UPDATE: devRant Trans-Oceanic Journey Community Project

It was a mere 12 days ago that I asked the question; 'Could devRanters, as a community, build a 21st Century Technology-Laden ‘devRant devie-Stressball-in-a-Bottle’ and send it on a journey across the Atlantic ocean?

I am thrilled to report that devRanters enthusiastically accepted this difficult challenge. A core team quickly formed and a tremendous amount of research and progress has been made in a short period of time. I want to give you a high level-flavor of what we are doing. Please keep in mind we still need your help. We welcome all develops to take part in this journey.

I want to give appreciation to the devRant Founders @dfox and @trogus. Without your support and sponsorship this project would not have been possible. devRant brought us together and it a reality. Devie journeying across the Ocean the Columbus sailed will stir the imagination of children and adults worldwide when we launch on May 1, 2017.

Some of the research and action items in progress:

- Slack and trello environments were created to capture research and foster discussion.

- A Stony Brook University Oceanography Professor suggested the Gulf Stream would be a good pathway across the ocean. We researched it very and agree. The Gulf Stream has been a trans-Atlantic conduit for hundreds of years. We are deciding whether to launch from Cape Hatteras, NC or the Virginia coast. Both have easy access to the rapid currents in the Gulf Stream.

- We are researching every detail of the Gulf Stream to make the journey easier and faster for devie. We have maps and a team member gathered valuable ideas reading a thorough book – ‘The Gulf Stream’.

- We decided on using a highly resilient plastic rather than glass for the bottle material. Plastic is much lighter, faster and glass breaks down more easily. The lightweight enclosure will allow us to take full advantage of waves and ample trade winds. We are still discussing the final design as we want to minimize friction and mimic the non-locomotion fish that migrate thousands of miles riding the Gulf Stream.

-The enclosure might be 3D printed unless we can locate a commercial solution. We have 3D specs and are speaking with some experts. There are advantages and dis-advantages to each solution.

- We will be using Iridiums' RockBLOCK two-way satellite technology to bounce lat-long coordinate pings off their 36 low-orbit satellites. The data will be analyzed by our devRant devie analysis software. IOS and Android public apps being built by the team will display devie's location throughout the journey in.

- Arduino will be used as the brains

- Multiple sensors including temperature and depth are being considered

-A project plan will be published to the team Friday 12/9. Sorry I am a few days late but adding some new ideas.

There are still a lot of challenges we must overcome and we will.

That’s all for now. I will send updates and all ideas / comments are valued.

*part rant part developers are the best people in the world*

years back a friend got a job at some non profit, as a program coordinator, and his first task was to "coordinate" the work on creating the new website for the organisation. current website they had was a monster built on some custom cms, 7 languages, 5 years of almost dayly content updates, etc. so he asked me if i would took the job of creating a new website on wordpress. i wasn t really keen on doing it, but he is a good friend so i said ok. i wrote down the SOW, which clearly stated that i will not be responsible for migrating the old content to the new website. i had experience working with non it clients, and made sure everyone understood the SOW before the contract was signed. everyone was ok with it. after three weeks my job was done, all milestones and requirenments were met. peechy! and then all hell breaks loose when the president of the organisation (the most evil person i ve met in my life) told my friend that she expects me to migrate the content as well. he tried explaining her that that was not agreed, that it will cost extra, etc. but she didn t want to hear any of that. despite the fact that she was a part of the entire SOW creation process, because she is a micro managing bitch. in any other situation i wouldn t budge, because we have the contract and i kept all the paper trail, but since my friends job was on the line i agreed to do it. my SQL knowldge at the time, and even now, was very rudimentary, the db organisation of their cms was confusing as fuck... so i took two days of searching tutorials and SO threads and was doing ok, until i got to a problem i couldn t solve on my own. i posted the issue on SO and some guy asked for some clarifications, and we went back and forth, and decided to move to chat. while chatting with him i realised that there was not a chance for me to do all the work in few days without a lot of errors so i offered him to do it for a fee. he agreed. i asked him for his rate, he said if this is a community work i will do it for free, but if it is commercial i will charge the standard rate, 50$/hr. i told him it was commercial, and agreed to his rate. i asked him if he needed an advance payment, he said no need, you ll pay me when the job is done. i sent him the db dumps, after two days he sent me the csv, i checked it, all was good and wired him the money.
now compare this work relatioship with the relatioship with that bitch from the non profit.
* we met online, on a semi-anonymous forum, this guys profile was empty
* he trusted me enough to say that he would do it for free if i wasn t payed either
* i wasn t an asshole to take advantage of that trust
* he did the work without the advance payment
* i payed him the moment i verified the work

faith in humanity restored

Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.

The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.

The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.

The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.

What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.

An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.

More often than not, I hear that the mission-critical stuff in Linux is done by paid people, the folks that work from 9 to 5 with a fixed time/resource schedule. Is software in Linux all like that? Say for example, Linux (kernel), systemd, Xorg, all the desktop environments, LibreOffice, Mozilla, Chromium and such.

The reason why I'm asking is because I kind of feel like the premise behind Linux "free, libre, *philanthropic*" and such is kinda wrong. Especially the latter. Do the people in the mission-critical stuff really care about its stability any more than commercial software devs do? Sure the projects driven by personal needs that are published are philanthropic in their nature, I'm having some of those too. But those are all non-critical and maintained as such. The stuff that's behind the steering wheel however? I'm not sure...

In essence, is the mission-critical part of the Linux ecosystem - however open-source it is - any different from other commercial software products QA-wise?

Don't forget, docker desktop will require paid licenses after 31/1/22

Docker Desktop remains free for small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue), personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects.

Just a friendly reminder to fuck docker and migrate to a better solution.

I'm developing a web app, which is purely based on some commercial .NET driven API. The documentation is a 12 page MS Word file with incorrect parameters and non-existing endpoints. I think there's also a cronjob which purposely crashes their server every 15minutes. I just love getting client emails saying I need to fix my app and get my shit together.

On This Episode of Ghetto Medium..

Posted after midnight for extra spooky effects. Read in the dark at your own risk. You've been warned.

So my mother has been on a binge watching shows like long island medium (apparently the taller your hair the closer you are to god or something), and every time we talk she begins at length to talk about, you guessed it.. 'ghosts.'

Now don't get me wrong, I've had some 'spooby' shit occur in my lifetime, the sort that will tighten your sphincter faster than bill cosby asking you if you want some koolaid or grape drank, but I digress.

The ghost talk is tiring. Lately theres been a *flood* of these new shows, purportedly showing mediums and people who can 'look into the other side' and I realize just how vapid and ridiculous it's all become, as if they all are being personally haunted by the ghost of John Edwards burnt out husk of a career. Theres long island beehive big-hair medium, celebrity medium, allison DuBois (the inspiration for that one sappy show *medium*) whos red hair and vacant stare speak of glimpses into centuries past like an intimate unseen horizon. or maybe she forgot to unplug her curling iron in a hotel one time and has been rendered permanently catatonic. And who can forget *Beyond With James Van Praagh* (everyone) whos face, as measured by the width of his mustache, appears to be expanding at a constant rate like a bad image macro edit thats been memed and repasted a thousand times. Then theres Chip Coffee, whos name is about as believable as his teaching degree on the show *Psychic Kids* where he mentored, again, you guessed it, *psychic kids*. Of course theres Tyler Henry, a youthful, uh, "flamboyant" medium for celebrities with ghost problems. Never trust a man with two names, this ones no exception, he looks so clean cut hes either secretly mormon, or secretly gay, maybe both. I'm not judging, but I am saying if I ever saw his clean cut, smooth, wrinkless (seriously, how tyler? how?), all american face, say smiling that subtle smile outside my kitchen sliding glass door at 3 am, his face watching me from the pitch dark outside, I wouldn't at all be surprised, except for the hospital bill I'd have to pay after shitting a brick and needing anal surgery.

At this rate we have mediums popping out left and right, like clowns at one of them R.L Stein nightmare carnivals, or beggers outside a methodone clinic. Geez, they're coming out the wood work, like those painting you see with hidden faces in them, or wheres-waldo posters, only you're trying to find the non-waldo guy amongst all the characters because they're ALL waldo: goofy acting, goofy dressing, and just all around goofy looking.

At this rate I'm fully expecting "pet medium" (starring a character named Stephen King and his marital problems, played by johnny depp eating way to much corn), and "haunted objects medium", and "car medium" (it's just seinfeld in a car, talking to psychics instead of other people), and "ghetto medium."

Today on this episode of "Ghetto Medium"..

Medium: Teneesha, aw yeah girl, u *definitely* ded gurl, uh huh! You WAY to white too be alive, you done passed over gurl!

And in the next episode of Ghetto Medium, one man claims "every time I bend over I can hear "wOoOoOoOoO!, Is my asshole possessed? Find out is it real or fake, and what our verdict is in Ghost Medium, episode 3: A Haunting In My Nether-regions."

Cut commercial break.

"Jerry Springer: One women asks, 'jerry, is my unborn child's foreskin haunted? And later today we ask the crowd, would you have sex with a ghost?"

Welcome to American television 'programming' in 2019.

Yes, it's all brainwashing.

why are Linux graphical git clients so crap? (as compared to TortoiseHg)

like GitKraken is the only OK one, but it lacks soo many features its nearly useless (bisect anyone?) + you need a commercial license

GitEye is the second non-shit one, but it regurarly stops working + its non-free

and it seems most git GUI clients force the name of the repo to be their parent dir. my parent dir for all web projects is www, so in both apps I have a long list of projects named www, unless I expand the projects sidebar to cover half of the screen to see the very very end of the path that petrays the actual project name in GitEye. In GitKraken I have to investigate the commit history to figure out if I have the right GitKraken with the right project open... talk about UX :D

so do most "git experts" just use git commit, git push and git pull on the command line and thats their whole world and the reason why they prefer git to mercurial (for all the many features they never use)?

Does anybody have some good suggestion for horizontal scaling solution of relational database (MySQL) that's not commercial? Both read and write scalings are of relevance btw.

If you have 10 years experience in php and apply a JavaScript role with 3 month non commercial experience. You are a junior dev or intern. At least from employee's view

Is there anyone in the whole of devRant working with VR, AR, speech or motion detection?

I keep thinking that those were just fads that disappeared, because I'm still to see a single lasting-success product.
It might be temporary, someone might invent motion control that actually works or an Alexa that does not suck (unless you speak English with an toothpaste-commercial accent), or a non-goofy AR set.

But if not a single dev in devRant is working with it, it does not seem likely.