Happy to report my last day is next week!

I did set them up on a small retainer to help answer any email questions the new guy has. But I put lots of stipulations in the agreement. Cancel any time at will, only X type of stuff will be done, no expectations or promises about turnaround time or response time, etc etc. Just a small token for maintaining email contact essentially.
f they need me after that, they will pay contract rates.

So wait, if I stop eating junk food I'll become Japanese!?!?

How do these product meetings go? And how does someone learn programming without understanding the vulnerabilities in this?

Lead: "So we need to basically monitor all keystrokes. Would be a good idea to store them all in a plain text file too, just in case. All management and CEO think this is a great idea."

Programmer: "Seems legit. There's probably a Windows API hook for this.....[runs back to desk]"

@DustinB3403 said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

@guyinpv said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

And all I wanted to do was open up a conversation so they could start looking for a replacement. I wasn't expecting a circus.

What were you realistically expecting?

To begin a detailed, thought-out, plan of finding a competent replacement. Start looking at quality job boards, map out job requirements, etc. Be reasonable, efficient, mindful.

Instead they panicked that I was going to walk out and leave in a couple days. They rushed to find anybody with basic knowledge of a computer from the local staffing agency and threw them onto my lap with little consideration. Now I'm trying to train a person with no experience and fairly rudimentary knowledge. Plus they dumped all these demands for an encyclopedia worth of how-tos, procedures, vendor notes, troubleshooting guides, etc.

It's funny but also sad. One day the new person was there and I was at home, sick or something. A shared network connection in Windows got disconnected which made an app pop up an error. New person tried to troubleshoot the app, perhaps not knowing the shared network drive existed. So boss asks if I've already written a specific procedure for this specific app when having this specific error caused by this specific problem.

I'm just like, no, I can't write a procedure detailing every conceivable error that can happen on every one of 50+ vendors we deal with, lol.

The IT person is supposed to know how to troubleshoot issues, not just read from a procedure book encyclopedia written by the previous IT person!

Question: Why should I participate at Mangolassi?

Answer: Um, well, ok, think of it as kinda like a hamburger, but it has no onions. The hamburger is tasty and useful, but maybe missing some flavor. You click reply and type something. That something is like onions you're adding to the burger. The burger becomes tasty and has more flavors, people like it. The entire burger becomes more complete. And the more people reply and add ingredients, the better the burger tastes. When you create new threads, it's like having fries or shake, and then other people add some salt or chocolate. Mangolassi is like a multi-course meal, the Internet is like a restaurant.....

That answer your question?

Ok I'm out.....

@stus This continued to affect systems across the world all weekend long.

Another article with ongoing details:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/05/15/nhs-cyber-attack-latest-authorities-warn-day-chaos-ransomware/

Do your updates gentlepeoples.

Has anyone been affected you know of? Make sure them backups are in order!

I'm new to the forums, came over from Spiceworks by recommendation.

Small time IT here, dabbling in hardware, software, programming, web design, Adobe, video, photography, and generally complain about dysfunctional stuff a lot.

Always fun to walk in the office and basically hear scary beeps coming from somewhere. Is it a server? Workstation? Battery backup?

Turns out it was the Synology DS216+. This has two 3TB drives in RAID0.
All the lights were off but it was beeping regularly. Pressing the power button didn't do anything. I tried to access and it worked fine, must have just been asleep? All the lights came back on but disk 2 was orange.

I was able to log in to DSM where it said disk 2 had "crashed" and I should try to backup my files.

This was already confusing. It's a RAID0, if one drive was crashed I'd think it would be total data loss, but I could still access the folder shares just fine, hmm. SMART listed it as "normal" as well.

Then I saw in the HDD/SSD section that disk2 had a "bad sector count" of 1. Apparently it found one lonely little bad sector and I assume marked it to avoid in the future as drives are supposed to do. But why did everything have to crash and burn over one stinking bad sector? I was hoping not to have to replace a drive for this.

I did some reading and found out that when DSM marks something as "crashed" it may disconnect it. Since I wasn't using a redundant RAID type but could still access data, I doubt that happened, but why not try?

I simply turned the unit off, took out both drives, sprayed some canned air while at it, and reinserted the drives.

After turning back on, it was no longer crashed, both drives showed "normal" and the RIAD0 self-tested as healthy. It did suggest that I do an additional data validation scan which it said would be about 25 minutes per 1TB of space. I said ok, but I guess it finished in about 2 minutes while rebooting cause I didn't see this happen.

The final message I got was that there was something wrong with a SCSI LUN something or other, I wish I took a screen shot. I'm not using the iSCSI LUN features and DSM says there is no iSCSI LUN in the system, so not sure how that message was relevant.

In any case, I'm writting this for the future. If your Synology is beeping and talks of crashing drives and end of the world events, just stay calm, it may just be a bad sector and it's throwing a hissy fit.
If SMART says your drive is fine, try turning it off and reseat the drives and turn back on.

You might even remove the drive and run a test from another computer to look for further sector issues, then put it back in.

Also I'm writing this to see if this has happened to anybody else and if I should be worried about this one bad sector issue. Drives develop bad sectors all the time, I don't know why the entire thing flips out and dies over it. I'm disappointed how the Synology handled something so simple as marking a bad sector and moving on.

I'll tell you, it's automated attendant phone menu systems.

Please, let this tech die a slow painful death. And please, companies just hire a little thing we used to call a receptionist. Have a human answer the darn phone and then direct the call. Automated systems with their slow talking computer people who never have any answers or menus to what we actually need, are useless.
And then in the 1 in 10 chance a menu kind of sounds like what I need, the person who eventually answers just tells me I need a different department anyway and then puts me back on hold again.

Ya I get it, a "personal attendant" sounded all science fiction 20 years ago or whatever, but for the love of all that is good, and to prevent turning all your customers into raging haters of your company, just get a freaking receptionist to answer phone calls and direct them!

The age of fighting a phone attendant for 28 minutes just to figure out how to reach a receptionist who can direct my call properly in all of 8 seconds must come to an end.

My life as a customer of any company on earth has never been made better or easier with these systems. They are only an exercise in frustration and make me angry and stressed by the time I actually do get to a person.
If you want the secret why phone operators hate their jobs, it's because the auto attendant already pissed off the customer and put them on edge before they answered!

Rant over

User of CentOS and Ubuntu servers myself. Mint is still top go-to for desktop, though there are interesting alternatives like ElementaryOS.

Linux is not always easy to learn, I just forget everything if it's not regularly used, especially CLI with their bazillion switches that no mere mortal can ever memorize. And moving between different distros where commands don't work exactly the same, Aptitude and Yum, etc.

Cool, but always challenging.

It's not about which CMS is "best". It's about picking the right tool for the job.

One gets annoyed when WP is offered for absolutely every job under the sun.
Want to make the next best Youtube with a mix of Twitter and Instagram! Probably WP is good.
Want to make the next best API for micro-services? I guess WP is the best.
Want some new emulation mini controllers for space shuttles? Probably a WP plugin for that.

The WP apostles always assume it is best for everything because "powerful".

At least decide if you want the overhead of a CMS. Do you need a database at all? Would a flat site work best and therefore a site generator? Is it a highly custom design from scratch or does your client demand a pretty page builder with drag-n-drop buttons?
Is the developer in control of the content and site or does a non-tech end user need to edit everything? Can they be exposed to HTML or a WYSIWYG or will they muck everything up?
Is the content highly structured or is every page a mix of many content pieces?
Is this actually a "blog" and needs bloggy features or are these more like landing pages?
Does the content or development features need to be source controlled?
What kind of scale do you need? Is there a focus on multi-national issues?
How important is the mobile experience, AMP, accessibility? Will the site offer APIs for various things?

Can every single concern be shoved into WP in some way? Perhaps, but why? Why do the same people who love how "powerful" it is because there are so many plugins, also say you shouldn't install any plugins, maybe one, or you're doing it wrong?

It's possible people don't like hooks and filters and PHP functions to output HTML, but would instead rather like to build out templates using Twig or Smarty or some other standard method. Or maybe they need a modern architecture with a site built on Node and React, or Vue.
Maybe they would like to use a Composer-based stack to manage the site rather than uploading files in FTP.
Maybe they need to run on a server with only command line access or some such, rather than a commodity $3.99/month cPanel host.

I, for one, am excited to see how the industry is going to evolve the CMS market, as long as people are open to change and not just cling on to their ancient tech.

@Obsolesce said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

Second, you absolutely should change the admin URL if possible, it's a very simple and basic thing that stops a ton of bot attacks by default. But WP doesn't make it easy, so it's rarely done. And keeping core files out of web root is also a very easy security measure that most modern software do by default, only exposing the public files and index.

Moving files around also breaks things. You really are screwing up every WP site you touch. No wonder you have problems with it...

Dude, for the last time, I'm not the one doing these things, this is what is already done on sites I have to work on. This is what everybody else does, because out of 200 developers, there are 200 ways they like to do things or protect things or tweak the file system. Yes, Roots Bedrock is a thing people use to change the file system. Yes, people change the login URL, because at best there are mixed opinions about these security tweaks. There are lots of plugins which do just this, and people install them all the time.

Scott, brother, you need to stop with the hyper analyzing sentence-by-sentence, I can't respond to a dozen individual messages like this.

@scottalanmiller said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

Creating a new WP site and not doing a full security stack of plugins would be like doing a fresh install of Windows XP and putting it on the internet with no antivirus!

Um, no. You absolutely don't use some big stack of plugins. Maybe one. Maybe not. That's it.

If you build WP sites with one plugin, you're definitely doing it wrong. WP doesn't have enough core features to run a decent site without various multiple plugins. If a site even wants to have ecommerce, they already need Woo, an import plugin, a payment plugin, some cart feature plugins, a shipper plugin, etc. Everybody runs Yoast or some other SEO plugin. A cache plugin, performance plugins, image optimizer, social networks, analytics.
I've never even seen a WP site with just one plugin. You don't even get just one on a fresh install!

@scottalanmiller said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

On what planet is a CMS powerful or great when it takes 5.5 hours to find some text in the footer?

You actually think that there is a modern, powerful CMS that isn't like this when the designer screws up? On what planet have you used products?

That's the problem, the footer text being hard to find wasn't a screw up of the designer, it's just the way they had to do it based on WP lack of consistency and how all their plugins and theme stuff interact and there is no actual "template" anywhere.

It's ok to not try and convince me how "powerful" WP is, I'm aware of how it works, I've laid out many points already. I'm painfully aware of its problems, for 10+ years now.

Sorry, not reading the hundred over-analyzing responses here. I already know WP is garbage so you're not convincing me otherwise, I've worked on too many of the things.

I've had to work on 200+ of the things and there is never one built "right". Everybody has a different idea of "right" or what makes the design/theme/development/workflow "easy". Fact is, with 200 sites, you get 200 different ways a website is built. There is very little consistency. There is no "right" way to build a site in WP.

@Obsolesce said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv

It seems to me that all of the "right" stuff you are doing to your WP installs are actually wrong and screwing it up.

I didn't say I was doing this. I work on other peoples' sites. This is what everybody else is doing. Every site is different.
Second, you absolutely should change the admin URL if possible, it's a very simple and basic thing that stops a ton of bot attacks by default. But WP doesn't make it easy, so it's rarely done. And keeping core files out of web root is also a very easy security measure that most modern software do by default, only exposing the public files and index. But WP definitely doesn't make that easy either.
Why would it be that only minutes after creating a brand new user, there are already bots attempting to log in with the username? How would they have found the username of a brand new user who hasn't created any content?

Creating a new WP site and not doing a full security stack of plugins would be like doing a fresh install of Windows XP and putting it on the internet with no antivirus!

I don't need to be convinced of WP greatness, it's not worth the effort. We all have our opinions of things. Imagine someone hires you because they spent 4 hours and couldn't figure out how to edit some text in the footer. So you spend another hour and half trying to track it down for them because in WP there is no actual standard place where your templates and output live. It could be anywhere, in plugin UI somewhere, or deep in a PHP template which includes another PHP which includes another PHP which overrides another which hooks another that filters another.
On what planet is a CMS powerful or great when it takes 5.5 hours to find some text in the footer?

This is like if you have a flat tire in your car so you try to find the puncture and finally discover the nail is actually under the carpet of the headliner inside the cab. hahah! That's kind of what it feels like to work on an old content-rich WP site sometimes.

I'm glad none of you build sites that way. I don't either, but it's one of the traps often found working on existing ones.

@Obsolesce said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv

I've used WP for a lot of production stuff and it's been nothing short of excellent with zero issues on any end.

You must be doing something seriously wrong, or have some weird prejudice or bias against WP.

I'm not doing anything "wrong". The point is you have to do a TON of "right" stuff to make WP do what it needs to do. And there is for certain a whole mess of things people can do "wrong" as well. Not updating is a HUGE problem for WP, as recent studies have found most sites using vulnerable versions, low PHP versions, long dead plugins, etc.

Do you mask or change the wp-admin URL? Do you put the WP core out of web root? Are you able to use a Git workflow or store the custom parts of the theme and plugins in a repo?

I'm not going to fight about how bad WP is, I already know it, but it's what everybody uses because it has the most plugins.

If you're a dev who builds the theme from scratch and uses no 3rd party themes, then fine, but that's not what most small agencies and freelancers do. They grab a theme on themeforest and install a 20-plugin stack of their favorite necessities. Then nobody maintains it.

I'm not mad at WP, it's a legacy system built on old techniques and has the advantage of a huge plugin store. Can't argue with that. But there is nothing much else great about it. You need a large learning curve to figure out its secret sauce. You need extra plugins just to be able to build the custom content needed for pages, or a page builder, ACF, Pods, something. Then a deep understanding of a favored theme framework, if you're into those, and all the possible hook locations. Genesis, Gantry, Thesis, Thematic, Divi, whatever your pleasure. You have to learn the hook system as well as the page builder they may or may not use.
So every WP site I come across has some new or old framework with an entirely different set of APIs and functions to figure out, because no two sites come together quite the same way. Some have custom admin UIs, some use the Customizer, some are only in the template files, some have child themes, some not. And those that don't use a child theme, you can't be sure whether the main/parent theme was customized or not, so have to be careful doing a theme update.

We would all like to believe we build WP sites perfectly in April 2019, but in 5 years it will be someone else's nightmare to figure out. Just like every site I'm given that was built 5 or 10 years ago is now my nightmare to figure out. Some were done well, to be sure, and might even have some dev docs to help out. But others you just get 2700 lines of random hook outputs piled into the functions file. You never know what you're going to get. And this isn't a praiseworthy design feature of WP.

I wouldn't tell anybody to not use it if they want, I would simply say there are other options out there, people trying to improve the CMS space and do things better.

If WP is your only tool, everything looks like a sloppy plugin-riddled nightmare ;)

@scottalanmiller said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

WP itself is pretty garbage, non-intuitive for end users,

All platforms are bad for end users. Windows is hard for end users. It's not an end user platform, it's a CMS.

WP is designed for end users, it's supposed to be a blog platform for non-devs to quickly grab a free theme and start writing posts.

WP is definitely not trim or fast or any of those things. Not without optimizing and plugins. It doesn't even have built-in caching no optimizes any of the output.

@scottalanmiller said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

@guyinpv said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

CV works pretty well in Zoho.

Because... Zoho ;)

Ya their email is pretty nice, but CV is not without issues.

Sometimes, for example, when looking at an email, I want to delete it. It's hard to know what the delete is actually doing. Sometimes it will only delete the one email in the chain that I'm looking at. Other times it appears to delete the entire chain so the whole thing disappears. It seems inconsistent. Sometimes I want to delete the whole chain since it's not needed for anything, but I don't think Zoho is actually deleting all the received and sent emails in the chain, it might just be deleting the one I'm looking at, and then hiding the rest? I don't know really know how that works to be honest.

@scottalanmiller said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

@guyinpv said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

I like it because it just that easy to read the last one or two emails to remember what's going on.

Those are normally in the email already, though, so I never run into that problem.

Very true, but then it's the same difference, you're just getting a view of previous emails under the current one.

None of those except #1 and #2 are core WP, the rest basically rely on what theme you choose, and various plugins.

WP itself is pretty garbage, non-intuitive for end users, and not easy at all to start from scratch should you want to build your own theme and not rely on a huge plugin stack. There is a lot of magic going on, like meta-data being stored in the CSS file, what?!? And a huge theme waterfall hierarchy, and a billion PHP functions for the API. There is no real theme framework or template system built-in, an incredibly basic and poor custom field manager. They expect you to build themes by using dozens of PHP hook functions and echoing out bits of HTML here and there, making it very difficult to ever track down exactly where a piece of output is coming from. Was it a menu, a widget, a custom field, the page content, a header/footer file, an override template, the functions file, a plugin, WHERE!!

I could go on and on for days about the many frustrations of WP. But that doesn't matter, because most people only use WP so they can install a huge stack of plugins to actually make it work and do something useful, if you're ok with the huge amount of code bloat you get with it.

And don't even try to write any custom CSS, because you'll find it nearly impossible to override all the other CSS spit out by the theme and plugin stack, unless you get very hacky to try and force your custom CSS file to be output last after every other style.

Then when all this is over, you have a basic site with an 18MB size home page, 160 assets being downloaded, 18 stylesheets, 12 Javascript files including three versions of jQuery, etc. So then you have to install some more plugins to try and optimize things, combine files, minimize, compress, and cache things, only to find that the combined JS doesn't work, and the site suddenly looks bad because CSS combined in the wrong order and the cascade isn't working right any more.

Hey, I work mostly on WP, lol, because everybody uses it, but it's far from praise-worthy, especially for a developer who wants complete control over the site. Or who wants a proper template system. Or who wants to highly optimize their output, or use a proper toolchain for development, staging, and production, etc.

Use it if you want, but it requires constant maintenance and updates, testing, and review to make sure nothing breaks when your plugins update every 4 days.

CV works pretty well in Zoho.

I can toll the whole chain into any folder or archive it or whatever. Even delete one of the middle emails in the chain, no problem. When a new email shows up, the entire chain basically goes to the top of the inbox again.

I like it because it just that easy to read the last one or two emails to remember what's going on.

In Thunderbird, even when not using CV, I would very often right-click the email and open the full chain to do just that, see them all in order of send/receive, it's quite handy.

I do oldest first in Thunderbird, I like it that way. Since I worked in commerce for a decade, it's always first-come, first-serve. I like to take care of emails from oldest to newest. So the "top" of my list is the old stuff and I work down, and try to keep inbox 0 at least in my main inbox.
For folder which are more like email archives for dumping stuff in, I might switch to newest first since I'm not actively reading through those folders.

And, I kind of like conversation view. I use it in Zoho and it's great because I deal with so many clients, I often need to see the previous one or two emails in the chain to remember what's going on.

One thing I've always wished for with email is the ability to edit the headers and content. If there was a way to have my client allow me to change or append the subject line or add some meta-data somewhere to help find this email later, that would be fantastic. And I know some clients let you have tags, but I want a standard, something that permanently gets fixed to the email so any given client could read the extra data.
There was a plugin for Thunderbird that allowed me to edit subject lines, but email needs a standard for adding metadata to emails for archival purposes or just to help with searching and categorizing.