angst_ridden

I've been in discussions with vegans over the 9.1x10^2 to 1.3x10^8 bacteria in the average indoor m^3 of air.

At previous job v.2, changed an IoT system that received daily text files from remote devices from dumping millions of them in the top level of the /data partition to using a /data/YYYY/MM/unit_id/ structure.

The claim was that the original files needed to be kept for audits, even after database ingest.

Management didn't care, but I made the change because I wanted to have my terminal not die if I accidentally typed "ls" in the wrong directory.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I'll have to look into the web-server customizations. One of them has a custom Apache module for talking to a 3rd party mainframe, but that should theoretically be movable too (if it's the correct platform architecture).

Of course, an Apache module's just C code, so how hard could it be to port to another architecture? But in all seriousness, I suspect it's a relatively simple UDP socket communication interface, so it is probably portable.

Thanks for the mention of Wordpress. It is a similar architecture. I'll read up on how to move a Wordpress install, and use that as a model for testing one of these apps.

All good recommendations. I think the difference is in the contracts (I'm reporting second-hand, since I don't have access to the actuals). With Linode, anyway, I do a lot of hosting in VPSes, but these clients have contracts stipulating the hosting company manages/maintains/monitors the OS.

I guess if I were smart, I'd get the actual contractual requirements from the clients. That'll be my next step.

I have some clients who host at Rackspace. They have old-school monolithic web-app architectures (single web server that also runs the application code, and a database server). They're never going to rebuild these legacy application -- the codebases are decades old, and comprise hundreds of thousands of line of code. The support at Rackspace has really cratered, and it's hard to have much faith in their technical capabilities anymore either.

I'm no sysadmin, so I don't know if it's realistic to port this kind of architecture to AWS or Azure. Also, some are contractually obligated to host at a facility that offers "managed hosting" (although I suppose the exact wording could be weaseled) with uptime guarantees and staffing levels.

I'm trying to figure out where I should recommend they move. It doesn't seem like a common use-case anymore.

A lot of folks don't appreciate how quickly normal can turn into dangerous in the wilderness. Because most of the time, it's all so tame. With our specialized gear and tech, there's not much threat ... most of the time.

I've been on mountain peaks on nice summer days when storms appear as out of nowhere (not the typical afternoon rains), and there's lightning, high winds, and 50ºF temperature swings. In that kind of situation, things can turn very dangerous very quickly. Stuff that you take for granted suddenly isn't true any more: some rock which is rough and gives great traction suddenly gets slippery, winds that come from a prevailing direction suddenly come from somewhere else and the formerly sheltered areas aren't any more, clouds and fogs may come in and visibility may drop to zero.

A common trap is slot canyons in the southwest desert in the summer, when it's hot and dry, and hikers don't know about the rains in the distant mountains.

It's easy to turn your back on the ocean, which isn't forgiving. Large waves can happen when least expected.

You can make the the code read-only (from the web-server's perspective) and have auto update if you use a tool like WP-CLI and a cron job.

I've had a few customer's sites on WP for decades without any hacks. But I also carefully restrict their plug-ins, and disable PHP in any of the upload directories.

The actual performance of the cells increases as they get colder. The attenuation due to ice or snow will, of course, reduce power generated.

There's a quotation, which I think may have been Monk, which I've been trying to track down the exact source. It's along the lines of "All I want is a simple melody, and I gotta go through all the bullshit again."

Ring any bells? I had someone tell me that I was completely high and it was Ellison, not Monk, but I cannot confirm.

80-100 miles from Port of Long Beach being 2-3 hours? Have you ever driven on the 110, 405, 105, or 605?

I don't think Le Carré was trying to write high art either, but I think they were interested in different things. Fleming wanted a fast-paced popular thriller, while Le Carré wanted a realistic depiction of spycraft.

Interesting contrasting Fleming's work to that of Le Carré.

A lot of Le Carré's work contains the kinds of details Fleming talks about, but the plots are more complex and the pace is slower.

I also personally find that there's an emotional impact from Le Carré that's lacking in Fleming, but perhaps that's just me.

Based on my experiences in the iOS app store, Apple desperately needs search tuning. Searching for a specific product sometimes yields 3rd party tutorial apps for the product but not the product itself. Following a link from the developer's web site will get me to the product itself.

Amusingly enough, later the same day this occurred, the product in question was featured in an ad banner on the App store.

Yeah, and in gas/oil-fired electric turbines you typically inject a whole lot of water to create more mass going through.

A power plant I worked at in the 90s tried to keep a 4:1 ratio of water to fuel oil.

It was always amusing to explain to lay-folk that we "burned more water than oil," even if it wasn't technically precise.

I just spent half a year in Canada, and my T-Mobile bill was no different. I was limited to 5GB/data/month, but other than that it was just like being in the US.

I'm not at liberty to give specifics right now.

I believe in making things accessible, and strive to do that on all my projects.

I object to abuse of the ADA. Businesses / organizations should be given an opportunity to remediate their web sites before an automated script files an erroneous lawsuit.

I'm afraid I don't have that information. I believe they did their scan last July.

There's a firm in Southern California that's suing restaurants / small theaters / community organizations / etc after bulk-scanning web sites for embedded video that lack links to caption files.

It's all ADA abuse, lawsuits in the $5k-$7k range. A huge percentage of those sued don't have the means to fight back, and settle.

The company that's suing people had some incompetent coder write their scanner, so it only parses the TRACK tag from a video container in certain circumstances. I was able to defend an organization by demonstrating this.

A vigorous countersuit is in the discussion stages.

RBC allows use of their mobile app as 2FA. I don't believe it uses SMS under the hood.

I'm not arguing it's necessarily more secure. I haven't audited it or looked into how it works.

Surprised the tabby mutation is so recent.

I could have sworn I'd seen older depictions in Buddhist art from India, but I'm probably confusing images representing tigers.

The kinds of comments that are useful are less about what the code already tells you is happening, and more things like:

/* we don't use the actual price but the discounted price, as per email from Manager Bob on 2022-09-16 */

subtotal += price * customer_discount_factor;

or

/* note there's a 2ms delay while relays settle; this is subtracted from sample time, so timeout is not what you might expect */

select(0,&readfd,NULL,NULL,&timeout);

I think Naomi Wu's Big Red Switch Box is better. With a seemingly dead drive, an adversary may still try to rubber-hose an access method out of you on the assumption that there's some special sequence to required to gain access. A simply dead drive is suspect, especially given the prevalence of ideas like port knocking, etc.

With the Big Red Switch that throws sparks and emits smoke, the adversary may still inflict punishment on you, but they have no illusions that they can torture you into revealing "the secret way to access it".

I have a carefully curated list of people I follow and who follow me.

I get a lot of value from one-on-one communication with tech expert, artists, authors, and musicians.

It takes some work to keep the lists clean, and you have to access Twitter via a 3rd party app like Echofon to avoid all the ads and crap the company throws into your timeline, but it's definitely worth it to me.

I took a language class with a large number of immigrants. Over the course of the semester, I'd ask each student about their favorite music from their home country. It's been fantastic. I've learned about whole genres of music, and expanded my listening horizons considerably.

One good tool that replicates this process a bit is https://radiooooo.com where you can listen to typical playlists from countries and even from a chosen decade (more or less).

I use C for embedded devices too, although I didn't end up learning C until '88 or '89. At that point, it was on IBM PCs and VAXen instead of my trusty TRS-80.

There was a lot of BASIC, but at least on microcomputers, there was a lot of assembly (if you needed any performance).

I was writing games, and there could be a bit of BASIC wrapper, but the rest was assembler.

I was programming in Z-80 assembler in that timeframe, and was pretty excited by the idea of C. I had previously thought to myself that it would be possible to create a language that simplified the tedious, repetitive tasks in assembler but that didn't add bloat or take away byte-level control like BASIC did.

I was an avid reader of Byte and 80-Micro back then.

For various reasons, I focused on other studies for a few years after that, and didn't immediately learn C until after I went to college. I'm sure if I had learned C in '83, I would have had an entirely different career trajectory.

Oh to be an echinoderm, and to be able to regenerate from just a limb!