[Rant] Tech Whine Like a baby thread

GasBandit

Staff member
I'd also seen that you would still be able to log into your Imgur account, and still be able to view all your uploaded content, it would just be that nobody else would be able to view it, which was what was going to break all the external reddit stuff, etc.

--Patrick
Interesting. Well, take a trip through the "Gas Bandit's Birthday" NSFW thread and let me know if the albums have gone mysteriously blank, would ya?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Yep, I just went back and checked, the NSFW forum is FULL of "oops, that post no longer exists" imgur embeds. I can still see my own, though. Just a question of if anybody else can - Pat, can you swing by my House of Reprehensible Filth?
 
Pat, can you swing by my House of Reprehensible Filth?
Sure! ...soon as I get out of work, that is. Gonna be a few more hours before I can take you up on that invitation.

EDIT: A quick check from my phone on cellular (NOT company wifi) shows them still there, but we will see if it lasts.

--Patrick
 
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GasBandit

Staff member
Out of an abundance of caution, I changed my seedbox's login credentials.

I had forgotten that this would require me to update the credentials on about 50 Syncbackpro profiles. And each profile takes a good 15 seconds to open.

THIS IS AGONYYYYY
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Just things that make your tech-anus pucker... sipping your morning caffeine, checking on the server, and finding...

1685639878633.png


"Your first disk stopped working. I fixed it, sir." HOW. WHY.

Thank goodness I have a spare ready to hot swap in if it goes down and doesn't come back up. Thank goodness for RAID-5
 
Argh, updating m graphics card drivers for the first time in a while, and I remember why I hate this and rarely do it.
Reason I was updating? A game that was playing just fine suddenly threw errors every half hour or so claiming a graphics card issue.
After update? "Your system doesn't meet requirements". Well fuck you and the GFX you rode in on, I played through this entire game 5 years ago on this exact machine.
A 600MB download for driver updates? Fuck right off.
A nVidia account, a security account, having to retry installing 3x because of generic "an error occurred" errors, holy fuck this is a bad way of working.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I don't know why, but my SyncBackPro has started sucking absolute balls lately. It downloads (via FTP) all the new stuff from my seedbox to my home plex server.

If I initiate an FTP session in filezilla or cuteftp, I get 16-24 mbit downloads consistently. Not great, but it's a transatlantic download and I get the same results whether I'm using a VPN or not, so it's probably the best it can get from there.

If I let SyncBackPro do its thing, I get 6 mbit.

Something's stinky here.
 
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GasBandit

Staff member
Didn't you recently change to fiber? Might there be some naughty throttling going on?
If that was the case, it would affect filezilla and cuteftp the same. Switching ftp client software should not have such an affect on download speed.

But yeah I did also use my VPN to cross check for throttling for a semi-related matter.

On a related note - you cannot trust what speedtest.net tells you - and even fast.com isn't a reliable indicator of speed for anything other than netflix, because ISPs have figured out to make a throttling exception for netflix. I found my fiber IS throttling basically everybody who isn't netflix or speedtest.

Best bet is to check speedofme. It shows you real world speed. My fiber ISP is throttling me the same as my cable ISP was... to about 100 mbit per connection except for specific exceptions - steam, netflix, etc, because those are the ones people pay attention to most.
 
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GasBandit

Staff member
Demonstrative visual aids - Work has a "business" cable connection.
Speedtest:
1688052487182.png

Fast.com gets similar results
1688052561089.png


Speedof.me confirms
1688052407643.png




But at home....
1688052647899.png


Hmm, I typically get closer to 800, but eh, that's not the important thing for this demo.

Fast.com:
1688052680195.png


Slightly slower but still way faster than you need to watch 4k on 10 devices...

... but Speedof.me tells the tale how everybody that isn't a megacorp, I get MUCH less.
1688052771483.png


And if you're wondering why my home is testing to chicago, it's because metronet has no gateway locally. They built their own fiber alllll the way back to Chicago.


But anyway, even at worst, these tests show me that while I AM getting throttled to non-megacorp destinations... it's not what is causing my 6 mbit downloads from my seedbox.

And really, for most people, this wouldn't matter. It's only my specific niche/edge case use that is experiencing the problem. Most Average Joe home Fiber subscriber only needs the big pipe to the big dogs - google, microsoft, steam, netflix, hulu, etc. And those guys do get the big numbers. It's just those of us looking to do surreptitious high speed transfers to private servers that get squished. And sometimes it's hard to prove which end is doing the throttling. Microsoft and Google are actually clamping upload speeds to their services at around 25mbit these days, it's affecting google drive and MS onedrive/sharepoint connections. I can upload stuff to halforums at about 24mbit as well - but is that MY connection, or is it the hosting company limiting that? No easy way to really prove it either way.
 
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what is causing my 6 mbit downloads from my seedbox.
Is it possible this is just some kind of AES or ESP overhead? I know that the encryption step can cripple the overall transmission speed if the encryption method is not one that your hardware can accelerate via QAT or the like.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Is it possible this is just some kind of AES or ESP overhead? I know that the encryption step can cripple the overall transmission speed if the encryption method is not one that your hardware can accelerate via QAT or the like.

--Patrick
I haven't dived that deeply into it to figure it out. I'm not using SFTP so I'm not sure how much encryption is actually going on here, if any.

I suspect it's because my copy of of SBP is very out of date. But I dread updating to the newest version, for fear of it not importing my profiles, of which there are dozens and dozens.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I haven't dived that deeply into it to figure it out. I'm not using SFTP so I'm not sure how much encryption is actually going on here, if any.

I suspect it's because my copy of of SBP is very out of date. But I dread updating to the newest version, for fear of it not importing my profiles, of which there are dozens and dozens.
Aaand with me taking no action now I'm getting 60+ mbit on these transfers again. The only thing more worrisome than a problem I can't figure out is a problem that fixes itself and I can't figure out WHY.
 
Aaand with me taking no action now I'm getting 60+ mbit on these transfers again. The only thing more worrisome than a problem I can't figure out is a problem that fixes itself and I can't figure out WHY.
Did you do a traceroute and see if some server in the middle was the slowdown? This used to be a lot more common years and years ago, but I still sometimes pull out the ol' traceroute when things aren't working to my expectations.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Did you do a traceroute and see if some server in the middle was the slowdown? This used to be a lot more common years and years ago, but I still sometimes pull out the ol' traceroute when things aren't working to my expectations.
Yep. It never seems to be a problem with ping times. I suspect it's somebody rate-limiting something and I can't prove who it is and even if I could, I'd have no way of addressing them.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Me, up until today:
"You know, I'm no genius or anything, but I am feeling like I'm a fairly competent programmer for my niche. I am fast, efficient, thorough, and my code is self-documenting. I can handle this."

Me, today, after receiving the final programming exam for full certification from our primary equipment manufacturer's proprietary language (which is my laser-focused specialty in which I have done 90% of my professional work):
"I am an infant. I am a charlatan, and a fraud, and an imposter. I have no idea what I'm doing and I obviously am a huge con artist to have tricked people into paying me to do this for the last 4 years. I will now sell all my worldly possessions and move to Nepal where I intend to live as a goat. If I'm not also hilariously unqualified for that, too."
 
Me, up until today:
"You know, I'm no genius or anything, but I am feeling like I'm a fairly competent programmer for my niche. I am fast, efficient, thorough, and my code is self-documenting. I can handle this."

Me, today, after receiving the final programming exam for full certification from our primary equipment manufacturer's proprietary language (which is my laser-focused specialty in which I have done 90% of my professional work):
"I am an infant. I am a charlatan, and a fraud, and an imposter. I have no idea what I'm doing and I obviously am a huge con artist to have tricked people into paying me to do this for the last 4 years. I will now sell all my worldly possessions and move to Nepal where I intend to live as a goat. If I'm not also hilariously unqualified for that, too."
That's all programmers anywhere. I once took a Visual Studio test and felt exactly the same afterwards, but the score came back with me in the 98 percentile. And if you go back and look at your old code every 3 years, you'll invariably find stuff that *you* wrote, and go "what the fuck was I thinking?"
 

GasBandit

Staff member
That's all programmers anywhere. I once took a Visual Studio test and felt exactly the same afterwards, but the score came back with me in the 98 percentile. And if you go back and look at your old code every 3 years, you'll invariably find stuff that *you* wrote, and go "what the fuck was I thinking?"
If only Crestron graded on a curve. Kidding aside, I'm pretty sure I'm more competent than at least 80% of AV integration programmers out there (because I'm routinely called in to "fix" code written by our competitors). But this test is tough and is trying to get me to do stuff that I have never seen in a scope of work in my 4 years in the industry (and I've done everything from classrooms to power plant control rooms) and I'm fairly certain I never will. They just want to make me bust my brain in the extreme niche case limits of the language, I think.

At least I have 3 months to complete it.
 
Me, up until today:
"You know, I'm no genius or anything, but I am feeling like I'm a fairly competent programmer for my niche. I am fast, efficient, thorough, and my code is self-documenting. I can handle this."

Me, today, after receiving the final programming exam for full certification from our primary equipment manufacturer's proprietary language (which is my laser-focused specialty in which I have done 90% of my professional work):
"I am an infant. I am a charlatan, and a fraud, and an imposter. I have no idea what I'm doing and I obviously am a huge con artist to have tricked people into paying me to do this for the last 4 years. I will now sell all my worldly possessions and move to Nepal where I intend to live as a goat. If I'm not also hilariously unqualified for that, too."
Are you a ruminant with a four-chambered stomach? If you're not, then I'm afraid you're not qualified to be a goat.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
It is excruciating to me to have to be figuring out how to write my own JSON parsing modules for this test when perfectly good json parsing modules are available for free and I have been using them professionally for over 3 years now. It just feels like a huge waste of time compounded by the fact that I don't know how to do it and am having to learn on my own and I can't even ask for help from anybody because they'll all go "uh uh uh! you're cheating on your exam!"
 
It is excruciating to me to have to be figuring out how to write my own JSON parsing modules for this test when perfectly good json parsing modules are available for free and I have been using them professionally for over 3 years now. It just feels like a huge waste of time compounded by the fact that I don't know how to do it and am having to learn on my own and I can't even ask for help from anybody because they'll all go "uh uh uh! you're cheating on your exam!"
"how to ask politely on StackOverflow" should just be part of any coding exam these days.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
"how to ask politely on StackOverflow" should just be part of any coding exam these days.
Unfortunately StackOverflow doesn't have much on the comparatively niche version of C# for Crestron. There's a lot of specific stuff you gotta do differently than just writing for windows or linux or mac. And asking around in any of the Crestron-specific communities gets you either:

1) stop trying to cheat on your exam
or
2) just use the Control Concepts Inc JSON modules like the rest of us, it works great

YES I KNOW I'VE BEEN USING THE CCI JSON MODULES FOR YEARS BUT THEY'RE A BLACK BOX AND NOW I HAVE TO ROLL MY OWN BECAUSE THE EXAM SAYS I'M NOT ALLOWED TO USE ANY MODULES I DIDN'T WRITE EVEN THOUGH THE ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL WORLD SWAPS AROUND MODULES LIKE BASEBALL CARDS AND NOBODY GIVES A CRAP ABOUT IT
 
Unfortunately StackOverflow doesn't have much on the comparatively niche version of C# for Crestron. There's a lot of specific stuff you gotta do differently than just writing for windows or linux or mac. And asking around in any of the Crestron-specific communities gets you either:

1) stop trying to cheat on your exam
or
2) just use the Control Concepts Inc JSON modules like the rest of us, it works great

YES I KNOW I'VE BEEN USING THE CCI JSON MODULES FOR YEARS BUT THEY'RE A BLACK BOX AND NOW I HAVE TO ROLL MY OWN BECAUSE THE EXAM SAYS I'M NOT ALLOWED TO USE ANY MODULES I DIDN'T WRITE EVEN THOUGH THE ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL WORLD SWAPS AROUND MODULES LIKE BASEBALL CARDS AND NOBODY GIVES A CRAP ABOUT IT
psst.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Oh I already found that.

But notice that is for Simpl#, not C# for Crestron.

The difference is that Simpl# requires a copy of VS 2008 SP1. That exact year, that exact service pack.

It's not available for sale any more.

I'm trying to figure out how to adapt it to C# for Crestron, but like Vrii says... this is a huge waste of time because the modules already exist in the wild and are ubiquitous.

It's the equivalent of having a driving test where I'm having to invent and manufacture the automatic transmission for myself.
 
It's the equivalent of having a driving test where I'm having to invent and manufacture the automatic transmission for myself.
That sounds complicated.
And I say this knowing that an automatic transmission is actually a glorified analog hydraulic computer.

—Patrick
 
Oh I already found that.

But notice that is for Simpl#, not C# for Crestron.

The difference is that Simpl# requires a copy of VS 2008 SP1. That exact year, that exact service pack.

It's not available for sale any more.

I'm trying to figure out how to adapt it to C# for Crestron, but like Vrii says... this is a huge waste of time because the modules already exist in the wild and are ubiquitous.

It's the equivalent of having a driving test where I'm having to invent and manufacture the automatic transmission for myself.
Well, if you haven't found this, it might put you on the right track, too--even if it's only for ideas/theory.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Well, if you haven't found this, it might put you on the right track, too--even if it's only for ideas/theory.
I appreciate it.

Just to whine some more, I (cough) managed to get a copy of VS 2008 SP1 just to be able to do stuff with old Simpl# modules if I have to.

IT CRASHES ALL THE COD DAMN TIME

Working on this feels like twisting my own scrotum
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Build Project!

ERROR CS0433: The type "JsonConvert" exists in both 'Newtonsoft.Json' and 'SimplSharpNetwtonsoft."

Huh. Ok. I guess I don't need "using Newtonsoft.Json" then... just comment that one line out, aaaaand BUILD!

ERROR CS0301: The name 'JsonConvert' does not exist in the current context

... wut

... but...



So I have to... remove Newtonsoft.Json from the references list... but still "using Newtonsoft.Json" ... and the build succeeds?

THIS MAKES NO SENSE
 
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GasBandit

Staff member
My C# library is now successfully parsing and deserializing my json file.

Pity it refuses to pass the data back to the Crestron program using said library >_<

Every day.. there's progress. It's excruciatingly slow progress that feels like dragging my brain across broken glass, but still.. progress.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
For months and months and months now I've been trying to figure out why my monitors refused to go to sleep.

Today I finally figured it out.

My joystick. As long as my USB logitech joystick is plugged in, my monitors will not sleep. Wuh. Tuh. Fuh.
 
For months and months and months now I've been trying to figure out why my monitors refused to go to sleep.

Today I finally figured it out.

My joystick. As long as my USB logitech joystick is plugged in, my monitors will not sleep. Wuh. Tuh. Fuh.
Try configuring the deadzone a little bigger?
 
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