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.
Putting an expiration date on SOFTWARE is one of the most insidious, and stupid, things the tech world has imposed on us.
They’ve sold us the idea it has to do with security. Let’s be honest — it’s not that. It’s about money.
For-profit software companies want you to buy their products over and over again. It’s why Microsoft Continue reading Unpopular Take: Software “End of Life” is Bullshit. Stop it.
A developer friend recently asked me, “Which AI coding tools are you using?”
“None”, I answered. “What about you?”
He proceeded to list off several tools, culminating with this astonishing admission: Continue reading Adventures in AI Coding, Episode 1: Claude vs Gemini
Recently I went to renew one of the many SSL certificates I manage, and they hit me with a message saying the new cert would only be valid for 200 days, instead of the usual 1 year. WTF? Is this some stupid scheme to get more money out of me? No, apparently it’s a real thing. And 200-days is just the tip of the iceberg. By 2029, certificate lifespans will be reduced to 47 days.
Who makes these fucking decisions?
More importantly, why are they doing this?
Continue reading SSL Certificates are Getting Cut Down to 47 days — Who Makes These Fucking Decisions?
I was a GoDaddy customer for 15+ years. Today, I moved my last site away from their platform.
Way back when, GoDaddy was a great place to register domain names inexpensively. I had several with them. Later I would also use their shared web hosting for myself and various clients.
GoDaddy always had a “bro”-ish vibe, but then again this was the internet of the 2000’s and, let’s be honest, the vast majority of folks building websites back then were probably sweaty guys.
Anybody remember the Danica Patrick commercials?
Continue reading GoDaddy is a Horrible, Scammy Company
TagDiv, the company which makes the popular WordPress themes Newspaper and Newsmag, embedded malicious code in their products. This code acts as a “kill switch”, allowing them to take down your entire website!
As first reported by Foo Conner at Jekko, this same problem happened to me recently with one of my websites. They took down the entire website — every page — and replaced it with an image like this one:
Continue reading TagDiv Embedded Malicious Code in Popular WordPress Themes Newsmag, Newspaper
WordPress has gone off the rails.
A big part of my business for the last 10+ years has been building sites using, and developing plugins for, WordPress. I’ve tried and used other CMS’s from time to time, but when I’m in a hurry to develop a site quickly (which is practically always) I turn to WordPress. It’s what is most comfortable, familiar, and (mostly) just works.
Nevertheless, I have a love-hate relationship with WordPress. Continue reading WordPress is Dead. Blocks Killed It
This week I encountered my first case of disc rot.
When new, these Imation-brand discs were a gray/silver color. As you can see now it has yellowed throughout, and has begun bronzing along the right side.
Here is a scan of the bottom side. I’ve increased the brightness so you can see Continue reading Optical Media Archival Field Notes – Beware of Imation CD-R’s From the Early 2000’s
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!
