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Search - "i'll simply not comment"
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Frack..people suck.
In sprint planning meeting, prioritizing the tasks...
ScrumMaster: "Next item, create a spreadsheet that identifies the systems used by order processing so the PO can identify errors by system."
Me: "That's already done."
ScrumMaster: "Did you work ahead of the sprint again?"
- Really trying not to throw something heavy at his head.
Me: "No, you did back in January."
- SM stutters..um..uhhs...
ScrumMaster: "No, I never did that...see."
- SM navigates to the sharepoint directory
Me: "Yep, there it is."
ScrumMaster: "I didn't create it, you must have."
Me: "Created by...you."
ScrumMaster: "Uh...um....I might have added it to sharepoint, but doesn't mean I created it. Anyway, lets take a look..."
- opens the spreadsheet
ScrumMaster: "What is this? Did you simply export the sharepoint list to excel?"
- Getting harder and harder to resist the urge to throw something heavy at his head.
Me: "I don't know what that is, you created it. You commented on the Trello card that this task item was done."
ScrumMaster: "No, I've never seen this or made any comment on the Trello board...lets look ..."
- FRACK!!! TRELLO IS DOWN!!!
ScrumMaster: "When Trello comes back up I'll assign the card to you. Lets stay on task with the cards from now on. Next item ... "
Trello up, 3 hours later, back at my desk, there is his fracking comment from January about uploading the spreadsheet to sharepoint. Frack frack frack people suck3 -
Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)
- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.
- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.
- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".
- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.
- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.
- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....
- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.
- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.
- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.
- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.
- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).
- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.
- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)
I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!4 -
Time for a rant about shitstaind, suspend/hibernate, and if there's room for it at the end probably swappiness, and Windows' way of dealing with this.
So yesterday I wanted to suspend my laptop like usual, to get those goddamn fans to shut up when I'm sleeping. Shitstaind.. pinnacle of init systems.. nope, couldn't do it. Hibernation on the other hand, no problem mate! So I hibernated the laptop and resumed it just now. I'm baffled by this.
I'll oversimplify a bit here (but feel free to comment how there's more to it regardless) but basically with suspend you keep your memory active as well as some blinkenlights, and everything else goes down. Simple enough.. except ACPI and I will not get into that here, curse those foul lands of ACPI.
With hibernation you do exactly the same, but on top of that, you also resume the system after suspending it, and freeze it. While frozen, you send all the memory contents to the designated swap file/partition. Regarding the size of the swap file, it only needs to be big enough to fit the memory that's currently in use. So in a 16GB RAM system with 8GB swap, as long as your used memory is under 8GB, no problem! It will fit. After you've moved all the memory into swap, you can shut down the entire system.
Now here's the problem with how shitstaind handled this... It's blatantly obvious that hibernation is an extension of suspend (sometimes called S3, see e.g. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/...) and that therefore the hibernation shouldn't have been possible either. The pinnacle of init systems.. can't even suspend a system, yet it can hibernate it. Shitstaind sure works in mysterious ways!
On Windows people would say it's a hardware issue though, so let's talk a bit about that clusterfuck too. And I'll even give you a life hack that saves 30GB of storage on your Windows system!
Now I use Windows 7 only, next to my Linux systems. Reason for it is it's the least fucked up version of Windows in my opinion, and while it's falling apart in terms of web browsing (not that you should on an EOL system), it's good enough for le games. With that out of the way... So when you install Windows, you'll find that out of the box it uses around 40GB of storage. Fairly substantial, and only ~12GB of it is actually system data. The other 30-ish GB are used by a hibernation file (size of your RAM, in C:\hiberfil.sys) and the page file (C:\pagefile.sys, and a little less than your total RAM.. don't ask me why). Disable both of those and on a 16GB RAM system, you'll save around 30GB storage. You can thank me later.
What I find strange though is that aside from this obscene amount of consumed storage, is that the pagefile and hibernation file are handled differently. In Linux both of those are handled by the swap, and it's easy to see why. Both are enabled by the concept of virtual memory. When hibernating, the "real" memory locations are simply being changed to those within swap. And what is the pagefile? Yep.. virtual memory. It's one thing to take an obscene amount of storage, but only Windows would go the extra mile and do it twice. Must be a hardware issue as well.
Oh, and swappiness. This is a concept that many Linux users seem to misunderstand. Intuitively you'd think that the swappiness determines what percentage of memory it takes for the kernel to start swapping, but this is not true. Instead, it's a ratio of sorts that the kernel uses when determining how important the memory and swap are. Each bit of memory has a chance to be put into either depending on the likelihood of it being used soon after, and with the swappiness you're tuning this likelihood to be either in favor of memory or swap. This is why a swappiness of 60 is default most of the time, because both are roughly equally important, and swap being on disk is already taken into account. When your system is swapping only and exactly the memory that's unlikely to be used again, you know you've succeeded. And even on large memory systems, having some swap is usually not a bad idea. Although I'd definitely recommend putting it on SSD in a partition, so that there's no filesystem overhead and so that it's still sufficiently fast, even when several GB of memory are being dumped in.6 -
Visiting a site about FOSS and it tells me:
"Note: We are experiencing technical issues with Firefox and our comment system. If you want to leave a comment, please use some other browser."
How about no?! *rage quit*
*popup appears right before leaving*
AARRRRGHHH!! *table flip*5