Not really dev as much but still IT related 😂

in college we got some new macs in our class. Before we were allowed to use them the "IT Tech" came in and did something to them all (probably ran some scripts to set stuff up)

Anyway, I was completely new to OS X and accidentally pressed a key combo that opened up a dialogue to connect to a remote file server. I saw the address field was already filled out (from when the IT Tech was running the scripts). So me being me I decided to connect. Low and behold my student credentials got me in.

Taking a look around I found scripts, backups and all sorts of stuff. I decided to look at some of the scripts to see what they did. One of them was a script to add the Mac to the domain. Here's the funny part. The login to do that was hard coded into the script....

To conclude. I now have domain level access to my whole college network 🙃

Tl;Dr: stupid it tech saves password in script. I find it. I now have domain level access to the college network

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.

TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.

There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.

With that out of the way, let the rant begin.

It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.

I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.

Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).

Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.

Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.

I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.

Well guess what he told me later:

They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.

That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".

So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.

(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)

If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?

Biggest GTFO moment of the year;

While applying for colleges, I created an account with a username and variant of my usual password (I know, bad move, sorry). I came back to finish the application but had forgotten what variant I had used. So I clicked the forgot password button and got an email with...

MY PASSWORD IN IT!!!!

Plain text password! Just as part of the email! WTF do these people think they are doing?!?!

I immediately changed my password to a random string and deleted my account, so hopefully when someone gets into this database my stuff with be overwritten... stupid programmers...

Last weekend I was working on a small project for a friend of mine: a dockerized webapp, plus API backend and DB. I had some problems with the installation on the vps and had to try out different images and never really did a complete setup of my usual dotfiles. Got it running on an Ubuntu distro. Everything great.
It was the first release so I still had to check that every configuration worked ok, like letsencrypt companion container, the reverse proxy and all that stuff, so I decided to clone the whole project on the server tho make the changes there and then commit them from there.
Docker compose, 10 lines of code, change the hosts and password. Boom everything working. Great... Except for the images in the webapp.

WTF? Check the repo, here they are, all ok. I try different build tactics. Nothing. Even building the app on another docker always the same. Checked browser cache, all the correct ports are open. I even though that maybe react was still using some weird websocket I didn't know, but no.
Damn, I spent 5 hours checking why the f*** the server wouldn't make it out.

Then, finally, the realization...

I didn't install the f******* git-lfs plugin and all I was working with were stupid symbolics links! Webpack never even throw an error for any of the stupid images and the browser would only show a corrupted image, when decoding the base64 string.

Literally the solution took 5 minutes.
F*** changes on production, now I do everything on a fully automated CI.

some call
- yo bro do you have some time ?
- quick cause I'm taking a dump
- I think I have been hacked, got black screen kernel panick, linux freeze seldomly I have to reboot, no internet connexion
- save your stuff and reinstall linux
- I don't have enough stockage to backup
- Then buy one and save, probably either OS is fcked up or you have some hdd problems

Time that it will take: ~30min to reinstall whole shit
Peace duration: ~2years

Later on the same day
aunt
- I can't log into windows
- Did you change the password ?
- Yes but it does not work anymore
* looking at shit
* logs successfully. Reason: interface changed after automatic update.
* wait.
* wait some more so fucking windows fucking starts
* Desktop is ugly as fck.
* Some stupid settings messed up (like high contrast set, black theme or so)

aunt (the same)
- I can't log into my (other) laptop either
* logs
* wait more more more

Guess what: automatic updaaaates. Freezes 100%cpu

* Being a very experienced user: wait before reboot because this suckass os will probably fail to boot otherwise
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates...
* reboots
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates continuing...
* finally boot (feels like a miracle windows succeeds lol)
* still slow
aunt now sleeps
* look at running process and install programs
* sees shits like camera recognition (vendor installed), candycrush
* occasionnaly get adds

time lost: 2h
peace duration: ~3month

FFS I am a dev, not a fucking trash lover
It is already pain to fix someone os, but windows is the cream of cream

It brings no ease of use for novice user
It is so insanely slow
It has stupid settings set up by default!!!!!!!! Who FFS wants candycrush and ads
The maj are so fcking hazardous. It is 2022 pretty much the same as 15y back then. Updates take fucking eternity. And needs reboot. and are not even finished!!!

I swear I am gonna stretch my ass and install linux and any fckin other toolsuite needed so they can use Micro$$ word, which is the only fucking usecase they need windows for in the first case anyway
I SO wish this OS would die

I mean, even more than safari

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

Starting to wonder why I tend to like our QA people so much: they often seem so much saner. Yes, sometimes they quibble as with the complaints about a page that is hidden from the user anyway, but they would usually not creep to deep into the hole creating most unintuitive workflows and abysmal logic.
Disclaimer: We're more like backend devs, but we had to do a UI which was beautifully slaughtered by the CEO messing with it - guess what's happening with the new one - and because of that... thing I already nearly smashed my Mac because stupid entered credentials for updating software would only be applied if you defocused once out of the password entry box. Fucked up stuff like this, which devs meddle with, give up, just shrug it off and dump it on the (l)user.

Or a more recent example: So PM wanted a stupid "Apply to all" buttons on a list that can be filtered. Guess to which items the actions should be applied if you filtered it and you currently only see a small selection in your window! Yes, of course it still applies to all items in the universe. QA guy who's just trying the buttons comes to me: "Hey, you sure this "apply all"-stuff supposed to work like that?"

Third example to end this long QA-praise: So there is this virtual appliance we build and we should support another stupid hypervisor.. and he found the kernel modules I have to activate additionally so we can just convert the existing image without having to create a new build system.