161 karma · joined February 19, 2008
Client (incident response dept at megacorp) had a problem: their quarterly exercises of switching network storage devices from live servers to disaster recovery (DR) servers was a manual operation of reconciling about 8 Excel spreadsheets and setting up ACLs before (luckily) an automated process would switch the storage mounts from live to DR.
We modeled and matched up all the hosts, servers, and ACLs and did a daily write to a single SQLite database. (We redundantly sent all the data to Splunk.) Now the DR employees are automating a daily diff of servers, hosts, ACLs etc to further automate the switch.
To echo a bunch of comments here, we decided on SQLite for a few reasons:
- only one user would write to the DB - only a few users need to access the data - besides standard retention policies, the data could be considered ephemeral and easily recompiled - the script we wrote to compile the data runs in 5 minutes, so if we lose the db, we can easily recompile it.
SQLite (and SQLalchemy) is useful for inexpensive data.
10% of campers are going to camp > 10 times a year and have nuanced opinions about tents. Occasionally, these campers will post their lengthy tent opinions on Reddit, but mostly they'll stay quiet because they already know what the best tent for their own uses is and don't need to deliberate on it.
- sometimes when I'd buy something at the chino (corner store run by Chinese immigrants), I'd get candy instead of my change back, due to the coin shortage. No arguing with them about that.
- I would get empanadas down the street at a bakery almost every day, and the woman who owned it would complain and almost start crying if I brought a bill that was too big (like a 100-peso note). I would occasionally buy fewer items than I wanted because I had smaller bills. I think she was happier that way.
- the best exchange rate for American dollars was the downtown grey market on Avenida Florida, where tourists would frequent. I would just walk down and guys would notice me as a tourist, and say "cambio allá" and point me around a corner, where I could trade American dollars for whatever the rate in pesos was that week. There was an official unofficial exchange rate, better than the official exchange rate.
- across the river, Uruguay just straight up abandoned their own peso and used American dollars instead. Same with Ecuador as I later found.
- when I got tired of wine, I'd get beer at this brewery in Palermo -- Orion, I think it was called. I can't remember. But I do remember in October 2012, beers cost about 24 pesos and were about 36 pesos by spring 2013. Cheaper for me since my wallet was backed by USD, but that just meant I drank more beer. :)
I really miss BA sometimes.
For example, I'm working on a cli for a client that ingests a bunch of spreadsheets and processes the data in an SQLite db. Pretty lightweight, but it takes a half hour to run. Using Jupyter notebooks to import some classes and iterate on SQL queries without needing the entire corpus of data is handy.
It is an absolute cf because the current system is a bowl of manually verified spreadsheet spaghetti that exists mostly in two guys' heads. We are currently discovering that no one knows how many servers don't actually have recovery backups ready because the buck has been passed so often and so many people have come and gone.
So I totally believe some employee as the single point of buck-passing would absolutely rubber stamp metallurgical tests just to avoid jamming up the system.
I wonder why this is, what the opposite (lacking mother) percentage is, and why that wasn't so salient.
Ungulate seemed promising, but similarly returned nothing. Maybe a generic name next?
He often discusses current events in infosec if you're into that.
I think certain species are intractable and unable to be domesticated, while others seem to be much more pliable. It took only six generations [1] to domesticate silver foxes.
1. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...
I am also convinced cardinals and blue jays get along great with each other but are "not like other birds" types.
So yeah, I've found my way out and here's my advice: it's a numbers game. Keep trying things. Even if you try to make a roguelike for 5 minutes and move on, that's a valuable lesson. Now try 100 more things and you might stick with 3 or 4.