My notes on information technology, technology, science and other matters, as taken from various podcasts, videos and other online flotsam, and summarized on Twitter. This month: Tech Notes, July 2020: Perl or Raku, Conway’s Law & CI/CD, HTML for code fragments, a few corny database jokes, content production vs. user-facing apps, a (somewhat) easy trick to understanding file permission octals, and why the devil doesn't execute ...
Tech Notes
Development
Larry Wall’s rewrite of #Perl version 5.8 differed so much that it was just renamed as another language altogether, Raku. But what about those of us who were OK with the earlier edition? @thenewstack's @rwwmike on the surprise return of Perl. https://t.co/rkGZMa9TsW
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 2, 2020
"One gating issue we often have is it’s hard to find people who really look at other people’s code and help funnel that code upstream...That’s something which I think we need to continue working on."--Linus Torvalds #Linux @linuxfoundation https://t.co/bcic31lUQ3 @DavidCasselTNS
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 3, 2020
CI/CD is the purest expression of Conway’s Law: your CI/CD pipeline will be broken and messy in exactly the same ways your engineering org is broken and messy. https://t.co/KHB7su003S pic.twitter.com/j0SScRTS4I
— John Arundel (@bitfield) May 16, 2020
“By creating and switching to a new context in Docker, a developer can simply issue an up command via Docker Compose, which will create those resources automatically in AWS” -- @CarmenAPuccio, @awscloud @Docker @thenewstack https://t.co/FIeSOm4kI6
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 9, 2020
#HTML for code fragments: "Use <code> for inline code that can wrap and <pre><code> for block code that must not wrap. <samp> is for sample output." https://t.co/rPXBaTpaiU #WebDev 2011
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 18, 2020
brutal https://t.co/uBIzt10rWh
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 22, 2020
"Content delivery networks were the OG #serverless. You’re not going to worry about Linux and Apache because you can deploy to any distributed global network that can serve essentially markup, JavaScript, CSS and static files." -- @rauchg on the #JAMstack https://t.co/7bPsdBcLBz
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 24, 2020
Data
Whether @oraclecloud realizes it or not, the future looks a lot more like "customers migrating in who aren't Oracle database customers" than other Oracle business units believe. This is a long term trend that there's no reversing.
— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) July 8, 2020
😂 Tag an #engineer that needs a laugh! pic.twitter.com/tjdkXdt3Sp
— Women Who Code (@WomenWhoCode) July 7, 2020
Graph databases are designed to more easily capture the relations across different entities. “Graph databases allow you to model your data more efficiently by using relationships" -- @DeniseKGosnell @DataStax @thenewstack https://t.co/NSjYdNIoQ2
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 17, 2020
— Paige Roberts (@RobertsPaige) July 24, 2020
Operations
“Somebody who has stood up a cluster on three Raspberry PIs in their basement and writes an article about how Kubernetes is great has a very different perspective than somebody who has run it at scale...”-- @blatanterror @CLoudNativeFDN @thenewstack https://t.co/i0WFjPTG68 #K8s
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 6, 2020
While streaming has a few dozen applications with huge footprint, content production has a large number
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 15, 2020
of applications with very small footprint. -- @Netflix's @ghermeto on reusing #NodeJS for different workloads, with a plug-in system. https://t.co/HrHIwqvjhu #OpenJSWorld pic.twitter.com/5EiCLDKmGB
A @CloudNativeFdn survey found that 17% of #Kubernetes users deployed #Rancher, with only AWS, Google and Azure garnering a larger user base, while only 10 of 1,197 Kubernetes users deployed #SUSE software to manage containers --@LawrenceHecht @thenewstack https://t.co/SXApVavhz5
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 8, 2020
.@googlecloud recognized that most of its customers have multiple cloud providers. This is problematic insofar that “it makes it difficult for people to run their analytics when their data is siloed across multiple clouds”--Debanjan Saha https://t.co/4mOhg7Bro9 #GoogleCloudNext
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 15, 2020
In many cases with #Unix/#Linux, if you want to view the contents of a file, using the cat command works just fine. cat won't work for binary files, because binary files contain non-printing characters (Or non-ASCII characters). od to the rescue! https://t.co/9WwnXS7kEo #sysadmin
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 21, 2020
A (Somewhat) Easy Trick to Understanding File Permission Octals https://t.co/oePMSpic7Y #Linux #Sysadmin
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 22, 2020
The devil doesn't execute... #Linux https://t.co/5YkuaVeAhB
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 22, 2020
]"The cause of this outage was deployment of a single misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. [The rule] contained a regular expression that caused CPU to spike to 100% on our machines worldwide." https://t.co/20qWM1OB7x
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 27, 2020
"From a price-performance curve, it was obvious to me, but so many people in the high-performance computing community completely rejected the idea without even considering it."--@NASA's Donald Becker on the birth of Cluster Computing, 2005 https://t.co/M5q5bqgBkU #HPC
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 28, 2020
Security
LinkedIn is copying the contents of my clipboard every keystroke. IOS 14 allows users to see each paste notification.
— Don 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 urspace.io (@DonCubed) July 2, 2020
I’m on an IPad Pro and it’s copying from the clipboard of my MacBook Pro.
Tik tok just got called out for this exact reason. pic.twitter.com/l6NIT8ixEF
Pretty wild a service as large as Twitter’s can still be hacked through social engineering... Where’s the resiliency? https://t.co/TpvLx0w83K
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 16, 2020
As many as 1/2 of all community-built #Terraform modules are misconfigured, opening the path for potential #security breaches in infrastructure-as-code-driven systems -- w/ @LawrenceHecht https://t.co/7DFKVmHwxi @HashiCorp @bridgecrewio #sponsors #IaC #ProgrammableInfrastructure
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 24, 2020
Machine Learning
“The goal of a human life is not merely to be born into the world, but to also grow up in it. To this end, it should be possible for each child to acquire knowledge, develop their capacities, and express themselves creatively.” —Computer #AI, https://t.co/zUTqbjR3is @kimberleymok
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 23, 2020
I quite often describe machine learning as giving you infinite interns. This can be a useful way to look at how ML would affect a product: sometimes having infinite free interns to look at data for you wouldn’t actually solve your problems, and the struggle is something else.
— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) July 6, 2020
What Elon says here is false. We will not have level 5 autonomous cars on our roads in 2020. It will not happen.https://t.co/b3CcnKE3Tb
— Rodney Brooks (@rodneyabrooks) July 9, 2020
GPT-3 imitating human text: We aren't pulling the mask off the machine to reveal a genius wizard, we're pulling the mask off each other to reveal the bar is low.
— Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) July 17, 2020
.@ODNIgov issues guiding principles for ethical artificial intelligence https://t.co/NlgFebt69U
— FedScoop (@fedscoop) July 24, 2020
COVID-19
Samuel spittin’ pic.twitter.com/HVtz8jsmM5
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 3, 2020
A very handy personal #COVID19 risk assessment tool, especially when traveling... “COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool” https://t.co/FLRvrJ7f9a via @sjvn
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 22, 2020
Hardware
“...using all 16k of your memory” 😂😂 https://t.co/cx7j5WnTmU
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 2, 2020
Stanley Kubrick invented the idea of the tablet, a good half decade before the PC? https://t.co/qzT0ps6VkX
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 3, 2020
Surveillance Capitalism
Why the hell does @Google need my **sexual orientation** for the #GoogleCloudNext2020 registration???? pic.twitter.com/Qe6240czd5
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 15, 2020
Google wants to know your sexual orientation in exchange for attending one of its conferences -- but only if you are cool with it... https://t.co/i14WSMph2i
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 16, 2020
You can not create a new location on @instagram. Only Instagram itself can determine what is or is not a “location” in the world 😂 https://t.co/cl3Fhgofja
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 19, 2020
Culture
When Bitcoin VCs attack... https://t.co/QTjUEJcqdZ
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 1, 2020
funny how the people who really SHOULD suffer from Imposter Syndrome don't...
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 3, 2020
Among other unexpected treasures, @NewberryLibrary's exhaustive Herman Melville collection includes a modern Ravensburger board game rendition of Moby Dick (1851)! pic.twitter.com/WmhStkchLG
— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) July 3, 2020
#KnivesOut: it’s not about sifting through the rubble of ambiguity to find the truth, but about being able to deal with the truth when it shows up... pic.twitter.com/GjMnL9Gd7c
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 26, 2020
What happens if you take the red pill AND the blue pill?
— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) July 27, 2020
Not only can he read electronic mail, but he can send it too! https://t.co/rT0QSBuT7h
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 28, 2020
Open Source
“We’re not in the foundation business. We’re not in the marketing business. We’re not in the conference business. The goal is not to be the Linux Foundation, or Apache Software Foundation or Software Freedom Conservancy”—@cdibona, @thenewstack https://t.co/wgCpngLdMB #OpenSource
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 10, 2020
8 months into deciding not to donate the #OpenSource, #Istio #serviceMesh to CNCF (or some other software org), Google is already alienating project contributors, IBM and Tetrate among them. Is this #WebServices fragmentation all over again? @thenewstack https://t.co/WyItfW4mPD
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 23, 2020
"“If the foundation is not really good, you put it out there and people will build stuff on it, and it’s like a building, it will collapse eventually.”--@soloio_inc's @Idit_Levine on Google's @IstioMesh, @thenewstack https://t.co/8k6pvn5G1R @rwwmike #K8s
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 28, 2020
Time
In medieval timekeeping, a MOMENT was precisely 1/40th of an hour—or exactly 90 seconds. pic.twitter.com/BS81obOrVn
— Haggard Hawks 🦅 (@HaggardHawks) July 28, 2020
Curios
Day in the life of a tech editor... https://t.co/HWzuaGWcL0
— Joab Jackson (@Joab_Jackson) July 12, 2020
In summary, Leonardo da Vinci was a man who rapidly switched from one hyperfocus to another. He rarely completed any of his grandiose projects and even considered his life a failure.
— Robert Merki (@robmerki) July 29, 2020
He was a genius artist & inventor who suffered from obvious ADHD symptoms.
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