Oppugn.us

Programming, Motherfucker

Zed A. Shaw — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:58:00 -0700

I think I'm going to create the ultimate software development methodology. It'll be revolutionary compared to others because it will focus on the one thing that gets software done. Its entire focus will be this one, glorious, completely useful activity for writing software. It's name even embodies the perfection of this programming methodology. The name is:

Programming, Motherfucker

That's right, my software development methodology will be: programming, motherfucker.

How will we solve problems? By programming, motherfucker.

You Have The Right To Block

Zed A. Shaw — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 03:32:57 -0800

Just today I was walking down the street and there was this old drunk ass motherfucker and his buddy standing out in front of a grocery store. The old guy wasn't so much standing as barely awake in his piss and shit stained clothes while his obviously heroin addict buddy talked to him. The old guy was ranting about Blacks, and Latinos, and anyone else he just thought fucked up his life.

I walk by, just minding my own business on my way to catch the transit, and dude yells at me, "What the fuck you looking at?!"

I yell back, "Nothing shithead." Now, normally I wouldn't bother, but you know what, drunk old assholes in San Francisco are starting to piss me off. They get in your grill, get offended and mean when you don't want to give them change, yell nasty evil shit at you, threaten people and are generally just annoying as hell.

Then I just keep on walking. You see, the advantage of being a healthy adult male is that I can actually walk away from a drunk old asshole and don't have to give a shit about him or his fucking opinions. He of course started calling me every racist thing he could think up, even though I'm not Black, Latino, or Asian. I just kept on walking.

How To Get Sued, Git(Hub) Style

Zed A. Shaw — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:36:39 -0800

These days Jimmy Wales gets a lot of flack for his Urgent appeal donation campaign to raise some 16 million dollars. Holy shit, that's a lot of money, but hey I bet wikipedia could use the cash. They do real good work.

But, try to ask for money and what do you get from the peanut gallery? Parodies. Everyone's doing a parody, and frankly most of them are pretty lame. Yawn. Most of them though are smart enough to not try to use their parody to actually collect money under false pretenses.

Then comes the ever classy git and github guys. I see this plea from some guy at github who runs git or something like that. I wouldn't know since I'm not smart enough to use git and I actually like user experience rather than just pretending I do. He's just some dude to me.

Not really thinking about it I read this, and think, well damn, I mean I hate git with a passion but if they need money I'd give a little if it's....hey wait a fucking minute. Is this a joke?

Operating systems, windows and focus.

bb — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:09:13 +1000

Hi, my name is Brad Tomlinson. You can print that, if this makes it anywhere.

Into it:

Goddamn fucking window focus. As in, application focus, context switching, more so, and in great pain - forced window focus switching. One just fucking happened to me then as I was typing this sentence, and again just now.

(ps, FUCK YOU ADOBE, every single one of your goddamn applications has a separate updater and they all run on different schedules)

RE: Announcing The Oxymoron CSS Framework

Alex Zelenskiy — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:40:00 -0500

Hi Zed,

Just read your post on CSS. I do agree that it is often a very frustrating language to use, but I think you are being somewhat unfair about how much it sucks. Or maybe just how much it sucks in context.

CSS has a very steep learning curve, and is difficult to work with (in my opinion) for a couple reasons:

CSS/HTML behavior is not consistent across browsers. Every browsers enjoys rendering websites in it's own special way and there is nothing you can do to avoid it except just forgetting that some ways of doing stuff exist and never using them again. In addition, there are a coupe things that ALL browsers do that break how the specification is supposed to work (z-index nesting, for example) because doing it the right way is hard.
Like you mentioned, everyone relies on tools like firebug to figure out why something is on the left and not centered. This gets better with experience, but that's not really the point.
It is very easy to build small sites with css, but incredibly difficult to build systems of css rules that can handle all of the style needs of a large site concisely. Few people can build these systems, and even after they are built they are fascinatingly easy to completely ruin.

Announcing The Oxymoron CSS Framework

Zed A. Shaw — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:54:23 -0700

UPDATE: There was a one character bug in this, you should update.

I absolutely hate CSS. It has to be the most inconsistent, poorly designed, bat shit fucking crazy piece of computing technology we have today. And remember, I used to code Ruby and Perl for a living. If I'm saying CSS is bat shit crazy I mean it.

My first problem with CSS is simply that it just never does what you tell it to. I say, "make this a column CSS" and it goes, "What? No that should go over here totally on the left and fuck you I like apples." I say, "make this fill all of the parent div" and CSS says, "Sharks love tiny needles, and no that will only take up the top part." I say, "Hey, CENTER THIS" and CSS says, "My shoes have centered worms but your heading will stay to the left."

I would die without Firebug to help me figure out why CSS is doing whatever the hell it's doing.

FU NYC

Zed A. Shaw — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:20:06 -0700

Oh yeah, I did this thing back in the day called Freehackers Union and then it didn't go anywhere and failed and then like random people bring up that it failed almost two years later. Awesome.

Well I'm sure this will be successful, since I'm not running it and NYC is primed for it. You're welcome.

But, here's how I really solved the problem:

I FUCKING MOVED TO SAN FRANCISCO

Shove that idea straight up where it came from

Charl van Niekerk — Wed, 8 Sep 2010 01:55:44 +0200

As a developer I often get approached by various "interesting" and "creative" entrepreneurial hopefuls with little to no budget. There are some legit cases of young people with big dreams but usually that just means they're not willing to put their money where their mouths are. Be that as it may, they have a rather big attitude about being "broke". They are not willing to spill the beans without me signing the mandatory NDA. Yes, the stock-standard template they pulled off some site for fellow cheap-skates. If I only had $1 for each of those I collected over the years, I would be stinking rich by now from that alone! Could be good business, come to think of it... Should start charging for those.

Anyway, after wasting some expensive ink and killing more trees I get the pitch about their "next" brilliant venture (as if they are on a streak or something). Apparently respraying your car to beige takes more creative energy than forming a startup these days. The Christmas Spirit lasts all year for these guys - in the spirit of giving they will give me a full 50% of their precious equity if I end up doing all the hard work at no pay while they are performing the exhausting work of reading the Financial Times in the restroom for four hours every morning. That only as a last resort as I'm not in for that 20% crap.

Marketing too is a really big deal - after all, it's hard work to spam all your luser friends on Twitter and Facebook until some douchebag VC feels desperate enough to shed some cash. Such a burden to have spare cash lying around in the middle of the biggest economic stuffup since the 1930's...

The surprising thing is that, having 50% of the equity apparently does not make you an equal partner. If any important business decisions need to be made, how could I ever have expected to be consulted? After all, I'm just an employee that is getting paid in equity instead of actual money. I might even have the hope of earning half a salary after the investors step up to the plate and I had to live off unemployment benefits for over six months. Who needs a car and furniture anyway? Public transport is so much better and at least I still own a mattress.

Fuck you ASP.NET

Paul Tasima — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:35:45 +0100

Seriously. How is it possible that something that has had so much money behind it cannot compete with the likes of the open source offerings. For fuck's sake, stop obfuscating my Request and Response variables behind a daft mechanism that requires me to learn an entire page rendering life cycle according to M$ that has almost nothing in common with how web pages are actually created just so I can get something slightly less ordinary done. We aren't all retards you know. I'm pretty sure we can all get to grips with basics of web servers and HTTP protocols. The web is not Windows. We don't need the stupid on-click hierarchy for our code to make sense. At the very least, can you make the viewstate render at a sensible time the page life cycle please?

Seriously. Classic ASP was actually better.

And while we are at it, when the fuck are you going to ship a decent ORM. I mean come on! Rails....Django.....they've managed. Where the fuck are you with this? I'm sure we could all get along just fine if you would at least catch up to the other frameworks. Then we won't look like twats who can't crank out code without a three month lead time just to set up our project and create our admin CRUD.

a rant: fuck 'unexcepted item in bagging area'

Ted Nyman — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:11:37 -0700

FUCK 'UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA' by Ted Nyman

You may have encountered self-checkout machines at Safeway stores or other fine middle-brow groceries throughout this nation and perhaps even the world. You bring up your Frosted Flakes, Odwalla, whatever, run through them a barcode detection thingy, pay via machine, and then bag your groceries yourself. Like a boss. Now, some people prefer this manner of checkout because it's often faster that using traditional aisles. Personally I like it because it means I usually don't have to talk to anyone at the grocery store, which is one of my main objectives in daily life.

However, there is one serious problem with the machines. And let me tell you: this fault is not just a fucking annoyance -- it's also a terrible UI fault. Yes, shoppers, you know what I'm talking about: "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA".

First, there is no consistency to this error message (which is spoken aloud to you in a pleasant female voice). Not even eventual consistency. I scan my Oreos, put in the bagging area, and everything is fine. Then I scan some Kraft pepper jack cheese (successfully it seems), put the pepper jack cheese in the bagging area -- and all hell breaks loose. UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. I look around, embarrassed at my terrible inability to correctly scan and bag my items. Then some moderately attractive chick wearing yoga pants gives me a look of scorn: "I wonder if that guy even WENT TO COLLEGE, he can't even operate a self-checkout machine!!" An older woman shakes her head in dismay; shit, even the fat dude in sweatpants buying 30 cans of Chunky Campbell's Soup looks at me as if I was Pol Pot.

Advice For The Bin 38 Super Angel Awesome Team

Zed A. Shaw — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 02:50:29 -0700

I'm not a rich guy by any stretch of the word "wealth". I mean, I pretty much live off donations writing awesome code that nobody will make a movie about later. I've got some sweet guitars, and a couple nice computers. I get to eat some alright food. Yeah I'm doing pretty decent, but definitely not wealthy at all.

But let me tell you, if I had the money that a "Super Angel" has, I sure as hell wouldn't pick a shithole wine bar in the ass end of town to hold my secret meetings. I mean c'mon, Bin 38? It's got two $$ on Yelp. No self-respecting rich dude should ever be seen in a $$ rated place. Hell, the places you guys should be building should require at least a million dollar membership and the sacrifice of an orphan baby girl on Winter Solstice.

In the spirit of givin' out advice where absolutely none was requested, I've decided to help you guys build the best place for you to get together and have your cookies and wine.

First, I'd have like a fucking Star Chamber with the actual Michael Douglas serving me fucking Tea and cookies. That'd rock pretty hard right away if only because the movie poster looks damn cool. A bunch of old craggy manly heads enveloped with a white light from behind so your victims can't make out your faces. Epic. I could see you guys all having the startups you fund stand in front of you while you ask them in your best old man voice, "Did you make any money today?" Then you pull a lever and the failures just get dumped into a shark tank.

The Revenge Of PowerSet

Zed A. Shaw — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:06:38 -0700

You may think this is a rant, but it's not what you think. It's some drama here and I'm a little bit mean, but read to the end please. This may seem like I'm bashing, but I'm actually telling the story in my way from my perspective.

When I think back to my time trying to get somewhere in Ruby, one company really stands out: PowerSet. I'm not sure if you remember, I'm sure none of you do, but they were going to take on Google. They were also that search engine that showed gay pornstars when you looked up politicians, so already they were actually satisfying an under-satisfied market. Namely toe-tapping Republicans.

What made PowerSet annoying is that they hired all these Ruby guys very early on and then that somehow made PowerSet and these Ruby guys awesome. These fairly nice gents became giant ego maniacs overnight and everyone had to deal with them all the damn time. You see, there was (is?) this channel a bunch of Ruby on Rails guys hung out in called caboose. Really caboose was this annoying slander factory where people could talk shit about DHH when he wasn't around or bitch about how they should be 54 on Working With Rails rather than that asshat zenspider (I was usually #1 mostly because I didn't care).

So here we were, and these asshats get jobs at a time when everyone was begging to use Ruby in a Java/.NET world. They were made men, on a level with the 2 or 3 other companies that were actually making shit with Ruby. And oh man did they start letting us know it. Day after day we'd hear about how boss the PowerSet stickers would look on their laptops. Yes, 'cause a guy with a dick on his chin looks so fucking boss.

Me And A Hobo Announce A Recommendation For Google

Zed A. Shaw — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:50:54 -0700

Since Google seems to think that I asked it to draft up a heavily biased set of laws that only benefit itself and Verizon I thought it was only fair that I draft my own proposed recommentation for Google. Normally if the FCC wants your fucking opinion they'll come and ask you...oh and some professors, and some politicians, and some ISPs and some law enforcement guys, and other people the FCC has to care about. But oh no, Google and Verizon seem to think that somebody wants them to make laws. I mean, last time I checked, the politicians that they pay off with massive donations are the ones who make the laws.

Why can't Google and Verizon just keep doing politics the old fashioned way? With bribes, and graft, and lobbyists. I miss the old days because at least back then there was some time before shit happened. Now we get corruption in Internet time.

Well, I figure, what the hell, I might as well team up with some dude and draft my own resolution for Google and Verizon to shut the fuck up. So I present to you, Google, a bi-lateral compromise on why you should shut the fuck up between myself and A Random Hobo.

Incidentally, I'm not sending this to Verizon because I already know they're crooked as shit. That and I don't want the NSA to hand over illegally obtained information to the FBI so I can be arrested like they did with Qwest's CEO.

Mac & Cheese rant

Daniel Greenfeld — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:37:14 -0500

I'm not a picky eater. I'm willing to eat every meat that is legal in the United States and wouldn't mind traveling to places where the laws are different. I have this strange desire to try pickled insects in a third world nation. I often eat things I don't like, such as eggplant.

However, the truth is that I really loathe mac & cheese. I hate cooking it, I hate eating it, I hate cleaning up after it. I've thrown away pots that have been used to cook it. I claim to be different because I despise this American staple, and silly as you may think it may be it is my preference not to have anything to do with cheesy pasta. Heck, it ain't even healthy.

Note: I sometimes like some cheese on top of tomato based sauces or chili that has pasta mixed into it. This is not the same thing as mac & cheese.

Yet the complication I face is that I have dear friends and family who think that their prize-winning homemade mac & cheese made from imported unpasteurized cheese will be something that I love. That I'll change and they'll get the chance to smugly say that it was the quality of what I've eaten that discouraged me.

Dear Gartner, Fire Andrea Di Maio

Zed A. Shaw — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:51:51 -0700

Dear Gartner,

I didn't know you hired racists. I mean, maybe racist is a bit of a stretch, but there's no other word for "asshole who arbitrarily stereotypes potential customers" so let's just call Andrea Di Maio the racist piece of shit he is. I say this, because in addition to pretty fucking racist comments about programmers, I'm pretty sure he's full of all sorts of other stereo types that are just lovely. He probably thinks Blacks are stupid, Latinos have big families, Women should shut up and poop out kids, and Jews are cheap and killed Jesus.

Because, let me tell you, where there's smoke there's fire Gartner, and any man who'd just come out and say anything about who I am because of my profession has got to harbor all sorts of evil bullshit mythological beliefs in his tiny little pathetic mind.

But what do I know, all of the above is just guessing, and Andrea may be a pretty upstanding guy. Hell, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't give me and just say I take back all the things I just said about him being a Nazi racist fuck. He's probably alright, even if he is a little fucking ugly.

Oh come on

Maximilian Herkender — Thu, 3 Jun 2010 15:56:18 -0700

I mean I know the Internet hates Flash atm, but did you ever think that it's all a bunch of groupthink?

As for the slow video thing.

Flash Cookies are there because normal cookies suck, they're adding similar stuff in HTML5 for that very reason. Don't panic they're limited to 100k unless you specifically grant more space. Chrome's "Clear data" dialog has a link to a url to help you manage them too, why don't other browsers do that I don't know.

As for the broken HTTP status thing. I don't know what you're talking about.

Facebook: Die Like AOL Already

Brian Shumate — Sat, 22 May 2010 16:36:34 -0400

For a couple weeks now, the usual sources of nerd news have been gushing like a BP disaster with stories concerning Facebook and its various alleged infractions against users' privacy.

While I'd like to think that none of that crap applies to me, I'd be remiss to overlook some interesting and rarely discussed issues around this whole social networking privacy snafu in the first place.

You see, I don't use Facebook.

I have never used Facebook, and I will never use Facebook.

Flash Developers: lrn2fuckingprogramkthxbai

Paul Davis — Tue, 4 May 2010 01:26:44 -0400

According to [1], there were 500 iPhone apps available for the iPhone 3G on July 11, 2008. According to [2] there were 180,000 apps available April 8, 2010. That's roughly (assuming 260 work days a year) 345 application approvals a day. Assuming a 100% acceptance rate. Given a review team of 100 people, that's roughly four (accounting for vacation, sick, etc days) successful apps a day. (I'm unable to source a number for an expectation of eight apps a day per review team member I recall reading but it would fit the order of magnitude.)

There have already been reports of automated analysis of AppStore submissions from November 2008 for private API usage [3]. The infamous Flash-to-iPhone packager works by compiling ActionScript to native ARM assembly [4]. This would quite assuredly break static analysis.

iPhone OS 4.0 now includes various API's for background processing. Assuming [5-6] are correct this is based on Grand Central Dispatch [7]. Given that applications are now allowed this freedom, it would make sense that the static analysis tests are going to be more stringent.

Who wants to bet against the idea that the new 3.3.1 isn't a lawyer's attempt at phrasing engineering terminology for what is testable?

No subject necessary

onitake@gmail.com — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:55:57 +0200

... and that it takes all of Adobe and their bosom buddy Microsoft with it ...

Oh yeah, and while we're at it, it should take its other bosom buddy apple along.

Your rant is justified, but apple has become as bad, arrogant, selfish, greedy, etc. as adobe, ms, the riaa, the mpaa, the wipo, or who else.

Flash sucks orc balls - but that's no reason to fuck off users by patronising them about flash support. If they want it, they should have it. If they don't, they can have it turned off. By not providing ANY fucking means to use it (save except maybe for a half-working gnash port for jailbreakers), apple fucks users harder into the posterior than adobe by publishing a completely fucked up "rich content platform".

The days of the programmer are over. Long live the programmer.

Guillaume Theoret — Wed, 9 Jun 2010 21:47:15 -0400

It's a sad state of affairs if programmers can no longer be famous for coding. But really, were programmers, at any point in history, capable of being famous for coding? I'm fairly young so I don't know much about what it was like to program back in the assembly, cobol and fortran days but it seems to me like the famous programmers weren't famous for their code back then either, rather they were famous for the academic papers they wrote.

Then, as far as I can tell it transitioned to the famous programmers being the ones that wrote books or possibly magazine articles. Then came the famous blogger/programmer, with blogger definitely the key part of that dichotomy. Now it's the ones founding companies and making a lot of money.

Is this really a problem though? Sure, it makes programmers a second class citizen, relegated to sweat away like the cog they are while others take credit for their hard work but is that likely to stay that way?

Well, yes and no.