rucksack

Complaints for the most part.

Smartly helping you break the law

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Insert smart chips & building blocks in your Google Doc
Insert smart chips in your Google Doc to include information about:

Other users with Gmail or Workspace email addresses
Other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides files
Dates or Google Calendar events
Places and map directions

Where there’s a smart chip in your document, you and other users can hover or click on a chip to get more information.

If you are dealing with confidential information you should stop using Google Sheets immediately.

  • There is no way to disable them.
  • Google will insist on forwarding or sharing the resource with people within the organization even if do not need access to it.
  • The changes are not reversible via Undo functionality. You have to revert to a previous version of the file (File -> Version History -> See Version History). Good luck to you if you’ve been working on the file for hours/days and google shits all over your file.
  • What happens when google kills the feature because no one is using it? The original data that was kept in those cells is gone.

This is particularly important if you’re dealing with FERPA or HIPAA data. Switch to excel, which is what you should’ve done from the beginning.

Enduro

In the space of a month:

  • Found a new full-time job at helpdeskJerb.
  • Adjusted my schedule at bartendJerb.
  • Moved addresses.
  • Potentially finished my time working at sysadminJerb.

I’m fucken tired.

This is being one hell of a ride

Well, now he’s truly done it. The melon husk bought twitter.

The writings were quick to arrive, particularly after the husk fired the A-levels first thing, and then dissolving the board of directors. Pretty sure all of that will result in lawsuits. Rich people don’t like not getting their golden parachutes.

The Verge posted:

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Welcome to hell, Elon

The Intercept wrote:

This could have been the mission statement of pre-Musk Twitter. But now there’s one big difference: When the content moderation of Twitter remains largely the same, the sense of betrayal among Musk’s super-fans will explode with the force of a supernova. And they will scream at Musk about it nonstop — on Twitter.

By Buying Twitter, Elon Musk Has Created His Own Hilarious Nightmare.

The chaos started immediately, with the husk firing a lot of people willy-nilly all over the company, and the world. Then it started asking people to come back. The company is now also on the hook for breaking California labor laws, with a looming lawsuit and employment attorneys commenting on this.

Nine days on from the purchase, the chaos continues:

Scoop: all of Musk’s companies use MS Teams for comms, where new channels are private by default.

When software engineers from Tesla, Boring and SpaceX came in to Twitter a week ago, they created Slack channels to communicate amongst themselves.

Several channels were public

@GergelyOrosz

Twitter Co also has zero potential advertisement income coming in, due to the husk’s erratic management style and general assholery. Also, someone please tell @Jack to shut the hell up.

Ourselves don’t plan on switching platforms until they shut the servers off… but then again we came from IRC, which has greatly reduced in size and influence; we keep a foothold on a couple networks but we don’t see any kind of substitute for the glorious chaos of an open timeline. But we’ll see.

Dril predicted all this, by the way. A true prophet of our age.

Trust google at your peril

It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.

Source: Stadia died because no one trusts Google | TechCrunch

The wake-up call was when google killed google reader, but it was ignored by a lot of people cos it was a free service.

Then there was G Suite (Legacy Free). They got a lot of people to rely on google services and then proceeded to straight up betray them. People still didn’t care cos it was also “free service”.

But now with Stadia people will care cos the cost of this cancellation won’t be paid by google— they already wrote off the money. The cost will be borne by developers who trusted google with their games.

I’m somewhat safe as I do pay for some google services but I am looking for alternatives now. Microsoft is not a particularly viable option.

Most streamers would rather suffer shitty wifi

This is a bit of a rant— mostly cos in the past few weeks we’ve seen some of the streamers we follow get hit with Internet issues and they’ll usually blame their ISP. Yeah comcast and charter/spectrum fucken suck but the vast majority of the time they’re not going to be the entity at fault. If you are a “professional” streamer, i.e. you have income from your streams, you owe it to yourself to ensure your Internet connection is actually functional at all times. So this here is for you. Why? Cos all the time we see people spend thousands of dollars on computer hardware (their gaming/streaming rig plus accessories, monitors, lighting, camera, microphone/headset, etc etc) and yet… they still connect their computer to the Internet via wifi.

Then they wonder why they’re lagging in fucken fortnite or why the audio is running half a second behind video on twitch. Bitch pls.

Particularly egregious when it’s people who know better but they just choose not to do it for whatever reason, chief among them that “landlord won’t allow it”. Run that Ethernet cable with command hooks if your have to, gawdamn, but do something.

We’re not a streamer but we do work in IT. A proper, trouble-free setup would replicate what we have right now here at home.

  1. Get a power-efficient computer. Doesn’t have to be expensive, we’re using one of these we bought for $30 USD.
  2. Install an extra network card on that computer (another $10 USD). If you get something like this it already has an extra LAN interface and they even throw in one year of tech support. If you’re cheap just go download pfsense and install it yourself, it’s free.
  3. Get a decent switch like this one with built-in PoE and gigabit ports all around.
  4. Get one or two wifi access points like these to handle phones, tablets and streaming boxes.

You plug the wifi access points into the switch (they get power via Ethernet), then the switch into the “router”. Turn everything on, then follow the instructions for setting up pfsense. If you’ve ever installed Windows on a computer this all works at the same level of tech skill.

With everything set up (and it isn’t that hard if you’re even somewhat technically inclined and you follow a youtube tutorial like this one) you now have a better network setup that most small businesses out there. Speaking of business… most places do know they need constant Internet connectivity to actually stay open and yet they still choose to have a $25 USD wifi router that reached end-of-life back in 2016 run their stuff, and then they wonder why their Internet fucken sucks.

Feeling fancy and want to take it easy? Go with a Ubiquiti Unifi setup. It’s nice and slick and they also have decent tech support if you have no idea what you’re fucken doing. It will cost you a pretty penny… but their setup is basically flawless and will last you a long time without having issues. If and when you have issues the system itself will tell you what’s wrong. Slick, like we said.

Once all of the things are connected and working, then you connect your computers and phones and streaming boxes and tables to that new network equipment. If you’re a streamer it is very likely there are one or two technically-inclined people who watch your streams and would help out if you ask. But that’s the thing, you have to ask.

If you’re making more than $1000 USD a month from streaming you can certainly afford to pay someone to do this for you. Hire someone, get them on retainer, and now when somethin breaks right before an important stream they’ll be able to help you figure out what the fuck is going on.

For shame! For shame!

Well guess what, here’s an actual blog post. For the past few years we’ve been putting stuff on twitter cos it’s easier to get stuff off the cuff, y’know? But we’ve realize that for a lot of things we want to do a bit more thought. Hence the following.


We’d noticed over the past couple weeks a coworker was downright hostile to us. Earlier we finally got the chance to ask her:

“Hey, is there anything we did to make you angry or annoyed?”

Yes

You don’t listen to anyone
You do whatever you feel like
And you drink too much at work

Which, fair.

  1. We listen to people who can actually impinge on our tasks, i.e. management or shift leads. If you want me to go clean tables cos you’d rather get hit on by the hot guy at the bar then no.
  2. We do whatever needs doing right then and there. Food needs doing and you’re busy getting hit on? We’ll run food. Guests in line and you’re busy chatting up a table of men? We’ll ring those guests right up. I’m not at your beck and call. I’m at the business’ beck and call. We’ve told the GM to fuck off cos we’re busy doing things they’d rather not do. We’ve told the fucken CEO off. You’re a mere peon just like me.
  3. This one actually threw us for a loop. We’re currently averaging .9 beers per hour, while the KM is doing about 2 beers/hour, the sous chef is doing 1 weed joint/hour. We believe the issue you have with our drinking is that we start making conversation with the men hitting on you, which means you then have to go and do actual work.

Now, we only found out cos we asked. She wasn’t going to let us know she had a problem, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let management know there was a problem cos then they’ll look at her work performance.

(Management loves us, by the way. They can find no fault with our work, which is how we like it.)

But it is annoying. When they say that it’s hard to make friends in Minnesota they didn’t say anything about people who can’t deal with their own emotions in a healthy way.

And fuck your cow too

Dear Spotify. I tried to search for podcasts on your Desktop app. I know you’re into fancy cross-platform Electron framework. I’ve come to terms with it. It’s fine. It’ll do. But, your understanding of interface design seems like it needs a bit of a history lesson. Back in iTunes Good

Source: Dear Spotify. Can we just get a table of songs?

Honestly if you’re using the Electron framework for anything you’re not a software developer. You’re a piece of shit who writes shit code and is out to make the world a shittier place.

Running thunderbolts through crystallized rock to make it think is already magical enough

At the heart of the problem is that the SELinux policies themselves are sort of magical. The policies have probably been provided by the maintainers of your Linux distribution, e.g., Fedora Linux. There’s nowhere on the system where you can view the policies and look up why something might or might not work. The policies also change over time, without any warning.

Source: SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way

Red Hat has made it clear the best way to manage SELinux is for you to outsource it to someone, preferably them. I get it, security of this sort is complex, but having to trust random internet postings for instructions on how to do a small task is how we ended up with github readmes saying “just curl this into bash as root”.

Oh, Photoprism

mariadb_1 | 2022-04-11 18:17:42 0 [ERROR] InnoDB: preallocating 507904 bytes for file ./photoprism/faces.ibd failed with error 28 mariadb_1 | 2022-04-11 18:17:42 0 [ERROR] [FATAL] InnoDB: Error (Out of disk space) in rollback. mariadb_1 | Fatal signal 6 while backtracing photoprism_mariadb_1 exited with code 139

We recently got our hands on some enterprise hardware and we’re now using it to run some VMs and whatnot. One of the projects I’ve had for a long time is trying to figure out a way to have a web gallery. After looking around at the available options we decided to give a shot to Photoprism.

Requirements aren’t complicated:
– Display pictures and associated metadata quickly, as a gallery.
– Have wide compatibility for various filetypes, including RAW and video files.
– Mobile app helps but it’s not a hard requirement. Web first, preferably with minimum javascript thrown in.

We have about 46 thousand files including pictures and videos, consuming 265 GB of storage. A bit more than what most people would have sure, but any cloud picture solution would definitely charge a good chunk of money to store all of them.

Now, on to PhotoPrims itself. It does Docker Compose but… fine, whatever, you want me to do the devops shit, fine. It’s easy to install, after all:

# mkdir -p /opt/photoprism
# wget https://dl.photoprism.app/docker/docker-compose.yml
# vi docker-compose.yml

You just edit docker-compose.yml with the bits and pieces you need specific to your installation and you’re good to go. Being lazy I mounted pictures storage via CIFS from the storage server. Tried to get it to work directly in Docker but it kept telling me to kick rocks.

Then you run the actual service:

# docker-compose up -d

Starts up a server accesible on the local network at http://server:2342. The documentation does state securing the connection is an exercise left to the reader, but as I only plan to run this on my LAN and accessible only via VPN, it’s fine.

This is where we started running into issues. The first VM created for it had 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 16GB HDD VM. It ran out of drive space after thrashing CPU for a bit. We upgraded the VM to 8 vCPU, 32BM RAM, 32GB HDD. It ran out of disk space after thrashing the CPU cores for a bit longer.

Mmmkay, now we have a bad time going here. Upgraded VM to 16 vCPU, 64GB RAM, 64 GB HDD. It ran out of disk space again after thrashing the CPU cores for a solid 20 hours. We get it, it’s using TensorFlow for AI stuff but as a comparison Digikam is able to do the same things but doesn’t consume nearly as many resources, for as long.

We suppose it really wants you to be using modern hardware of the sort that is incredibly expensive and to find given the current supply chain issues worldwide.

Seriously Google, what the fuck

They are altering the agreement, pray they don’t alter it further.

Source: Google to free G Suite users: Pay up or lose your account | Ars Technica

Darth Vader: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further

A few years ago I needed to add another domain to my Gsuite account, which led me to start paying for services there. Over time we started using it for more things but we remained leery of purchasing things from Google through Gsuite accounts or free Gmail accounts.

At some point we migrated our Google Voice number from our gmail account to the Gsuite account, and it remained there. When this migration was done Google moved everything through: contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails. Everything happened without issues or difficulties; all you had to do was unlink your carrier number from one account, migrate the GV number from Gmail to Gsuite, and re-link your carrier number.

But starting a couple of years ago Google disabled the ability to migrate from Gsuite to Gmail. Not without losing everything. We’ve been looking to migrate off Google’s infrastructure for email/calendar and everything else and it’s a non-started as long as they hold my main phone number hostage. And now Google is forcing people and companies who made the mistake of choosing Google for their services to pay up or lose everything:

oh fuck

I’ve been using this for my family since Google first introduced it as a way for Families to use vanity domains together. I have over a decade (almost 2?) of purchases tied to this account and the cost to migrate to their enterprise offering for my family is bonkers.

I don’t know what I’m going to do here as I can’t migrate my purchases out of this account and into a normal gmail account. uuuuuuuugh.

While self-hosting files and email and photos is doable, self-hosting your own mobile phone number is still complicated, and on top of that the available services still cannot compete with the simplicity of GV even as Google leaves the service to wither for years at a time. We’ve been looking at using services like https://jmp.chat/ but again, they are non-trivial:

  1. You must port your number from GV to their service.
  2. You lose everything: Contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails.
  3. You have to figure out what XMPP client to use on your devices depending on operating system, as most XMPP clients don’t support them all.
  4. You have to learn the quirks of texting people who aren’t in your contacts already.
  5. Jmp.chat itself is still marketed as Beta, and some features are still in alpha, like group messaging.

Google should offer the option to convert a Gworkspace (nee Gsuite) account to a free Gmail account, or to migrate the data from a Gworkspace account to a Gmail account. They can do it, they just choose not to because nobody can force them to do the right thing.

The current state of things is absolute bullshit.

Fix Logitech Mouse double-click. Permanently.

As I posted on Reddit some time ago my Logitech Proteus Core G503 Gaming Mouse started having a clicking issue, where one of the buttons would just fake pressing the left-arrow key. Usually a good slap or two of the mouse against the desk would fix it, but it is a known issue due to the drop in build quality of all Logitech products.

But fear not! I found a solution!

Import basic contact information into Google Contacts quickly

I just fucken spent a fucken hour and a half trying to import some fucken data into fucken Google Contacts cos it’s a piece of pigshit.

There are multiple guides on the web on how to import data into it and most are fucken failures. This is what you need:

Google Contacts CSV columns

In text form, as a CSV:

Given Name,Family Name,E-mail 1 - Value,Phone 1 - Type,Phone 1 - Value,Organization 1 - Type,Organization 1 - Name
First Name,Last Name,mailbox@domain.tld,Mobile,1-000-0000000,unknown,Company Name

In a nice tabulated table. It’s in code cos my fucken markdown plugin doesn’t understand markdown tables

|Given Name|Family Name|E-mail 1 - Value  |Phone 1 - Type|Phone 1 - Value|Organization 1 - Type|Organization 1 - Name|
|First Name|Last Name  |mailbox@domain.tld|Mobile        |1-000-0000000  |unknown              |Company Name         |

And here’s an actual CSV file you can download so you can plug your data into it: google-contact-quickstart.csv: Google Contacts Quickstart CSV.

They should use their much-vaunted AI might and quantum supremacy to fix one of the most basic things companies need to do all over the fucken planet instead of trying to figure out how yoke everyone into their FLoC pigshit without having to threaten ultraviolence on them.

I’d probably have spent less time importing contacts one by one but at least now I know how to do it in bulk and have it work.

Seriously google, get fucked.

It’s done, thank Chaos

This past week was truly a week from fucken hell. Six nights in row at sysadmin jerb, three doubles in a row , then another two doubles in a row.

I’m fucken tired but with the fucken pigs doing curfews in Minneapolis and firing off emergency alerts at all hours of the day it hasn’t been easy to actually get any fucken sleep after they killed a Black guy in Brooklin Center and protests started.

Google Calendar from April 4 until April 17

I think I only survived thanks to the free coffee I get at my barista job and napping at my sysadmin job— which we try not to do because then we’re groggy the rest of the night and when the job is thinking that leads to problems.

I’m going to bed in an occupied territory. Fuck the police.

For Third Night After Daunte Wright’s Killing, Protesters And Law Enforcement Clash Outside Brooklyn Center Police HQ

Never write documentation hangry, e.g. this post

I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

Source: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action – QuirksBlog

Another article related to the fall of Mozilla. Back in the day we relied heavily on quirksmode.org and doing that sort of data mining, collating, writing and publishing is not easy. For a while myself helped out writing documentation for WordPress during the <.09 era and we found out for myself exactly how hard technical writing is. It’s something we’re good at and, more importantly, enjoy. We appreciate the skill, nuance, talent and even luck that goes into writing good documentation.

It is something that we complain about often on teh twitter derp corn; often using ultraviolent language cos most developers are assholes. We’ve mentioned on this here blargh of using vimwiki. Their documentation looks like… actually, not even going to bother with a screenshot because they don’t have anything on their github or wiki that actually says “Documentation”. They take the easy way out and tell you “oh run :h vimwiki in vim”.

No, fuck you, lazy assholes.

Another few great examples of technical writing gone wrong:

  • Pretty much any plugins for vim. Most of them are just the same text file you’d use :h for, except without hyperlinking.
  • VirtualBox coming in with the one-page User Manual
  • Nextcloud, with documentation full of gotchas that should be mentioned prior or during installation, but aren’t.
  • Apple: Documentation? What’s that? Also there never was any documentation here.

Agent J: Move along, nothing to see here

I just had to use a gif for Apple. It’s that bad. Most Android apps don’t have any documentation of any kind whatsoever. Windows applications used to have documentation built-in but now they just direct you to their website, where documentation changes and disappears depending on the A-level goals for the quarter.

There are many more examples out there but these are some of the ones I can think of right now. The gist of it is this kind of thing is hard and people who do it should be paid for it, and if they’re good at it they should be paid well. If a developer doesn’t want to write proper documentation then… they should either have someone do it for them and listen to that feedback, or get their ass handed to them so they get on writing it themselves.

Going to go eat something now before the hunger makes me angrier.

All for a fistful of dollars

FOSS is dead. what now?

Source: Post-Open Source | boringcactus

the gods fucken damnit, Mozilla. This is but one article out of so, so, so many out there that are talking about the death, dearth, and zombification of open source projects. And that’s before we even bring in the tweets.

But sure, those Mozilla Corporation executives deserve millions of dollars so they can look preen themselves when they have to prostate themselves before their capitalist gods making hundreds of times their salaries.

That was A Week

Sunday, July 16

Massive fight cos I did not want to move from bed after a week of 12 to 14 hour days. The core of it was that her feelings about what other people might think about me are more important than my physical well-being. I hit myself in the head and downed a pint of cold-press concentrate.

She ended up going to her parents’ on her own. Now hopped up on caffeine I stayed at home and cleaned. Fell asleep on the couch.

Monday

16 hour day between a busy time prepping and cooking lunch service at tKitchenJob, then dealing with more covers than usual at bFOHjob while severely understaffed. Getting home I find a big-ass box in the middle of the living room and I immediately get pissed because at this point I have been the only one consistently cleaning for weeks on end. I get loud enough to wake 🐝, who says she wanted to show how much she appreciates it.

I replied we wouldn’t need it if she helped clean. I slept on the couch again.

Tuesday

tKitchenJob was steady, but things at bFOHjob were a repeat of Monday, replacing the two servers with another pair. Slept on the couch again.

Wednesday

Busy lunch at tKitchenJob, had a chance to relax a bit on their outside benches with a glass of wine. Then off to Yeasayer at the Fine Line Cafe. I am exhausted and dead on my feet, but we manage. We still end up getting in another fight so I barely move the rest of the show and concentrate on not falling asleep right there and then (I still think I fell asleep fully standing up for about ten minutes regardless of the loud music. At the end of the show she said she was going for drinks with friends.

I am aghast. I just asked for keys, went home, and fell asleep on the couch.

Thursday

Got fucked over at tKitchenJob, then got fucked over again at bFOHjob with the usual combination of high bookings and low staff. Getting home I find 🐝 has cleaned a bit; the conversation went a bit like this.

🐝: I have been a shitty girlfriend and I need to change things.
null: Good. I have been overreacting mostly because **I am tired** and it’s hard to work all day and then get home and have to clean.

I think we’re okay. We both sleep on the bed.

Friday

tKitchenJob was steady prepping throughout, something for which I am thankful. bFOHjob… fucken’ clusterfuck. Friday night, two servers, one food runner, one wait assistant. No host, the GM was hosting. We got hit hard that day.

At the end of the night the GM wanted a high-five for surviving the night. Bitch, please.

Getting home I eat something with 🐝. I am desperate for sleep but the food is appreciated.

Saturday

🐝 leaves for work early, she’s opening at work.

I get to bFOHjob in the afternoon; got a barback shift. Getting there and… going to have to prep in the changing room/locker/storage space cos there’s a bachelorette party out front. Fine.

Borrowed a decent knife from the kitchen and got a talking to from two cooks and the chef cos I used a knife that belongs to a specific cook instead of a house knife. Up until that point I had assumed house knives were left on the magnetic knife rails and everyone gathered their stuff in their knife rolls or bains. Fine.

Get through prep… we’re short like a million things. I make do. While trying to set up one of the kegs neither the other barback nor me realize there are hoses in the walk-in cooler to carbonate the keg. Hose blows out, really loudly. I get a talking to from five people.

GM tells me I make her nervous.

Five minutes later, Bar Manager tells me I got it wrong and now I have to re-do everything.

I leave. I text 🐝 when getting home about it, then fall asleep on the couch. Wake up to a text from her saying she’s on her way.

When she walks into the apartment she says she doesn’t feel safe and is leaving. With that, she leaves.

I go back to sleep.

Sunday, June 23

I think I woke up around 1500, ate something, went back to sleep.

Monday

First day at merBOHjob. It went well and I got cut early. Went out and got drunk. 🐝 texts saying she’ll move out on Wednesday. Frankly, my dear, I couldn’t care less.

Dark liminality

Well, here we are again. Another week from hell done:

  • Walked out on bFOHjob; I make the GM nervous.
  • Reduced my hours at tKitchenJob because I’m starting at…
  • merBOHjob, doing the same thing as tKitchenJob but at a higher wage.
  • Going to try and give it a week before starting to look for another FOH job.

Lost the job, lost the girl, and I’m pretty sure I’ll get an eviction notice tomorrow Monday because… why not? It’s how the universe seems to work for me.

Anyway, as I now seem to have plenty of free time on the calendar I’ll try to make better use of it and spending re-learning how to code as I never have learned to do it properly. Or so I’m saying right now. But before I do that I’m going to get some reading material on personal finance and learn how to do forecasting; merely having a budget doesn’t cut it for me.

Hopefully I’ll also be able to sleep better tonight. Last night I was caught between being too tired to sleep and a mind racing to figure out a path forward.

GM was very good at telling me I did not belong

Over time I was told a few things at the last job I had:

  1. “You’re an intense person. You may have trouble here.” This happened right during my hiring interview.
  2. “Maybe you just don’t fit in.”
  3. “You’re perceived as a dishonest person.”
  4. “I think you’re insubordinate as an employee because you don’t talk.”

Given those circumstances I thought it best to leave. I should have timed it better cos now I’m going to have a hell of a time actually making rent.

Should’ve gone elsewhere

Writing this at the bar as the boss sits on the spot two places to my left. Wish I were fucking joking but I en’t.

Given past… Situations I have faced with her it makes it difficult to find a common social point that won’t get me in trouble with her at work even if the events happen outside of work.

Service industry blues, am I right.

Ugh, doubles. My personal scourge.

Due to scheduling vagaries at my two jobs I end up working doubles three times a week at the least. And not just regular doubles, but “clopenings”; that is, when you close the night and then open the next day. Never any fun to be had during those days… Specially in the weekends.

I work brunch.

FML.

Only scratching the surface, here.

I fucking hate my job now.

It was okay for a long, long while. Certainly less stressful than working at the biting squad but it certainly had its share of trouble.

But now all of the low lying brush-fires that consume the company are threatening my very sanity. I dread going to work so much I try to sleep as much as possible, which is the opposite of me staying up until 0300 on teh twitter derp corn or playing videogames.

Hopefully something good will pop-up soon because THIS IS SO, SO BAD.

How bad, you ask? We have clients who are literal nazi sympathizers. I asked my Pa about it and he says that technically makes me a nazi collaborator. The kicker? The boss is Jewish.

Hopefully next job I’ll actually be given a chance to move up? Either way, I’m over this place.

Press This

WordPress removed the “Press This” bookmarklet because:

  • WordPress developers are fucking idiots.
  • WordPress developers fucking hate you, the user.

Most of the links I put up on this site were usually through the bookmarklet. “We just want to increase security”, they say, then break the functionality without a proper equivalent in place.

They’re probably friends with Firefox developers, who also like to break with the past without regard to their users.

But what do users know, right? Developers always know better.

Sonido en Linux, o la falta de

Tons esta este articulo en el sitio del New York Times acerca del enfoque de Ubuntu en lo Mainstream. Es un buen articulo. Pero nunca va a pasar.

Preguntas por que? Por el sonido. Ya sabes, la cosa que tu cerebro procesa como entrada auditiva.

No voy a decir mucho al respecto, ya que otros lo han dicho mejor de lo que yo lo podría decir:

Yo solamente he tratado de hacer funcionar una diadema con Skype en mi computadora. Tuve que molerle a las cosas durante una hora antes de que Skype funcionara como se supone debe hacerlo. Esto con una diadema barata de 50 pesos sin control alguno; nada de esas chidas diademas USB para mi por que ya se que no funcionan con el sistema operativo de mi elección.

Todos esos APIs, servidores de sonido, sistemas y demonios…. son ganado Augeo cagándose en el establo; necesitan ser llevados al rastro y el establo ser limpiado. Quiza el Sr. Shuttleworth lo pueda hacer.

Sonido en Linux? Esta completamente roto; cada vez que veas artículos anunciando “Este es el año de Linux en el escritorio” por favor procede a abusar del autor hasta que te canses.

Digo esto como un usuario de Linux — tanto en casa como en el trabajo — y como alguien que empuja software libre encima de todo mundo. Supongo tendré que dejar de empujar la gente hacia Apple ahora.

Linux Sound, or lack thereof

So there’s this article on the NYTimes about Ubuntu’s focus on reaching the Mainstream. It’s a pretty good read. But it won’t happen.

Why, you ask? Because of sound. You know, the thing that your brain processes as auditory input.

I won’t say much about it, since others have already said it far better than I could:

I’ve only tried to get a headset to work on my computer with Skype. Had to fiddle with settings for an hour before Skype worked the way it was supposed to. Mind you, this is a cheap-ass run-of-the-mill headphones-and-microphone headset without any controls; none of those nifty USB headsets for me because I know they do not work with my choice of operating system.

All of those APIs, sound servers, systems and daemons… they’re Augean cattle mucking up the stable, and they need to be slaughtered and the stable cleaned out. Perhaps Mr. Shuttleworth is up to the job.

Sound on Linux? It is completely broken; whenever you see articles announcing “This is the year of Linux on the desktop”, please proceed to abuse the author to no end.

I say this all as a Linux user — both at home and at work — and as someone who pushes open source software on everyone. Guess I’ll have to stop doing that and push people towards Apple instead.

Comentarios en el sitio

Me acabo de dar cuenta que Gengo se chinga los permalinks para cualquier comentario hecho en el sitio.

Cuando tu — el visitante — dejas un comentario te aparece un error que dice “Not Found” inmediatamente después de dejar el comentario. Ademas, cuando le haces click a un link de comentario en la barra lateral te aparece lo mismo. El link original (que puedes ver al hacer un mouse-over en tu barra de estatus) es:
http://nullrend.com/2008/12/30/rains/en/comment-page-1/#comment-29

Cuando haces click en el, WP y Gengo hacen su magia y obtienes
http://nullrend.com/2008/12/30/rains/en/comment-page-1/en/#comment-29

Pero el URL real resultante debería ser
http://nullrend.com/2008/12/30/rains/en/#comment-29

Creo que tiene algo que ver con incompatibilidad entre WP 2.7 y Gengo 2.5.3; este problema ciertamente no existía antes de actualizar. Quizá un cambio rápido en el .htaccess lo pueda arreglar, pero la solución real es modificar el código en Gengo en si.

Ya me están enfadando estas chingaderas de Gengo… Ya hasta le puse su propia categoría.

Comments on site

I just noticed Gengo fucks up the permalinks for any comment left on the site.

When you — the visitor — leave a comment you get a “Not Found” error immediately after leaving the comment. Plus, when clicking on a comment link on the sidebar you get the same thing. The original link (which you can see on your status bar) is
http://nullrend.com/2008/12/30/rains/en/comment-page-1/#comment-29

When you click on it, WP and Gengo do their stuff and you get
http://nullrend.com/2008/12/30/rains/en/comment-page-1/en/#comment-29

But the real URL being linked to should be
http://nullrend.com/2008/12/30/rains/en/#comment-29

I’m thinking it’s got something to do with incompatibilities between WP 2.7 and Gengo 2.5.3; this issue certainly wasn’t there before I upgraded. Perhaps a quick fix to .htaccess can fix this, but the real solution is to change the code in Gengo itself.

It’s getting annoying, this Gengo crap… I’ve given it it’s very own category now.

The boss

Our ‘boss’ at work isn’t even in the city. He invests time and effort on growing another team in a city in the center of the country, where is cheaper to hire support personnel. No big deal, it’s the very nature of my sector for work to flow into places where labor is cheaper.

The problem for us is the team we’ve got here in Tijuana. A few hours ago I was informed beginning next Monday our daily work hours are reduced to 6 hours and the night shift is being phased out. This after fighting management for a few months to get our shifts reduced from 12 hours to 8 hours daily.

“There’s no budget”, he alleges; fuck that. The fucker doesn’t declare our full salary to the IMSS(social security here in Mexico). He’s changing the company’s stated reason of being with the SHCP(the Mexican Fed). Long-expired workplace permissions and documentation. Utterly stupid ideas of growing that make hiring and retaining personnel that much harder. An endless parade of workplace practices worthy of The Daily WTF.

Screwmotherfucking bastard.

El patrón

Nuestro ‘jefe’ actual ni siquiera esta en la ciudad. Invierte su tiempo y esfuerzo en hacer crecer otro equipo en una ciudad del centro del país, donde resulta mas barato contratar personal para soporte. No hay gran problema en ello, es la misma naturaleza de mi sector que el trabajo fluirá lentamente a áreas donde resulte mas barata la mano de obra.

El problema es para el equipo que tenemos aquí en Tijuana. Hace unas horas me fue informado que a partir del lunes que viene nuestro horario de trabajo sera de 6 horas diarias, y el turno nocturno sera eliminado. Esto viene después de haber batallado durante varios meses para reducir nuestros turnos de trabajo de 12 horas a 8 horas diarias.

“No hay presupuesto”, alega; esas son mamadas. El cabrón no declara nuestro salario completo al IMSS. Esta cambiando la naturaleza de la empresa con Hacienda. Permisos vencidos hace años. Ideas de crecimiento completamente estúpidas que hacen mas difícil la contratación y retención de personal. Un sinfín de practicas de trabajo dignas para Daily WTF.

Hijo de su gran renormeputarevergadre y dos tantitos.