Hi, I’m PROGRAMMER BEAR. I like fishing, long walks in the forest, and computer programming.
I’m a web developer by day, so I’ll be talking about topics ranging from web technologies to more technical programming things, general work/life issues, and anything else that seems interesting to me.
Hopefully something I say here will someday prove useful to somebody. That’s nice to think about anyway.
For years now I’ve been telling myself I’m going to stop using Google Chrome. Besides the obvious reason — Google tracking everything I do — Chrome just has a way of pissing me off over and over again. Continual BS updates, unnecessary fucking around with the UI, removing features without my consent, etc etc. Nevertheless, I keep ending up back in Chrome like some bad addiction. (Really I blame my users… since so many damn people use Chrome I have to use it to see what they see, and along the way I open a couple billion tabs, and I just get… stuck there. But I digress.)
I’ve made a valiant effort over the years to try to use Firefox. I’ve followed their journey since the Netscape Navigator days, which was great for it’s time! (Now I’m giving away my age, oops!) But unfortunately, Firefox has been pissing me off too. Continue reading The Quest for the Perfect Browser (ongoing)
Google Chrome always fucks with me at the least opportune moments. Always when I’m in a hurry, trying to log in and do something quickly — BOOM — Chrome has updated (without my permission) and something is broken. This week, Chrome decided to disable all my extensions because of something called “Manifest v2 support” that apparently has been dropped in favor of something called “Manifest v3”. No warning, just forcibly turned off all my extensions. Isn’t that nice?
I’m not a developer of browser extensions, so I don’t give a shit what either Manifest v2 or v3 is. All I know is I’m in a hurry to do something else, and I can’t browse the web without two absolutely mandatory extensions: Dark Reader and uBlock Origin (UBO). I had to stop everything I was doing and find some way to get my extensions back.
Dark Reader already released an update for this Manifest v3 bullshit, so that was easy enough (albeit annoying). UBO, however, has not and/or can’t. Thankfully, I found this gem on r/uBlockOrigin which explains how to fix it (at least for now… until Google fully blocks it):
Continue reading How to get around Google Chrome dropping Manifest v2 support (for now)
You may see an error like:
PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 0 seconds exceeded
… and wonder how PHP can timeout when no limit is set?
If so, the following information may help you.
Continue reading PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of infinity exceeded!
After years of trying to improve their image, it seems Microsoft’s efforts must have paid off — not many youngsters these days are aware why so many of the previous generation (including myself) vehemently hated Microsoft.
I was searching for “microsoft is evil” just for fun, and one of the common reasons cited is their aggressive licencing practices (which is what got them in trouble with U.S. anti-trust laws). While a valid point, I feel this is too remote an issue from the average’s person consciousness. The immediate effects of it more screwed PC manufacturers than anyone else. (End users probably gave less thought about why Windows was the only OS you could get on any new off-the-shelf PC.)
On the other end of the spectrum there is Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, who says Microsoft’s Software Is Malware. While he makes a lot of valid points — Microsoft certainly is guilty of many sins — I feel the language of his arguments is often so far to the extremes as to make them less effective. (I generally agree with his free-as-in-speech software philosophy, but seeing as I make a living selling the software I create, I also give more leeway to the ways developers monetize their software. We gotta eat, after all…)
So here I will relate my personal journey with Microsoft over the years, to hopefully make clear why somebody like me could have so much hatred for a distant software company. Continue reading Why Microsoft is Evil
Email spam is the bane of all our existences. On the other hand, being able to send (legit) emails to customers and actually have them land in inboxes is absolutely essential to run just about any business. With that in mind, a variety of Email Blacklists came about and are maintained by various organizations, to help ESP’s sort out the good senders from the bad. But what happens when a particular Email Blacklist goes from being a force for good, to rather blatant monetary extortion? Continue reading Email Service Providers – It’s Time to Stop Using UCEPROTECT
One of my businesses sells WP plugins on an annual licensing basis… its a subscription that auto-renews each year unless you cancel. An extremely common and well known business practice in the WP world.
Well… we had this one German guy cancel his subscription before the year was up — as some people do, and that’s totally fine — but as the end of the year approached he got an automated “your license is expiring soon” email from our website. He absolutely flipped a lid.
We thought maybe he was worried about getting charged, so we replied and confirmed that, not to worry, his subscription was already cancelled and he wasn’t going to be charged anything. We explained it was just an automated email letting him know his license is expiring.
Then he replies with this gem (word for word):
Hi [name],
i didn’t worry, but you should.
What kind of company you are working for? Is this a garage sale?
If i cancel a subsription then i will never receive any further messages!
If you need advice to review your internal processes feel free to ask me for a proposal.
Alex
So much anger over an email!
I don’t see anything upsetting about a perfectly normal, commonplace reminder email. I’ve received the same kinds of emails from other companies and have never been bothered.
I wanted to reply something like “I’m sorry our email caused you emotional suffering. Please do send us your proposal for what process we should use to deal with rude customers who are triggered by automated emails. Sincerely, The Owner of this Garage Sale”…. but I didn’t.
Instead… Welcome to the blacklist!
See more from The Joys of Customer Support
After having a bad experience with Web Hosting Canada (read my review here), I decided to try LunaNode for the first time. I’ve been very happy since.
LunaNode is a good, no-nonsense cloud host. They have everything I need, and (so far) no bullshit. From the time I signed up my account and ordered my first server, it was deployed and live within maybe 2 minutes. They have 3 tiers of plans — General Purpose, Memory-Optimized, and Compute-Optimized, each with different levels of resources available. They have all the common Linux distros available as templates. (No Windows Server is offered, but if needed it seems you could upload an image.) In a nutshell, all the standard stuff is there.
I have several projects based in Canada, and as such I’ve had opportunities to try several different Canadian web hosts. Recently I gave Web Hosting Canada (whc.ca) a try. It was a terrible experience. The worst of any Canadian host I’ve tried so far.
In fairness, I didn’t get very far with WHC. I couldn’t.
Important note: this post is NOT meant to encourage anyone to carry out a DDoS attack on any website. Rather it is my tongue-in-cheek way of exposing a major flaw in the popular Cloudflare service, in hopes they will take this shit seriously and actually reform their business practices. If you, dear reader, ever DDoS a site for real, I hope you die in a fire.
I use Cloudflare on several sites — for DDoS protection, as a Web Application Firewall, and also for their CDN. I have sites on both free and paid plans with them. Up until now, I thought Cloudflare was a great service — little did I know how easy it is to defeat the entire purpose of using them.
Or to put it another way: Cloudflare is great — until they decide to fuck you over.
Here’s how you defeat Cloudflare:
Continue reading How to DDoS attack a site protected by CloudFlare
I’ve shortened the first part of his message for brevity, but the rest is 100% exactly what he wrote to us:
FROM: Some user <somebody@somewhere>
I am trying to [some random thing, we have no idea what he’s talking about]
Do you have anything like that?If NOT and you implement it, will you give me some kind discount for the suggestion?
We honest to God laughed out loud when we read that last line. I wanted so bad to reply back “Yes, pretty please won’t you give us a suggestion for something to do with all our free time over here, PLEASE!!”. (But I didn’t.)
Seriously though. The poor guy must not understand that feature requests are a dime a dozen. EVERYBODY has some idea, and everybody thinks THEIR idea is the most amazing thing ever. (I got news for you: they’re not.) Nobody ever stops to think our schedules might already be full, or that maybe we have our own ideas to pursue.
So yeah… some random guy with some random idea that I honestly couldn’t even understand what he was trying to say… and he wants me to PAY HIM for the suggestion? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I love this guy!
