Programming

I used to read dailywtf back in the day, it was? Is? A compendium of those sort of things. One I remember was a Visual Basic app that someone dared to add a couple lines to. The app turned out to use VBs “on error Goto” error handling, specifying line numbers. So by adding lines to it he induced a frameshift and as soon as there was an error it went careening wildly around the app, executing arbitrary code.

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Yes, but you need to invoke doTheThing in the arrow function.

BTW, this lint for this this issue is the ish if you don’t want to miss a misplaced this.

FYI - this is the basic concept behind graphql - which is pretty popular in some circles.

Returning XML or JSON is generally just a switch you can flip on a lot of API frameworks. Maybe they decided they need some HTML and not raw data so they wen’t with XML that can then be transformed by something like XSLT. Can you see how they’re processing the XML?

But yeah unminified is a clear sign they have no idea what they’re doing.

Right but that has structured queries. This is like you put “p=todaywagers” in the POST data to get an open bets list and there are 100 other arbitrary commands like that.

It’s all completely roll-your-own, ad hoc code. They process XML with DOMParser or whatever, with hand written, imperative code. Nothing like XSLT, which frankly is demonic in its own right.

Building my first desktop in about 20 years. Parts all came today. I’ve lived off just work/personal laptops and tablets for the last couple of decades. Been wanting to play a few more games and maybe get my kid into Minecraft or 3d printing or whatever captures her interest. I’ve always thought my dicking around with computers back when I was 10-12 was incredibly valuable now.

I’ve had a buy list together for 6+months but have held off due to the GPU shortage. Finally figured a couple months ago I’d just buy everything, and get a processor with decent enough integrated graphics to get me through a few months, but all the better AMDs with integrated graphics had a shortage as well. Just bit the bullet and went with an intel with decent igu, we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I can get a good card in a few months.

I splurged a bit (for me, anyway) on everything, so I’m nervous about breaking it all, hah. Hopefully it’ll be like riding a bicycle.

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Yeah I’ve done a couple builds in the last few years and it all worked on the first try, just watch some youtubes. The thermal paste part is the only tricky part but its not hard.

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I’m old enough to remember setting jumpers on the motherboard.

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Not seating the RAM all the way in the slot is where I usually mess up, even after doing it multiple times and knowing that it’s an issue for me.

Pretty interesting article about how weird floats are. Also incidentally about how weird JS is.

I had to set a jumper on the motherboard on a desktop 1.5 years ago. I don’t remember what it was for. In putting that machine together I bent some pins on my CPU. Took a while to get them straight enough to get it in the socket. Made a mess with thermal paste. Cleaning that up is no fun. The IO shield popped off and I had to take the motherboard out again. The board didn’t align perfectly with the case so there was some cursing screwing it back in. Bottom line, I’m making sure my contact/glasses prescription is up to date before I do that again.

My CPU doesn’t have integrated graphics so that added to the adventure. There was a little bit of a dip in the GPU wars at the time so I got a little better mid-range card than I otherwise would have and I see it’s somehow worth more now used than what I paid. Am just now looking to upgrade my monitor from lol 1600x1200. (I think I got that monitor from the pokerstars store ~12 years ago.) The GPU has at least gotten workouts doing protein folding calculations for the Rosetta Stone project.

My first job in the IT industry was fixing PCs and maintaining NT and Novell networks. I think the first computer I built had a top of the line 400MB HD and 56k modem. You did have to set some jumpers on the modem I believe to make sure the ports were compatible or something.

95% of my job was rebooting NT machines then chatting with the office workers while we waited. Oh that didn’t work? Try another thing, reboot, chat. Repeat half the day. Oh none of that worked? Time to reinstall. Get the CDs out. This will take the rest of the day.

I once saw the loaf of bread-sized stack of floppies they had to use to install NT before CD players came along. Fortunately I never had to go that route.

There was a girl at one office who was so hot it was like staring at the sun - Maggie Farriedooni or something like that. We went to lunch multiple times. I swear she seemed at least slightly curious about dating me. But alas, she left the company and moved away. :(

I studied like hell for the MCSE and flunked it bad. Luckily a half programming/half maintaining a network of macs job came along soon after that. Macs required like 1/20th as much maintenance as PCs, leaving me a lot of time to learn programming in SAS, Stata and a few other math/stats languages.

While I had that job I took a side job programming a website in perl, and the rest is history.

My first engineering job, our secretary fit this description. I’d have to stand in line to ask her to do anything because guys were always around her desk for no reason so I rarely talked to her. And she seemed disdainful when we did interact. After a re-organization cycle we ended up in different departments/buildings. Years later she came to our isolated building (populated by 20 guys and one older lady) and we talked for a while. I was a minor celebrity by quitting time. Unfortunately I was the one who moved away.

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jumpers on modems/etc used to set COM ports and IRQ interrupts. it all went away with PnP around 98-99.

it’s very unlikely you had to do any jumpers on the motherboard itself. at least not since circa ‘95.

This was '97/98 so yeah IRQ whatever.

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Well that makes three of us (you, me and Spidercrab). A lot of my colleagues use SAS, but I never got into it.

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My cousin had a good career doing video editing for a while. But he lost his job before the pandemic and hasn’t found anything new. He’s asked me a few times about programming. I told him to take a few classes at Red Rocks community college to see if he likes it. I fear he’s in too much of a funk to do self-guided online classes.

Anyway he found this bootcamp for 9 months for $10k:

Seems kinda crazy for just UI/UX? Which isn’t even programming. But I know some here have had good luck with boot camps. Any thoughts?

I’m gonna try again to get him to try a udemy course. This one seems like a good foundation for web development:

https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-html5-programming-from-scratch/

I would never do a boot camp without a strong track record of it leading to job opportunities. Should be the primary focus, for example Insight in Boston and SF is basically a way for people to get in front of companies and get a job. (Used to be the companies would actually pay their tuition after hiring) Would never do one just for a certificate or to learn. I would 100% vet everything about this before signing up for that much money.

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lmao no. all of my noes. tell him to do one of the million free coding sites for a month and see if he gets it.

anyone’s who’s can do the ins and outs of video editing (premiere, after effects, final cut, whatever) is good enough to do programming. I did that stuff to minor success in 2011 after Preet killed my “career” and then went on to be paid ridiculous sums to crap out javascript in the years since then.

There’s a gap between learning programming and getting a company to hire you for it. Tough to overcome for a lot of people. I don’t know a great solution honestly.

Make stuff, host it and link in your resume, profit.