If I were doing it, checking the box would permanently temove your root privileges.
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I bet it used to do something sensible, was deprecated for some reason, but removing it broke something in a completely unexpected wayā¦
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That never happens.
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(Thatās two Dr Funs in two daysā¦ Presumably something will remind me of another one tomorrowā¦)
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Just sat down to write a tedious tweak to a bit of work codeā¦ and discovered that Iād already done it, in November 2020. (It works silently so this wasnāt obvious until I looked at the source.)
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Thatāll do it : )
Unwittingly doing the same thing twice, you say?
Iāll stop now : )
(I remember the author using these two as an example of a few times when heād thought of a joke with absolutely no recollection of having drawn it previously.)
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Iāve been working on a big thing for several weeks. Iāve got it ready to get reviewed and committed, so I cleaned the last bits of it up, and started when I need to capture for the testing. And my devswerver fell over.
I was going to be productive today! Dammit
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I need two approvals to have access on a set of repos. Got one (from my line manager) and waiting for the other one.
I understand the need for security, but these sodding ****s have the speed of a Whitehall bureaucrat
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I just got a call from a recruiter. Happens all the time. I rarely actually talk to them, but this time, Iām expecting someone to call about something else.
He is looking for someone to do screen scraping, off a mainframe. In C. Actual, real, C, not a variant.
Sounds like something I would have a nightmare about.
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āAnd whenever you get the boulder to the top of the hill, they change the screen layout.ā
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Do you have the whole archive memorized?
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IIRC he did 10 years worth of week-day cartoons, so that would be a lot to memorise ā however specific Dr Fun cartoons apparently continue to occupy more of my brain space than the average person might expect, given how long itās been since he stopped drawing it.
He started it around the same time I got on the internet, so it was a fairly (or indeed Farley) constant thing for me for a long time; and when the end of Dr Fun was announced I did work back through the entire archive to pick out my favourites. I think I categorised things as āho-humā, āgoodā, āvery goodā, and āamazingā (the first category was very large and the last was very small, but thereās some really funny stuff in there). Sadly that drive wasnāt backed up, and I lost my categorised archive, but I must have reinforced a bunch of them enough that, throughout the rest of my life, things have continued to remind me of Dr Fun!
(I think the single-panel format helps a lot with that ā thereās not much to remember about any given cartoon, and it always had to be a really immediate thing.)
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About a month ago, I was working on a service I own, to convert it from doing stuff using a rube goldberg machine (Heath Robinson for some of you lot) to doing directly from python. I worked through about 85% of it, got stuck on the next bit, and had to put it down to do MY GOD ITS ON FIRE stuff. today, I tried to grab my last diff, and start back at it, but itās too old to merge cleanly when rebasing to the head. So I grabbed the relevant method, pasted it into a new branch, it bloody works. I am not going to complain too loudly, but really, wtf?
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I had a similar āwhy does it even work?ā moment this week. We had to introduce āversioningā for certain documents after the factā¦ you know how thereās already shenanigans going on where people needed different versions and did what we call āfrickelnā (verb to Gefrickel = hot mess of code) to somehow ā¦ create those. This just for broad contextā¦
So we had to go into the database which has HUGE, HUGE views and functionsā¦ enough of them for someone to use a packageā¦ I do not really speak Oracle SQL but somehow it fell to me to modify one of those functions to take the versioned view as a parameterā¦
ā¦ and I messed up the commit (IDEA plugin removed all caps which peopled had used as a kind of code highlighting for SQL) and we only noticed the next day.
Of course it is a no go to do a commit that is unnecessarily modifying all the lines when we need git blame almost every day to assess how old the code is.
So we reset the commit and I tried to manually merge the thing but failed and I just copy pasted the small pieces I had edited manually and it all worked. I was staring at the screen and asked my colleagueā¦ āHow is this possible? This has to be a mistake, it canāt be workingā¦.ā (but it did and does).
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I figured it out, because today it was broken. I have a string, which I am breaking into bits, one of which is a hexadecimal string thatās an auth token. sometimes it arrives as
DEADBEEF, sometimes "DEADBEEF".
removing the quotes as required makes it work properly. I donāt understand the difference in quoting, since the origin is the same and the codepath is constant. It may be the upstream system.
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Monday, was being Monday yesterday and of course the system that only one person really knows how to fix is on Easter vacation. I mean both the system and the person who would know how to recall the system from its vacation.
~
Today, our PO (product owner) sends me the long awaited test data for something I programmed before Christmas , the precursor of which was programmed almost a year ago by someone else. The XML format was incomplete for the requirements I had to implement, so I invented the additional tags, all while knowing I would probably have to change them.
The PO has been hounding the people who provide the data ever since. The most awesome PO Iāve ever had the pleasure to work with.
So the test data arrives and lo and behold: I guessed right. The tags are exactly how I guessed they would name them.
But waitā¦ what is thisā¦ they changed the format for something else?
Aaaaaaarrrgh.
PS: and the actual service providing the data still isnāt running and the big feature demo is day after tomorrow.
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Are you really a tech company if you donāt do this? 
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Well, admitttedly it is just the development version of this piece of infrastructure. But our builds are breaking because our Jenkins uses this and we checked in some pretty dramatic changes and need our integration testingā¦
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This sprint Iāve worked on 50% of the User Stories/Story Points and reviewed a good chunk of the rest.
We are a team of ten engineers.
Some of the Pull Requests Iāve reviewed have been nowhere near ready, so Iāve ended up doing the implementation of those through review comments.
I skirted around the issue in the Retro but I really want to point at the people who arenāt pulling their weight and ask them what theyāre doing
One of them is a fairly senior engineer and the other is a new starter (been here 6 months).
Ugh.
Edit: I expect to have to help the new starter a bit more, but Iām literally having to tell him what to write and heās not picked up anything from his previous work or from any of the work Iāve suggested he crib from. And even when I give him precise instructions he canāt follow them.
The senior engineer has been working on a small story for three full sprints and bits of two more. It was needed to be finished today and itās nowhere near. Iām asking fairly significant questions about the changes and he canāt back them up with good reason.
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