ebooksyearn

ebooksyearn, 4 days ago to random

Noticing a ton of people driving with flat tires lately. I feel like it's been one a day for a week

bikepedantic, 7 days ago to random

Today in Government Humor: Every Friday, my coworker pledges to get out the door reasonably close to his quitting-time of record, saying that he'll be "5:08 compliant," and it elicits a smile every time

ebooksyearn, 9 days ago to linux

So what the heck do I do when GRUB rescue doesn't recognize any of my partitions #linux

ebooksyearn, 14 days ago to random

Trying dinner from a new spot in our neighborhood

ebooksyearn, 14 days ago to random

Uh.. thanks I guess?

black_intellect, 27 days ago to random

Seattle gave low-income residents $500 a month no strings attached. Employment rates nearly doubled. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/seattle-gave-low-income-residents-175101720.html

complain, 27 days ago to random

I did software as a contractor for various federal agencies for years. It was a good gig for the most part – I got out when they wanted me to write less code and go to more meetings. I can assure you that I did NOT go into software because I wanted to go to meetings.

We were often forced to code in very strict and unfriendly conditions. I like to compare myself to the early Nintendo developers, who I believe had to use short variable names to save space, which seems utterly absurd now, but so do a lot of things.

Anyway, we had this custom web application framework that my then-boss had built. In many ways it was a glorious triumph of engineering. In many other ways it was a steaming pile of garbage. It had to run on an Oracle application server. It was written in PL/SQL. It worked well, but it was deeply flawed in ways I didn’t really understand then, but in hindsight I sometimes have nightmares.

One of the things it did really poorly was form submission. The web framework required a consistent url structure and was completely inflexible on this. For some reason we were not passing form values in POST – I didn’t understand the difference then, and probably no one else on the team did, either. None of us had gone to school for programming. In our application, there was this big procedure that had a giant conditional that took in parameters and then decided which procedure to call to build the intended web page:

if page == 1 then home()else if page == 2 then page2()

Something like that, except there were like 100 entries. The problem was that this procedure expected all parameters as url parameters. So if you wanted to record that Bob had made 10 widgets today (this is not what our website did but you get the idea) you had to write a url like:

ourcoolsite.gov/show?page=4&employee="Bob"&widgets=10

Except that didn’t work with the show procedure. It had to be consistent – if you passed “employee” to show in this context, you had to pass it for every page in the website. The solution for this was to pass a bunch of pairs of parameters – a name and a value – so it was consistent. So now you had to write your url like:

ourcoolsite.gov/show?varname1="employee"&varval1="Bob"&varname2="widgets"&varval2=10

There was this hacky bit of Javascript that would take a form and translate it into this format for submission. It was less than ideal. But it worked. And really, as a coding practice, I FEEL this. The guy who wrote the web framework got it to where it worked for him and then left it. We’ve all done that on code we use for ourselves. Yes, even you have done it, don’t lie. But this got annoying really fast: “Was employee varval2 or varval3”?

So what I did, and let me tell you I was smug AF about this – I wrote a show2 procedure that expected all the parameters as one JSON-formatted variable. Now, I wish I could recall whether or not I started POSTing the forms or if I still put it in the url. Let’s say I POSTed it because no one who can say I didn’t is ever going to read this. But now you had something like this:

{"page":2,"employee":"Bob", "widgets":10}

Much better. Not good, but better.

https://complainthub.com/2024/04/20/crimes-against-good-coding-practice/

#crimesAgainstCoding #governmentContracting

ebooksyearn, 1 month ago to random

My favorite is the sound of cars running over the broken plastic from the car crash that just happened

w7voa, 1 month ago to random

TSA says it intercepted 1,500+ firearms at US airport checkpoints nationwide during the first quarter of this year.

ebooksyearn, 1 month ago to random

Throw me a bone here Dominion

ifixcoinops, 1 month ago to random

Helping out a mate set up her #gameDad recently. She got to a page asking a question and prodded the buttons without reading. I went "Wait hang on what did that say," we never found out but it was Probably something about updating a list of ports? Who knows! Anyway it started up fine, but... like, twenty years ago I would've gone, like, "Mate what are you doing," but these days...

When every website you visit thrusts a thing in your face as you're scrolling and you know it's spam so you just hit the heck-off button without looking, never mind reading

When every game you play starts with a bunch of logo videos that you have to mash buttons to skip

When a new game throws some bollocks up about an EULA that nobody expects anyone to ever read

When every three days your computer goes "Hey can I just -" and you read it once and understand that it's asking you to install spyware and then every other time you hit the Remind Me In 3 Days button without thinking or even pausing

When every day you get an email that says "Important information about your account" and it's never important information

When 80% of your physical mail goes straight into the recycling bin without even being opened because, well, it's just recycling

...yeah. It's absolutely no surprise that our default first interaction with a machine is to mash buttons randomly until it stops banging on about whatever and gets on with doing what we bought it to do.

ebooksyearn, 1 month ago to random

What do you call it when something is the prime example of something? Not symbolic, there's some nice word or phrase I'm thinking of

ebooksyearn, 1 month ago to random

I know we're all busy Being Mad about April Fools Day but is no one commenting on how it's ALREADY [EXPLETIVE DELETED] APRIL

ebooksyearn, 1 month ago to random

Ok maybe don't send me a marketing email around the Key Bridge collapse

ebooksyearn, 1 month ago to random

Hung out with @peter for 4 hours, toured half of Barcelona, and forgot to take a picture to toot

kcivey, 1 month ago to random

I guess I'm going to have to help my parents shop for a TV when I don't actually have a TV myself. I hope there are still options that aren't complete "smart" garbage.

ebooksyearn, 2 months ago to random

There used to be people who made cool tshirts and sold them online. Do those people exist anymore, or is it just brands and automated or derivative junk?

ebooksyearn, 2 months ago to animals

Cat pretending she doesn't want my homemade Girl Scout Cookie ice cream sandwich #CatsOfMastodon

ebooksyearn, 2 months ago to random

Whoever designed these soccer fields has never been to a soccer game