* Posts by Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

82 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2014

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Google adds account sync for Authenticator, without E2EE

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Salesforce Community lets businesses spin up quick customer-facing websites

"Users of Salesforce Community – a cloud-based tool that lets businesses spin up quick customer-facing websites –"

In my professional opinion: quick my fucking arse.

Trying to do anything, even the most basic things, salesforce is a nightmare.

I guess it was some copy and paste from some marketing material?

Salesforce's new hires are less productive, says CEO Benioff

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Pay

"If someone isn't productive, likely they are not paid enough to be productive."

Or maybe they have to deal with a clunky completely non standard ( not for the better ) environment infested by point and click "technology" that makes you waste hours to fix some text in an HTML page for customer self service. Trying to build a chat bot, which basically requires a few strings and a few if statements is created using a UI spaghetti graph that makes you wonder if you really are awake or having a terrifying nightmare.

No real debug, no real sql, no real javascript, no real nothing...

The whole system is a scam to lock in customers, some of which might fall for the sunk cost fallacy and be scammed a bit longer.

I have been doing that for a whole year - as much as I adore my colleagues and the company I work for, I can't put myself through this for much longer.

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan
Thumb Down

Only one person can save Evernote

Nothing personal against the Italians - me being one myself -, but the only human being that can bring Evernote back to its own splendor is Elon Musk.

Salesforce to let two-thirds of space in SF high-rise

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Do not go anywhere near anything with that name on it unless they pay you

I am currently, for my sins, working as a salesforce "developer". They are so talented at turning everything they touch into overpriced shit I wouldn't feel safe being anywhere near a sand castle with their name on it, let alone venture inside one of their buildings.

I wonder if they will bend over backwards to lock those renting space in like they do with those poor customers of their botched platform. The whole company is built on a "shaft thy neighbour" philosophy, and not the nice kind of shafting.

Microsoft's do-it-all IDE Visual Studio 2022 came out late last year. How good is it really?

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: "The top request for Visual Studio is a Linux version. Why?"

I never got this obsession about Vim.

I don't think this fad will last long.

I like to write my code using my Royal 10 Typewriter, then use my old scanner + OCR for the A4s and Bob's your uncle.

The N is missing, so I have to add them all in by hand, but hey...

I am thinking of getting rid of all this over engineering anyway, and just use card board and a single hole puncher, like normal people.

Big Blue scoffs a Happy Meal: McDonald's sells automated order-taking tech to IBM

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: McStaff McRedundancies by McAI

School drop outs and those who opted to park themselves at the edges of education for a few years, so that they could procrastinate applying for McJobs. History, Philosophy, English, Media...

If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Storm = natural disaster?

I heard that there are ancient books explaining that storms and the likes are caused by stroppy invisible entities when they get offended for nonsensical reasons...

If that is the case, then the parties in that region of Jupiter must really be something else...

UK Ministry of Defence tries again to procure £1.7bn tri-service recruitment system

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Has anyone seen an outsourcing work?

A tear rolled down my cheek as I was reading this

Clegg on its face: Facebook turns to former UK deputy PM to fend off damaging headlines

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

"killing Identity Cards"

Not saying it is right or wrong, but as European citizen in the EU I can guarantee that Brits' issues with ID is one of the things that baffles us the most. Almost on the same level as the crazy taps which let you choose between frost bites and third degree burns

Forget that Loon's balloon burst, we just fired 700TB of laser broadband between two cities, says Alphabet

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Laser comms

Have you considered publishing your research on bird shit and lasers?

You would definitely be considered for an ignobel prize :-)

Java 17 arrives with long-term support: What's new, and is it falling behind Kotlin?

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: . Spring framework!

Fair enough for the dependency injection bit - but if I remember correctly there were about 150MB of Spring related libraries of death. Not sure what they did apart from making it harder to get where we wanted to get.

Hard to unit test would have been a bliss, so much better than almost impossible to deliver. Luckily I left after one year, no idea how long it took them to get a working version of what they wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if they just switched to C# or any other language which just lets you get on with things without lengthy XML prayers. At the time it was the best way to do things, apparently, rather than annotations. Can't imagine what torture annotations must have been then.

As far as I am aware Spring.NET is dead. So there must be ways to do without spring for sure.

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

No Java or any other JVM language will be good enough until it they are safe from Spring framework!

I wouldn't be surprised if projects that use Java will eventually move on to another language unless they abandon the vomcano that Spring framework is - maybe it will become a niche technology like Cobol?

I had to use it for a whole year without understanding exactly what it does, apart from creating mile long exception stacktraces, turning simple debug operations into a nightmare. And so much complexity added, for nothing!

I understand that it can be a legacy technology because JEE used to be worse ( whatever worse than Spring could possibly be, without physically attacking and abusing you ), but at the time we were rewriting an existing one from scratch because the original one was a patchwork of different bits added over time.

Estimated length of the project was a year, at the end of which we were not even half way through ( we also had to thank hibernate and GWT for that though ). From what I heard it's not uncommon that very basic functionalities will take forever to implement just to make Spring happy.

I found myself a nice Springless job, unfortunately rare these days, learned to develop android apps - which were threatened with Spring for android for a while, until the whole idea was abandoned - and now moving on to Salesforce devving... Hoping that nobody will every be stupid enough to even consider some Spring like frameworks for that.

Focus on the camera, mobile devs: 48MP shooters about to become the sweet spot

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

That's exactly what people want!

I am glad that they are finally listening to people.

I have had enough of complete strangers stopping me on the street to tell me that anything less than 48MP is not enough to take breakfast and dick pics.

Those also were the last words of all my dead grandparents, right before they reminded me for the 100th time that during the war people had to live with low resolution black and white dick and breakfast pics, which they had to develop, then buy stamps and envelopes for.

Nobody wants removable batteries instead, right? Screens that won't crack if you drop them from a 1-inch coffee table? Nah. They could do without batteries altogether, and maybe get rid of the screen too. I can see the future being all about screenless, non-mobile devices tied to a wall with a string, Add some rounded corners to them, and they all become premium features, with extra privacy and all.

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Backsies should not be allowed!

Smut names make everything better. Even more so if unintentional!

This was another good one:

http://aliprandi.blogspot.com/2013/03/inkulator-sounds-funny-for-italians.html

I guess that was one of the very first times that being born there ( and speaking the language ) turned out to be an advantage :-)

In this round of 'Real life or Black Mirror episode', drones that hunt down humans by listening to their screams

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Or know what you are screaming about, until you finally finished screaming.

Unfixable Apple M1 chip bug enables cross-process chatter, breaking OS security model

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

"a website non-design I can appreciate"

Did we look at the same website?

With serif fonts? And variable width too?

I had to look twice before realising I wasn't looking at Rio's Gay Pride official website...

Man found dead inside model dinosaur after climbing in to retrieve phone

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Alternative explanation

"ergo you are the one with the problem."

It vaguely reminds me of the saudis objecting to a .baby TLD because, according to their warped minds, it would attract or even encourage paedos.

I don't think normal people's minds would have gone down that road in a million years. Or possibly a million light years, even.

As another vendor promises 3 years of Android updates, we ask: How long should mobile devices receive support?

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: runs W10 on SSD

I guess the downvotes were from people who got confused because you omitted to say "bazinga"

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Scammers and time wasters do blacklist people...

I do believe that scammers have some sort of database of people they cannot con which they all share.

My own experience is with people who were trying to sell me some kind of disaster recovery strategy plan - the door to door jesus people:

I used to receive the occasional visit from people who had clear ideas on the steps to follow in order to transfer my consciousness to a place they considered super safe once my wetware would give up the ghost.

I never was a vegetarian ( back then ) campaigner, as I do what I believe is right for me and don't share opinions unless asked. But I was confronted by people who were offering opinions I had never asked for, so hey...

I had a lot of time that day, and nothing better to do, so I took a lot of time to explain that they would go to hell too, together with their favourite mythological characters, as they were probably consuming meat. A very polite conversation I could tell they didn't know how to get out of :-)

That was the last ever visit of final destination merchants at that address, from any kind of vendors. Imagine being blacklisted by one of the most annoying categories of human beings!

How embarrassing: Xiaomi and Motorola show up to high school prom both wearing remote-charging tech

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Perfect

They are the charges I've been dreaming of for years.

I would definitely upgrade my Juicero for a completely wireless model with remote charging! I could take it with me from room to room, no faffing about with the power lead

Samsung aims boot at Apple's decision not to bundle a charger in with the iPhone 12, foot ends up in mouth

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Oh Samsung

I am fairly neutral when it comes to brands - I don't like iphones and I don't buy them, just like I don't like cucumbers and I don't buy them either. I have no strong feelings against either.

Having said that, I find it odd that people can be excited for a company selling stuff at an higher margin, and therefore ripping its customers off more than its competitors do.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Oracle Solaris

They could buy a new TLD, so to own solaris.vom?

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Personal wealth?

Oh, my ex was just like her despite his immensely humbler origins. Only difference was that he could barely count and organise a piss up in a brewery.

I would say that privilege, wealth and coddling had no part in his small scale grifting. Given the lack of those prerequisites, maybe it just means he was just an over achiever when it comes to narcissistic personality disorder?

Something to consider in case Dell freezes over: HP unfolds 2-in-1 laptop with Intel Tiger Lake brains, bigger screen

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Is this the same HP... @A.Coward

"I'm kinda baffled how on this IT news forum so many people have trouble understanding the difference between HP and HPE."

Exactly! And let's hope they don't invent languages with a similar name and syntax, but running on different environments...

Can you imagine if, for shits and giggles, they created one called Java and another one Javascript? It would leave people baffled for generations...

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

The Kins of Zune

Billionaires showered with wealth as experts say global economy set for long and deep recession

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: whenever governments grab MORE control...

"It is SO predictable by those who understand what I just said. And so is the SOLUTION!!!"

Something tells me your solution includes "sun and disinfectant injections"...

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: The Modern UI/UX

In all honesty I am quite convinced that it's the designers who insist that GUIs must be regularly changed because it's the only way they can justify their jobs.

You like JavaScript! You really like it! Scripting lingo tops dev survey of programming languages

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan
Boffin

Re: It will not last ...

"Java may be on top of the heap today but it will be gone in five years."

Problem is, once Java is gone, all we will have left is Script.

Script will have 6 / 10 of the power of JavaScript.

Once Sript is gone, all we will have left is c.

c will only have 1 / 6 of the power of Script.

c will have 1 / 10 of the power of JavaScript.

Is this cuttlefish really all that cosmic? Ubuntu 18.10 arrives with extra spit, polish, 4.18 kernel

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

@jake - Re: "the system has a more modern and 'flatter' look"

"... what happens when Marketing makes Engineering decisions ..."

Or when designers are good at convincing others that what they have already done is so bad that it needs to be done again from scratch.

Facebook names former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg head of global affairs

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: RE: Forget It

It's quite sad that we can't think of an excuse to ship Diane Abbott to California as well.

It would help if anybody actually knew what she does...

Finally. The palm-sized Palm phone is back. And it will, er, save you from your real smartphone

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: I found this:

That article says that an irritating phone you don't want to use is a new concept - but what about that Nokia that had Snake instead of Whatsapp?

Maybe one day we will have mobiles with rotary dials which need coins to make calls, do not have your Contacts stored on them, and only work if you tie them to a wall.

What a time to be alive!

Man cuffed for testing fruit with bum cheek pre-purchase

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Jape

Allergy, or are you a bit anal when it comes to pesticide paranoia?

Well, this makes scents: Kotlin code quality smells better than Java

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Fewer lines of code == fewer bugs?

@ a_yank_lurker - Ah, that makes sense, thanks for the reply...

It makes sense to me now. I was mainly thinking about former colleagues whose work could only have been helped by a miracle, couldn't see how less typing would have helped :-) Proper Thedailywtf grade material

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Fewer lines of code == fewer bugs?

Sounds to me like saying that if I use 40% fewer words the quality of an essay will improve

Dunno, maybe if people develop using a plain text editor rather than Eclipse? And that would just be typos and syntax errors, rather than fewer bugs.

But it's just my opinion, maybe I am missing something obvious.

Did you even sweat, tho? Plaintiffs told to amend claims in Apple headphones suit

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Found the solution. Tim Cook give me a shout if you are reading this

I have just been granted the patent for the solution to the problem.

It consists of a wire between the headphones and the device they are wirelessly connected to. It allows the headphones to use the other device's battery, which is bigger, instead of their own. That should also limit power consumption - I am not an expert, could be wrong, but they look nice so sod it - because there is no need to keep the blue tooth switched on in both devices. If you rest the wire along the perimeter of the device, it acquires visually pleasant round corners.

Huawei Honor 10: At £399, plenty of bang for buck – it's a pity about the snaps

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

@Chz Re: "The problem is it makes the phone as slippery as a bar of soap."

Reminds me of my Nexus 4 - I thought whoever made it ( LG? ) had invented a material with a negative coefficient of friction

Doom and Super Mario could be a lot tougher now AI is building levels

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Selfie or it never happened!

Jupiter has the craziest storms seen yet, say boffins

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Frank Blackmore's work?

Is it just me or that looks a lot like the flow of cars trying to escape from Swindon's Magic Roundabout?

Windows 10 S to become a 'mode', not a discrete product

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: ... Microsoft Store ...

@wallaby FFS = For Free Software?

IBM Java CTO: Devs shouldn't have to learn Docker, K8s, 30 other things to deploy an app

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: --->Hibernate

"an attempt to enable people who had not a clue about databases or SQL to store relational data" - fully agree, and worth mentioning is that apart from the zillions of unnecessary database hits it also is ( was? ) terribly complicated - much more than the SQL it wanted to save a developer from. I also had to use Spring on top of that, to make everything unnecessarily even more difficult. While it was clear to me what Hibernate was trying ( and failing ) to do, I never understood what the whole point of Spring was, apart from making everybody waste time and the will to live. I hope it's gone out of fashion. Other than that, I really like plain normal Java...

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

@ onefang Re: Lame name options IMHO

"I was under the impression that what people wanted in an enterprise platform was expensive bloat and job preserving complexity"

That's why Spring and Hibernate were invented. To teach those who though a select query couldn't be a time consuming processor hammering nightmare a lesson. The software equivalent of chopsticks - in my case at least :-)

And we return to Munich's migration back to Windows – it's going to cost what now?! €100m!

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

@Rob Telford

I only searched on Google for "Munich Vertu", to confirm that there really were two, and it returned only one. But I am quite convinced there was a second one at some stage... I remember reading about Vertu being liquidated, but I am not an expert and assumed liquidation didn't have to be immediate and they were allowed to go on for a while to sell as much stock as possible. Their own website seems to confirm that all their shops have now gone. Thank you for the correction :-)

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

I have friends there, and from what I saw, the place does have money to burn. I can only see one Vertu shop now, but I am pretty sure there used to be two :-)

If my impression is correct, the reason why they do have money to burn is because they don't do burn it. That seems to be changing now though?

Team Trump goes in to bat for Google and Facebook

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Trump will want to be re-elected

@thegroucho Better the swamp monster you know?

First iPhone X fondlers struggle to admit that Face ID sort of sucks

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Couldn't they buy the technolody from whoever build Nexus 4

I think it was LG, but I might be wrong. You had the option of still eyes or blinking to avoid people unlocking it using pictures. It used to work fine, I asked other people to test it and not a single false positive. It would have been cheaper and more reliable than reinventing a buckled wheel

Ex-sperm-inate! Sam the sex-droid 'heavily soiled' in randy nerd rampage

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

Re: Gimmi!

I'm no expert myself, but from what friends tell me I think these dolls can be quite an investment. 3 grand is nothing, unless they need more leccy than a furnace, compared to what some long term XX wetware ( no pun intended ) require.

IKEA flat-packs TaskRabbit to crack assembly code

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

@ Joe Werner - Re: Reading a manual

"A manual is a set of instructions to follow in a logical order, just follow the steps one by one. Nobody's asking to perform a quadruple bypass off a manual, so just get on with the basic stuff. If you can't do *that*, then there's something wrong with you" - that's what I used to tell myself until I became friend with a guy who has a degree in biosomething who could not put together a cabinet despite the clearly explained instructions. What would have taken me 10 minutes ended up taking 45 instead because he wanted to help. Then he cooked can't remember what, the food was delicious and it suddenly dawned on me: he assembled ingredients. No matter how easy the recipe is, I follow the steps one by one, but it just doesn't taste nice, or the way it's intended to taste, and the mess is the same as if I had cooked for everybody in India and China. Same with fixing punctures in my bike - some kids could do it in a few minutes, I'm 41 and ended up having to buy solid tyres ( which are a great invention ). I cycle everywhere, but GPS on phones changed my life because I'm useless at reading maps - I was in Barcelona with a non particularly bright ex and we went for a long walk. At some point he stopped before I could realise he brought us back to the hotel, through the maze of many tiny streets, without a map. All very basic things which I realised are my Achille's heels, while it comes natural to other people.

So, in my experience at least, the Y chromosome can be very selective in what it decides to allow you to be able to do. I will never criticise anybody ever again for their hopelessness with something I find piss easy. Turns out I'm often equally useless with some stuff that others can do effortlessly

PS - I am not saying you were criticising anybody in your comment! :-)

Crushed Juicero now officially a fruitless endeavor

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

@ AC Hipsters

"No doubt the people involved in that will now be engaged in new startups"

Yes, that, or impossible.com. It still exists, I just checked

Java 9 release back on track, community votes 'yes'

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan

@Hstubbe

Yes, you can find all about it on the Internet.

Looking for an Ubuntu Unity close cousin? Elementary, my dear...

Friendly Neighbourhood Coder Dan
Headmaster

Re: "An"? I had no idea!

"Red Hat" is pronounced "reddit". That's why their website is "reddit.com". It's all written in javascript ( silent "script", it is pronounced "java" ) and HTML ( pronounced "hotmail" )

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