:

Generate a pdf file inside Firebase environment.

Hi. Me and my friend is working on this major project where we are trying to create a many to many file convertor for a lot of media and file types ( for eg pdf to doc and visa versa, jpg to png , mp4 to flv , or mp4 to gif , whatever the possibilities are )

If anyone has done something like this, then please share your insights : how this is gonna work, what concepts are involved , where to look for this kind of info, etc.
Currently from what i have gathered, it would be almost impossible to convert to a few proprietary formats (like rar, psd or autocad's dwg) but there are still free softwares and websites doing it openly. How so?