grumpy-cowboy

_Useless complexity_ (aka everything must be a service@scale even if it's not necessary at all) keeps cyber security companies in business.

A newcomer with a Vertx backpack (vertx.com) ;)

If I need to make some research for a project, I keep my findings on my computer (publicly available knowledge, facts, ..).

BUT I keep all my new ideas, thinking, todos, agenda, ... offline (analog) to prevent AI tools reading them and sending it back to big corps. I keep them in a Filofax so it's easy to shuffle/insert/... pages if required.

I work in IT since 1995 (now 15 years as a freelance/consultant) and honestly I start returning back to analog information management for most of my stuff. I don't trust big corps. It's not new but it's more true today than ever.

So if you have a really revolutionary new idea/discovery: NEVER EVER put it on ANY big corps infrastructure (Cloud, OS, ...) to prevent leaking it everywhere.

What about legal media files? In addition to be a software engineer I'm a DJ... I have near 1 TB of LEGAL music (mostly FLAC or high bitrate music files) on my OneDrive (easier because I use Virtual DJ). Yes I know it's not Google Drive but how they can make a difference between legal and illegal files?

Note: I'm in a process to completely "de-googled, de-microsoft, ..." all my stuff (big self-hosted TrueNAS server with BlackBlaze backup).

For MANY things a simple text files (txt, tsv, gnu recutils, ...) is required. Using the filesystem (folder, links, ..) to organize them.

I started moving back all my things/KB to simple text files and stop using all apps/web apps "du jour". Using text files is SO lightweight and resource efficient.

For multimedia content, I use only open/future proof format free of any patents/legal restrictions.

Nice a password manager taking 1GB of RAM and 20% of CPU.

Because nothing's free.

This is the MOST important reason no one talk about.

What is the environmental cost of such useless technology (production, maintenance, end of life,...)?

By definition, all ads are unsolicited.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) web console : really slow and take HUGE amount of memory

s/more fragmented IRC networks/more decentralized IRC networks

Why a new browser? Use Firefox

How to write unmaintainable code? Easy : write a project based on the latest "saveur du jour" JS framework.

Because it's simple, straight to the point, doesn't have any distracting images, perfectly aligned, light, ...

My client use paid GitHub services for the new projects they work on. But we (devs) really hate it because it slow us at lot (can't push/pull, Github Actions not working, "crash" our CI/CD server, ...) because of instability of Github servers! Their status page look like a Christmas Tree! Not a single week without issues.

I don't have control on my client decisions (not my business), but personally I'm done with GH.

Exactly. My own domain is on Fastmail. I have an alias for every sites I have account in (Amazon, eBay, Pocket, ...). If I got spammed using an address I know exactly where it came from, advise the sir and create another alias.

Another great console tool to view/manipulate/process/... tabular data is Visidata (http://visidata.org/).

Text files are king! I store every single byte I can in text files. Examples:

  - Tabular data     : TSV   (almost all Un*x/GNU tools handle this out of the box)
  - Simple "records" : GNU Recutils format (https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/)
  - Formatted texts  : Markdown, LaTeX, ...
  - ...

I know that not everything can be stored as text. But I try to use open, well documented and future proof formats. Examples:

  - Images : PNG
  - Music  : FLAC, Ogg, ...
  - If I really need to preserve orignal format/design of a web page: PDF

Why not? Not everything have to be dumb proof/easy. For example, Suckless softwares like DWM (https://dwm.suckless.org/). Extract:

"Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions."

Sometimes we need to have expert/power user's tools. It's not specific to IT jobs. You can see it in many other jobs.

Tired of all this ads. I understand that some level of Ads is required (nothing's free!). But this becoming ridiculous (and I'm not talking about personal data mining). Instead of just whining about that, I decided to move away from this:

- My email/calendar/contacts on paid Fastmail.com account using my own domain. I don't want to deal with all the work required to maintain an email server: spam filtering, prevent being falsely flagged as a spam server, .... And I use an alias per account I have. For example: amazon@mydomain.com, hn@mydomain.com, ... So if my email got spammed/stolen, first I'll advise the site and I'll just create a new one (ex: amazon2@mydomain.com).

- Host my own federated servers like Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfeed, ...

- Host my own Git "social server" with public and private repos.

- ...

I think we have to come back to what the Web/Internet was before: a federation of servers working together (ex: Usenet). When I talk about that to people, they don't understand. I then use a simple example of this: email servers. You can have an email account on any servers on the internet and send a message to anyone who have an email account on another server. You CAN'T do that with FB/Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, ...

Big corps shoot themselves in the foot. People have limits and they are not that stupid. When you taste a new (old) way to exchange with other people without being flooded with Ads (Mastodon, Matrix, ... or simply emails), you can't come back.

edit: formatting

Yes, the "CSV road to hell":

- comma separated, nothing escaped (crash when 1 column contains a comma)

- comma separated, quotes around all elements, quotes not escaped

- comma separated, double-quotes around all elements, double-quotes not escaped

- comma separated, quotes around some elements, quotes not escaped

- comma separated, double-quotes around some elements, double-quotes not escaped

- comma separated, quotes around all elements, quotes escaped (using '')

- comma separated, double-quotes around all elements, double-quotes escaped (using "")

- comma separated, quotes around some elements, quotes escaped (using '')

- comma separated, double-quotes around some elements, double-quotes escaped (using "")

- comma separated, quotes around all elements, quotes escaped (using \')

- comma separated, double-quotes around all elements, double-quotes escaped (using \")

- comma separated, quotes around some elements, quotes escaped (using \')

- comma separated, double-quotes around some elements, double-quotes escaped (using \")

And the Microsoft format (where comma == semi-colon):

- semi-colon separated, nothing escaped (crash when 1 column contains a comma)

- semi-colon separated, quotes around all elements, quotes not escaped

- semi-colon separated, double-quotes around all elements, double-quotes not escaped

- semi-colon separated, quotes around some elements, quotes not escaped

- semi-colon separated, double-quotes around some elements, double-quotes not escaped

- semi-colon separated, quotes around all elements, quotes escaped (using '')

- semi-colon separated, double-quotes around all elements, double-quotes escaped (using "")

- semi-colon separated, quotes around some elements, quotes escaped (using '')

- semi-colon separated, double-quotes around some elements, double-quotes escaped (using "")

- semi-colon separated, quotes around all elements, quotes escaped (using \')

- semi-colon separated, double-quotes around all elements, double-quotes escaped (using \")

- semi-colon separated, quotes around some elements, quotes escaped (using \')

- semi-colon separated, double-quotes around some elements, double-quotes escaped (using \")

And I'm not talking about some weird custom CSV variants to support multi-lines for example or any other "I want to fit a circle in a square" mentality.

I don't know why people doesn't simply create TSV file (Tab-separated). No characters espacing mess. MUCHHH easier to parse.

EDIT: Formatting

Hint for Dell: just ensure that your hardware works perfectly in Linux (drivers) and please don't add any ^(bloat|crap)ware[s]?$ to it.

I have a Dell Precision 7530 laptop with an I5 CPU, 64GB of RAM, AMD GPU, 3 SSD M2 drives... I installed Ubuntu 18.04 (from Ubuntu site) and it's the only distrib that work perfectly out of the box with an external monitor, suspend mode, ... :)

Note: I tried Linux Mint (issues with external monitor, suspend mode, ...), Parrot Linux (doesn't work at all) and others without any success.

Thanks for pointing to recfiles. I didn't know about that. It's a pretty simple "DB" format. I like it (and I'll use it).

Rapid data entry and Web app/site/page cannot be put in the same sentence.

If I pay for a product (on-premise), it's not your business what I do with it.

If I use the free hosted service (ex: gitlab.com), then this is the price to pay for a free service (within legal rules like GDPR).

BTW, it's too late for me. I'm about to move all my stuff to a self-hosted Gitea (on a cheap VPS) in addition to Matrix, Mastodon, ...

It depends who is your target audience. For me, TUI interfaces (Text UI like Weechat, Neomutt, Cmus, ...) are beautiful and easy to use. They are straight to the point, keyboard based, extremely fast, low on resource usage, ... I'm so much more productive on this kind of interface than GUI/mouse based ones.

GUI tends to be slow, buggy, unresponsive, less configurable, heavy on resources, ... So much code required to manage GUI interface compared to code doing real business stuff. So much wasted clock cycles.

I have a laptop with 64GB of RAM but I don't want to waste this RAM to display "beautiful" GUI apps. I need it for things more useful like VMs, processing big files, ...

I want to be productive. Not wasting my time with the latest UX "experts" enlightenment on what a "modern/futuristic" interface should look like.

BTW, Get off my lawn :P

EDIT: For your question... Would I pay for a more beautiful app? No. Would I pay for a software that have features I need that are not already available in software I use? Yes (don't care about how beautiful it is).

Additional information...

I use almost exclusively plain text files. If I need formatting to produce things like HTML, PDF, ... I use Markdown or LaTeX.

For images/audio, I use lossless file formats (ex: TIFF, FLAC, WAV, SVG). If I need smaller formats for a web site, for sharing or to bring it with me on my phone, I convert it to smaller formats like MP3, JPG, ... Those files are disposable when not required anymore.

During my research if I found a web page I want to refer to later on, I save it in PDF format. Why? Because PDF is fairly future-proof (ISO standard) and it's so widely used that it will not disappear anytime soon. I don't save it in HTML format because I will probably not be able to reopen it in the future because HTML spec changed too much. I don't want to have a folder full of images/css/js for each page. Also, there is no garantee I will be able to read it in the future to way I read it initially. PDF have this garantee.

For anything else (like speadsheets), I use LibreOffice the most I can. LibreOffice is based on OpenDocument open format. Open format fit in my definition of future-proof formats. And no, Microsoft OOXML format doesn't fit in my definition of future-proof format because it's driven by Microsoft (same for any big business like this). They can decide tomorrow to stop keeping the standard updated and start adding proprietary "features" in the "OOXML-NG" format (which will make Microsoft Office files unreadable in other Office suites).

For future-proof information/knowledge management, stay away from closed/proprietary softwares as much you can do.

All my personal knowledge/information/research are structured using the File System Infobase Manager method as described by Douglas Barone : http://dougist.com/2009/08/file-system-infobase-manager/

It's future proof and require no special tool. Another philosophy that drive this way of managing my data : The Lo-Fi Manifesto http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.2/inventio/stolley/

Why? What is wrong about having a product dedicated to elitists? Not everything have to be accessible to everyone and it's a good thing. :)