Everything is Broken
As it turns out, we actually live in a time where a surprising amount of the software we use is just plain broken.
I was once watching a presentation by Kevlin Henney, where he mentioned the concept of a "Kevlin Henney Screen" - a humorous name given to a variety of pictures of software crashing in the wild, that people have started sending him:
And it kind of got me thinking:
"Over the years, how many times have i experienced software not working like i'd expect it to?"
The answer to that question is a number that's pretty awkwardly high! And yet, when discussions about a particular piece of software come up, there are rarely any concrete examples of things breaking. So, i figured that i'd change that and now, whenever a piece of software fails to do what i expect it to, i will attempt to document it here.
iPhone, Android and WhatsApp are broken
I took a little break from writing blog posts due to how busy I've been in these past months, but I could not resist writing about the mess that I stumbled upon recently. You see, I got some Apple devices for...
Keycloak is broken
Okay, so here's the thing: I've been working on bootstrapping an entire platform as a part of some freelance work, for which I decided to use a bunch of off-the-shelf components, especially in regards to authn/authz. I still reme...
Ubuntu LTS is broken
It's been a little while since I've had a good rant in this section, because for the most part I've been able to ignore most of the issues that I've run into so far. They either weren't big enough of a deal to write about, or s...
Debian updates are broken
You know, when I wrote "Never update anything" it as mostly supposed to be satire. We all know that updates are necessary because of security, whenever you have a piece of software that's connected to any network. Howeve...
OpenProject updates are broken
It's that time of the year again, update time!
Following the best practices, I decided to update as much of my software as I could, to avoid any nasty CVEs or other vulnerabilities. So, the first thing that I did, w...
Vector maps are laggy
Occasionally you see posts about self-hosted maps pop up on HN. And you know what? That's great! People self-hosting more of their software is generally a good thing, both for them learning how to rely less on the larger cor...
Visual Studio Code Is Broken
My vacation from my day job recently started and I wanted to encourage myself to be a bit productive during it as well, not just procrastinate and play games.
So, spending more time in GNU/Linux felt like a good opti...
Bitnami MariaDB is broken
Here's a short tale about software defaults, drop-in replacements, containers and data loss. You know, there was this one link shortener, YOURLS that to me seemed wonderfully boring and otherwise decent. It supported sho...
Kdenlive is broken
I've seen plenty of interesting ways for software to break, but recently I experienced a peculiar way how some very basic functionality in my video editor of choice, Kdenlive, utterly broke.
You see, while I was on call at wo...
Containers are broken
Containers were generally touted as the solution to the problem of: "But it works on my machine!"
And in some respects, they actually succeeded at that, except for when that is absolutely false and nothing works as you'd exp...
GitLab updates are broken
Recently i went on Hacker News and saw the following post at the very top of the front page:
You know, Hacker News is actually a pretty useful place in regards to spotting things like this, it actually also alerted me...
Nginx configuration is broken
A little while ago i wrote about how to use Nginx as a reverse proxy and i rather enjoy that piece of software! That said, it's not without its faults, about some of which i'd like to tell you today.
What upsets me...
Upgrading Java 8 to 11 is broken
People oftentimes say that you should always keep up with new releases of technologies. Say, you should use PHP 7 or 8 when they come out, instead of having your project be stuck on PHP 5. The same is said about aba...
Modern React is broken
Suppose that you're a full stack developer. You get asked to join a project to develop some additional functionality but upon launching the lastest version, you discover that the front end application runs into a situation wh...
Oracle DBMS is broken
So here's something different for a change - i think we just found a bug in the Oracle database management system at work!
Our clients reported an issue for a simple query, that could not be executed:
DELETE
FROM some_tabl...
Oracle JDK and OpenJDK compatibility is broken
So here's a little something after a bit of a hiatus. Recently i had a pretty bad outage at work, one that required bringing me in to fix it. What should have been a pretty short cycle of gathering app...
Debian and GRUB are broken
How would you feel if one day, suddenly, your server stopped responding and you could no longer reach it through SSH? Obviously, something like that wouldn't be too cool, especially if you'd have installed with the expres...
Managing disks in Linux is broken
Recently i figured that instead of running two servers with 1 disks each, i could instead run a single server with two disks, to use for storing my backups. In this case, it'd be a bit like a software RAID 1, mostl...
Grav is broken
Grav is the software that's running this blog and rendering this page right now! I've decided on using it, because it is entirely free, but in addition to that also allows storing blog posts in Markdown format, which is a plain text...
LibreOffice bibliography is broken
Imagine having to hand in your master's thesis in a few days, and discovering that you kind of can't really do that, because the one tool that you've used for managing bibliography has decided not to work.
Enter...
Nextcloud is broken
Nextcloud and GitLab have both made me absolutely hate updating software, especially when it's running inside of Docker containers. The idea itself is pretty simple - since containers are largely immutable (except for data in vo...
Using an SD card for storage in GNU/Linux is broken: Part 2
So, previously i wrote about how SD cards in GNU/Linux are pretty broken. However, i thought that perhaps i just got unlucky with either the particular model of SD card, or perhaps the e...
Using an SD card for storage in GNU/Linux is broken
I have this annoying and persistent problem with my SD card for my netbook.
Basically, a while back, being a poor student and all, i got a pretty cheap netbook by a Polish company that was mad...
Docker Swarm access to devices is nonexistent
So, recently i figured that i'd cook up a script that uses my webcam for motion detection, which i wrote more about here: DIY surveillance: motion detection with OpenCV and Python
And, after finishin...
OpenCV (with Python) is broken
Recently i had the displeasure working with OpenCV for some video capture and image processing. You can read more about the actual project here: DIY surveillance: motion detection with OpenCV and Python
The library...
