Microsoft's latest Windows 11 Insider Beta Build (22635.4445) introduces a hidden universal Share button, marking the company's ongoing efforts to unify the user experience and simplify file-sharing across devices. The feature was first identified by Windows enthusiast @phantomofearth on X (formerly

Amazon's Children's Day Store is now open, featuring an array of products specially discounted for the occasion, including top-selling Android tablets ideal for e-learning. With price reductions of up to 75% on select items such as headphones, tablets, and kids' smartwatches,

Redeem Codes for Garena Free Fire Max on November 13, 2024: Gain an advantage over your opponents or enhance your character's appearance with these codes, offering in-game items for free. Acquire weapons, skins, diamonds, and more through these codes. Garena Free Fire

We are manufactured exporting company. We acquire godown , quareters from unregistered landlord on rent. Is this type of rent come under the applicability of RCM ?

Dear Experts,

In GSTR 1, under which table should we show the RCM amount on rent paid to an
unregistered Landlord.

Pls. advice.

Dear Sir,

We have a godown in Porur, and we pay rent every month after TDS is deducted. Recently, my friend mentioned that RCM is applicable for commercial rent payments to an unregistered person (URP). Could you please clarify my doubts?

whether it is compulsory to submit CA Certificate for refund claim exceeding Rs 200000 /- in case of GST refund due to inverted duty structure ??

Do the RBI guidelines mandate the linking of PAN with Aadhar as a prerequisite for opening a bank account?

My ITR3 for AY 2023-24 has been processed by CPC under OLD REGIME without recognizing the Taxation Option exercised undersection 115BAC for NEW REGIME by filing FORM 10IE during AY 2022-23 on 01-Jun-2022, which has been CONTINUED for AY 2023-24, as EVIDENT in the ITR3 filed for this Assessment Year. I have also Registered my grievance in this regard in the e-portal of the IT Department and have sought RECTIFICATION FIVE TIMES under Section 154 but have got the same RECTIFICATION ORDER repeating the same MISTAKE with processing done under OLD REGIME with TAX DEMAND of Rs.87,000. (Similar thing had happened in AY 2022-23 but it was corrected by RECTIFICATION). I am in continuous correspondence through email and written communication several times with the Department, including grievances raised on E-PORTAL, but the issue remains UNRESOLVED. I have also registered my grievance in this regard in CPGRAMS Portal of GOI which is pending.
I request advice on further course of action to resolve the issue including as to whether i can file an Appeal under Section 264 .
G S Prakash

In a pre-Budget meeting with Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) urged the government to continue tax reforms and boost capital expenditure in the Union Budget for 2025-26....

The Income Tax Department has intensified scrutiny on dubious tax refund claims for the assessment years 2021-22 and 2022-23, issuing notices to multiple taxpayers across the country. ...

DSV said that the objective of these acquisitions are three-fold: to augment its position within the semiconductor industry; align with its new Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport operations; and support its growing cross-border services into Latin America. It added that these acquisitions are expected to be made official next month.

Despite being some six billion kilometers away, the sun from Pluto would be a dazzling sight to behold—carefully, that is

Rod-shaped fragments of RNA called “obelisks” were discovered in gut and mouth bacteria for the first time

More than 500 fires have burned across Colombia, including in its delicate and unique highland wetlands, one of the fastest evolving ecosystems on Earth

En Colombia han ardido más de 500 incendios, incluso en sus delicados y únicos humedales del altiplano, uno de los ecosistemas de más rápida evolución de la Tierra

A lunar lander nicknamed Odie carries 125 small moon sculptures by artist Jeff Koons that could become the first authorized artwork on the moon

A long-awaited study of people with ME/CFS revealed differences in their immune and nervous system. The findings may offer clues about long COVID

Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission is the first U.S. soft landing on the moon since Apollo 17. It’s also a sign of private industry’s growing role in space

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks will make its closest approach to the sun this April—right after North America is treated to a total solar eclipse

8007/20948Scientists have ascertained that chimpanzees will never accidentally type the complete works of Shakespeare - there's simply not enough time left in history for the population of chimpanzees on earth to type even a simple sentence. Thank goodness that's been sorted out.Also even if you put chimps in a room with a typewriter, the probably wouldn't attempt to use it. And if they did it would be hard to force them to do nothing else but type for more than a few seconds. There's all kinds of reasons why chimps won't ever do this.

Holidays are a perfect time to try something fun, easy, and no-fail. Hello, mokume gane! Problem is there are variations nine ways to Sunday! You’ve got your deep, shallow, scrap, ghost, and natural methods. For your holiday polymer pleasure, follow this free link from the UK’s Jane Hewitt, who gathers a slew of approaches to […] Read more

Kassie Krut “Reckless” My friend Molly passed this along to me, telling me “this feels Matthew-core.” And she’s right, this is exactly the kind of song I’ve been looking out for on this site for over 20 years. Let’s go down the checklist – catchy but abrasive, big heavy beats, random bits of noise, a […]

Wear something like this out in public and folks'll know you're not one to be messed with. It'll show people you know what you like and even if there's only one season of it, you're still loyal. In fact, you like Firefly so much that you yearn to have some kind of video game where you can live in the world of Firefly and leave the real world behind if only for a minute. This lo-fi rendering of Serenity signals to others that you're a good man with a good moral compass and anyone who doesn't agree with you can eat lead. Wrap this cunning piece of cloth around your torso and proclaim to the world "we aim to misbehave." $10-13 | URL | Paypal Credit | S - 3XL ')}

No obvious pattern fell out of last week's submissions for Error'd, but I did especially like Caleb Su's example.

Michael R. , apparently still job hunting, reports "I have signed up to outlier.ai to make some $$$ on the side. No instructions necessary."

 

Peter G. repeats a recurring theme of lost packages, saying "(Insert obligatory snark about Americans and geography. No, New Zealand isn't located in Washington DC)." A very odd coincidence, since neither the lat/long nor the zip code are particularly interesting.

 

"The Past Is Mutable," declares Caleb Su , explaining "In the race to compete with Gmail feature scheduling emails to send in the *future*, Outlook now lets you send emails in the past! Clearly, someone at Microsoft deserves a Nobel Prize for defying the basic laws of unidirectional time." That's thinking different.

 

Explorer xOneca explains this snapshot: "Was going to watch a Youtube video in DuckDuckGo, and while diagnosing why it wasn't playing I found this. It seems that youtube-nocookie.com actually *sets* cookies..?"

 

Morgan either found or made a funny. But it is a funny. "Now when I think about it I do like Option 3 more…" I rate this question a ????

 

Quality control is an important business function for any company. When your company is shipping devices with safety concerns, it's even more important. In some industries, a quality control failure is bound to be national headlines.

When the quality control software tool stopped working, everyone panicked. At which point, GRH stepped in.

Now, we've discussed this software and GRH before, but as a quick recap, it was:

written by someone who is no longer employed with the company, as part of a project managed by someone who is no longer at the company, requested by an executive who is also no longer at the company. There are no documented requirements, very few tests, and a lot of "don't touch this, it works".

And this was a quality control tool. So we're already in bad shape. It also had been unmaintained for years- a few of the QC engineers had tried to take it over, but weren't programmers, and it had essentially languished.

Specifically, it was a quality control tool used to oversee the process by about 50 QC engineers. It automates a series of checks by wrapping around third party software tools, in a complex network of "this device gets tested by generating output in program A, feeding it to program B, then combining the streams and sending them to the device, but this device gets tested using programs D, E, and F."

The automated process using the tool has a shockingly low error rate. Without the tool, doing things manually, the error rate climbs to 1-2%. So unless everyone wanted to see terrifying headlines in the Boston Globe about their devices failing, GRH needed to fix the problem.

GRH was given the code, in this case a a zip file on a shared drive. It did not, at the start, even build. After fighting with the project configuration to resolve that, GRH was free to start digging in deeper.

Public Sub connect2PCdb()
        Dim cPath As String = Path.Combine(strConverterPath, "c.pfx")
        Dim strCN As String

        ' JES 12/6/2016: Modify the following line if MySQL server is changed to a different server.  A dump file will be needed to re-create teh database in the new server.
        strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;sslmode=Required;certificatepassword=REDACTED;certificatefile=REDACTEDc.pfx;password=REDACTED'"
        strCN = Regex.Replace(strCN, "certificatefile=.*?pfx", "certificatefile=" & cPath)
        pcContext = New Entities(strCN)
        strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;persistsecurityinfo=True;database=REDACTED;password=REDACTED'"
        strCN = Regex.Match(strCN, ".*'(.*)'").Groups(1).Value

        Try
            strCN = pcContext.Database.Connection.ConnectionString
            cnPC.ConnectionString = "server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;password=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;"
            cnPC.Open()
        Catch ex As Exception

        End Try
    End Sub

This is the code which connects to the backend database. The code is in the category of more of a trainwreck than a WTF. It's got a wonderful mix of nonsense in here, though- a hard-coded connection string which includes plaintext passwords, regex munging to modify the string, then hard-coding a string again, only to use regexes to extract a subset of the string. A subset we don't use.

And then, for a bonus, the whole thing has a misleading comment- "modify the following line" if we move to a different server? We have to modify several lines, because we keep copy/pasting the string around.

Oh, and of course, it uses the pattern of "open a database connection at application startup, and just hold that connection forever," which is a great way to strain your database as your userbase grows.

The good news about the hard-coded password is that it got GRH access to the database. With that, it was easy to see what the problem was: the database was full. The system was overly aggressive with logging, the logs went to database tables, the server was an antique with a rather small hard drive, and the database wasn't configured to even use all of that space anyway.

Cleaning up old logs got the engineers working again. GRH kept working on the code, though, cleaning it up and modernizing it. Updating to latest version of the .NET Core framework modified the data access to be far simpler, and got rid of the need for hard-coded connection strings. Still, GRH left the method looking like this:

    Public Sub connect2PCdb()
        'Dim cPath As String = Path.Combine(strConverterPath, "c.pfx")
        'Dim strCN As String

        ' JES 12/6/2016: Modify the following line if MySQL server is changed to a different server.  A dump file will be needed to re-create teh database in the new server.
        'strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;sslmode=Required;certificatepassword=REDACTED;certificatefile=REDACTEDc.pfx;password=REDACTED'"
        'strCN = Regex.Replace(strCN, "certificatefile=.*?pfx", "certificatefile=" & cPath)
        'pcContext = New Entities(strCN)
        'strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;persistsecurityinfo=True;database=REDACTED;password=REDACTED'"
        'strCN = Regex.Match(strCN, ".*'(.*)'").Groups(1).Value

        'GRH 2021-01-15.  Connection information moved to App.Config
        'GRH 2021-08-13.  EF Core no longer supports App.Config method
        pcContext = New PcEntities

        Try
            ' GRH 2021-08-21  This variable no longer exists in .NET 5
            'strCN = pcContext.Database.Connection.ConnectionString
            ' GRH 2021-08-20  Keeping the connection open causes EF Core to not work
            'cnPC.ConnectionString = "server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;password=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;SslMode=none"
            'cnPC.Open()
        Catch ex As Exception

        End Try
    End Sub

It's now a one-line method, with most of the code commented out, instead of removed. Why on Earth is the method left like that?

GRH explains:

Yes, I could delete the function as it is functionally dead, but I keep it for the same reasons that a hunter mounts a deer's head above her mantle.

For years, Victoria had a co-worker who "programmed by Google Search"; they didn't understand how anything worked, they simply plugged their problem into Google search and then copy/pasted and edited until they got code that worked. For this developer, I'm sure ChatGPT has been a godsend, but this code predates its wide use. It's pure "Googlesauce".

    StringBuffer stringBuffer = new StringBuffer();
    stringBuffer.append("SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COLUMN1 = 1 WITH UR");

    String sqlStr = stringBuffer.toString();
    ps = getConnection().prepareStatement(sqlStr);

    ps.setInt(1, code);

    rs = ps.executeQuery();

    while (rs.next())
    {
      count++;
    }

The core of this WTF isn't anything special- instead of running a SELECT COUNT they run a SELECT and then loop over the results to get the count. But it's all the little details in here which make it fun.

They start by using a StringBuffer to construct their query- not a horrible plan when the query is long, but this is just a single, simple, one-line query. The query contains a WITH clause, but it's in the wrong spot. Then they prepareStatement it, which does nothing, since this query doesn't contain any parameters (and also, isn't syntactically valid). Once it's prepared, they set the non-existent parameter 1 to a value- this operation will throw an exception because there are no parameters in the query.

Finally, they loop across the results to count.

The real WTF is that this code ended up in the code base, somehow. The developer said, "Yes, this seems good, I'll check in this non-functional blob that I definitely don't understand," and then there were no protections in place to keep that from happening. Now it falls to more competent developers, like Victoria, to clean up after this co-worker.

Since it's election day in the US, many people are thinking about counting today. We frequently discuss counting here, and how to do it wrong, so let's look at some code from RK.

This code may not be counting votes, but whatever it's counting, we're not going to enjoy it:

case LogMode.Row_limit: // row limit excel = 65536 rows
    if (File.Exists(personalFolder + @"" + fileName + ".CSV"))
    {
        using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(personalFolder + @"" + fileName + ".CSV"))
        {
            countRows = reader.ReadToEnd().Split(new char[] { '
' }).Length;
        }
    }

Now, this code is from a rather old application, originally released in 2007. So the comment about Excel's row limit really puts us in a moment in time- Excel 2007 raised the row limit to 1,000,000 rows. But older versions of Excel did cap out at 65,536. And it wasn't the case that everyone just up and switched to Excel 2007 when it came out- transitioning to the new Office file formats was a conversion which took years.

But we're not even reading an Excel file, we're reading a CSV.

I enjoy that we construct the name twice, because that's useful. But the real magic of this one is how we count the rows. Because while Excel can handle 65,536 rows at this time, I don't think this program is going to do a great job of it- because we read the entire file into memory with ReadToEnd, then Split on newlines, then count the length that way.

As you can imagine, in practice, this performed terribly on large files, of which there were many.

Unfortunately for RK, there's one rule about old, legacy code: don't touch it. So despite fixing this being a rather easy task, nobody is working on fixing it, because nobody wants to be the one who touched it last. Instead, management is promising to launch a greenfield replacement project any day now…

There's the potential for endless installments of "programmers not understanding how UUIDs work." Frankly, I think the fact that we represent them as human readable strings is part of the problem; sure, it's readable, but conceals the fact that it's just a large integer.

Which brings us to this snippet, from Capybara James.

    if (!StringUtils.hasLength(uuid) || uuid.length() != 36) {
        throw new RequestParameterNotFoundException(ErrorCodeCostants.UUID_MANDATORY_OR_FORMAT);
    }

StringUtils.hasLength comes from the Spring library, and it's a simple "is not null or empty" check. So- we're testing to see if a string is null or empty, or isn't exactly 36 characters long. That tells us the input is bad, so we throw a RequestParameterNotFoundException, along with an error code.

So, as already pointed out, a UUID is just a large integer that we render as a 36 character string, and there are better ways to validate a UUID. But this also will accept any 36 character string- as long as you've got 36 characters, we'll call it a UUID. "This is valid, really valid, dumbass" is now a valid UUID.

With that in mind, I also like the bonus of it not distinguishing between whether or not the input was missing or invalid, because that'll make it real easy for users to understand why their input is getting rejected.

Not all winged dinosaurs were necessarily capable of full flight, but this anatomical feature may have enabled them to travel further by flapping or gliding

In a wetland on the south coast of England, archaeologists dug up one of the oldest and most complete wooden tools ever found in Britain, which is around 3500 years old

Zapping the skin with electricity could stop bacteria that live there harmlessly from entering the body and causing blood poisoning

A lithium-ion battery made from three droplets of hydrogel is the smallest soft battery of its kind – and it could be used in biocompatible and biodegradable implants

A typically fragile quantum superposition has been made to last exceptionally long, and could eventually be used as a probe for discovering new physics

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car

Light can be directed and steered around bends using a method similar to the way clouds scatter photons, which could lead to advances in medical imaging, cooling systems and even nuclear reactors

A bird flu virus that has been circulating in dairy cattle for months has now been found in a pig in the US for the first time, raising the risk of the virus evolving to become more dangerous to people

Soil is full of an uncountable number of viruses, and scientists are only beginning to understand just how substantial their role in the carbon cycle may be

Zinc nanoparticles, a common sunscreen ingredient, can make plants more resilient to climate change – in a surprising way

One day, doctors might be able to 3D print copies of your organs in order to test a variety of drugs, thanks to a new technique that uses light and sound for rapid printing

Experiments where vampire bats were made to run on a treadmill have revealed how they extract energy from protein in their latest blood meal

When it comes to the survival of animals living in the wild, the characteristics of the group can matter as much as the traits of the individual, according to a study in marmots