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progmetaldev

699 karma · joined March 14, 2021

I am currently a senior web developer, with an interest in all aspects of development, including non-web based projects. Here to learn and share, with over 30 years of development and programming experience.
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progmetaldev··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Unfortunately, this will also expose your IP address, which may leave you vulnerable even when the WAF and DDoS protections come back up (unless you take the time to only listen for Cloudflare IP address ranges, which could still take a beefy server if you're having to filter large amounts of traffic).
progmetaldev··on The Art of Atari (2016)
The box art for Haunted House (not the racy, original version) always frightened me as a child. I got the same feeling when I would go through my dad's vinyl collection and would run into the cover of The Moody Blues' "On The Threshold Of A Dream." The surreal style captured the types of nightmares I would have when young.

Atari Haunted House: https://e.snmc.io/lk/o/x/5585d64c8bad9592834b18b0c8394b44/10...

On The Threshold Of A Dream: https://rockandrollglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2505...

progmetaldev··on Tell HN: Azure outage
I have had intermittent issues with winget today. I use UniGetUI for a front-end, and anything tied to Microsoft has failed for me. Judging by the logs, it's mostly retrieving the listing of versions (I assume similar to what 'apt-get update' does, I'm fairly new to using winget for Windows package management).
progmetaldev··on Tell HN: Azure outage
These stores appear everywhere, even in areas with high income. You'd be surprised, but often people with those high incomes shop for certain products at very low rates, and that's how they keep their savings. A good example is garbage bags. Most people don't care too much about the quality of their garbage bags, unless they rip on the way to the bin.
progmetaldev··on Tell HN: Azure outage
My card tied to my main financial institution have the raised digits, but most cards you'd sign up for online now no longer have the raised digits (and often allow you to select art to appear on the card face).
progmetaldev··on Tell HN: Azure outage
Unfortunately they are largely corporate, which is how they can sell items for such a cheap price. The store manager probably has zero say in nearly anything. Even if they wanted to "break the rules," I doubt they could make use of your connection as a backup, but I've also worked for smaller companies that were able to sell internet access to individual locations like Denny's and various large hotels in the US. Being able to somehow share sales would be the difficult part, since all sales are reported back to corporate.

Good luck if you make this work for you, it would be exciting to hear about if you're able to get them to work with you.

progmetaldev··on Tell HN: Azure outage
They still capture the name on the card, so I would be careful about trying this, unless you can make use of a prepaid card.
progmetaldev··on Tell HN: Azure outage
Currently even the Front Door landing page is only partially loading.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/frontdoor

progmetaldev··on Tell HN: Azure outage
I was having issues a few hours ago. I'm now able to access the portal, although I get lots of errors in the browser console, and things are loading slowly. I have services in the US-East region.

I have been having issues with GitHub and the winget tool for updates throughout the day as well. I imagine things are pulling from the same locations on Azure for some of the software I needed to update (NPM dependencies, and some .NET tooling).

progmetaldev··on Erowid - Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans and Psychoactives
I would have as well. I remember in the 1990's seeing teens on TV that had taken it, and they were smoking imaginary cigarettes, and speaking to people that weren't there. I thought that sounded amazing until I read the trip reports about psychosis and the lethality of the dosage.
progmetaldev··on Erowid - Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans and Psychoactives
This site helped me tremendously in my youth, with staying safe and giving me actual knowledge about different chemicals, rather than the complete abstinence information from programs like DARE. At one point, I found that a psychoactive chemical I was taking had a serious side effect with a prescription I was taking, and that information was nowhere to be found through web searches. Without Erowid, I definitely would have permanently damaged my liver! I don't think we should necessarily be marketing psychoactives to the youth, but I'm glad that this type of information is available for those that choose to search for it.
progmetaldev··on Safe zero-copy operations in C#
My most expensive resource is RAM, so I've used performance profiling tools to make sure I'm using it efficiently as I can. At this point, I think I would need to start directly profiling the CMS libraries, and start contributing performance improvements there.
progmetaldev··on Safe zero-copy operations in C#
I've definitely fine-tuned my headers, and using all the features of the CDN that are available. The improvements I made were after taking a look into the performance profiling tools, where I could see improvements to be made in RAM-usage (which tends to be the most expensive for these sites).
progmetaldev··on A SQL Heuristic: ORs Are Expensive
This website taught me a ton, even after I thought I knew more than enough about performance. Just seeing how different databases generate and execute their SQL is a huge boon (and sometimes extremely surprising when looking at one DBMS to another).
progmetaldev··on A SQL Heuristic: ORs Are Expensive
If you are looking to squeeze every ounce of performance from your entire application stack, I'd say you should be looking at everything your ORM produces. The ORM is basically to speed up your developers time to production, but most ORMs will have some cases where they generate terrible SQL, and you can usually run your own SQL in a stored procedure if the generated SQL is sub-optimal. I've done this quite a few times with Microsoft's Entity Framework, but as new versions come out, it's become less common for me to have to do this. Usually I need to drop to a stored procedure for code that allows searching a large number of columns, in addition to sorting on all the columns that display. I also use stored procedures for multi-table joins with a WHERE clause, when using Entity Framework. You still need to look at your generated queries, but the code is nothing like it used to be under Entity Framework under the .NET Framework (at least in my experience - YMMV - you should never just let your ORM create SQL without reviewing what it is coming up with).
progmetaldev··on Safe zero-copy operations in C#
I truly appreciate articles like this. I am using the Umbraco CMS, and have written code to use lower than the recommended requirements to keep the entire system running. While I don't see a use for using a Span<T> yet, I could definitely see it being useful for a website with an enormous amount of content.

I am currently looking into making use of "public readonly record struct" for the models that I create for my views. Of course, I need to performance profile the code versus using standard classes with readonly properties where appropriate, but since most of my code is short-lived for pulling from the CMS to hydrate classes for the views, I'm not sure how much of a benefit I will get. Luckily I'm in a position to work on squeezing as much performance as possible between major projects.

I'm curious if anyone has found any serious performance benefit from using a Span<T> or a "public readonly record struct" in a .NET CMS, where the pages are usually fire and forget? I have spent years (since 2013) trying to squeeze every ounce of performance from the code, as I work with quite a few smaller businesses, and even the rest of my team are starting to look into Wix or Squarespace, since it doesn't require a "me" to be involved to get a site up and running.

To my credit and/or surprise, I haven't dealt with a breach to my knowledge, and I read logs and am constantly reviewing code as it is my passion (at least working within the confines of the Umbraco CMS, although it isn't my only place of knowledge). I used to work with PHP and CodeIgniter pre-2013 (then Kohana a bit while making the jump from PHP to .NET). I enjoy C#, and feel like I am able to gain quite a bit of performance from it, but if anyone has any ideas for me on how to create even more value from this, I would be extremely interested.

progmetaldev··on Mesh: I tried Htmx, then ditched it
I have been using the Umbraco CMS since 2013, and they moved from AngularJS 1.x to Lit for the backend technology. While it was frustrating at first, due to a lack of documentation around the specific CMS APIs, I can see that it was a great choice to move towards a more "standard" technology that is somewhat agnostic of a full library. Working with web components makes so much more sense to me than the way AngularJS works, as well as the React and Vue tutorials I've followed. If I found a killer feature implemented in React or Vue, I could still make use of my Lit web components without having to toss out everything and rebuild.
progmetaldev··on React is winning by default and slowing innovation
I have been taking a deep-dive into Lit recently, because the CMS I use (Umbraco) has built their BackOffice (CMS management interface) in it. It has been fairly easy to grok, other than learning the CMS specific libraries.

With that said, HTMX feels like the progressive enhancement solution I wish I had back when I was doing so with jQuery (and Prototype.JS even before that). I appreciate your solution, and definitely want to take a deeper look in the future. For applications, I still tend to use ASP.NET (Core, whatever you want to call the current open-source version of .NET). HTMX seems like a perfect solution to progressively enhance an application, while your library does far more for controlling how library code is written in JavaScript than a gigantic mess of jQuery scripts with shared state.

progmetaldev··on The Color of the Future: A history of blue
I paint with blue fairly often. I understand that it might be the hardest to create artificially, but it is done regularly in the modern world.

Could the fascination be due to psychological reasons, like blue light being linked to sleep difficulties? This seems to be the current world we live in, where blue light filters exist to help prevent sleep disorders. Perhaps because our skies are increasingly gray with pollution, so blue gives us hope of a future where our air is clean and without smog?

I might be missing the entire point of the article, but I feel that if I am, my fellow HNers are with me (even if they don't believe the same thing).

progmetaldev··on Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress
I think the fact that you are able to even setup a VM with GPU-passthrough probably means your knowledge of using Linux is far greater than most coming from Windows and Mac. I'm someone that uses Visual Studio for work often, but the fact that you can do GPU-passthrough gives me some hope that I could switch to Linux full-time, and make it work. Even though your comment was about games, I appreciate that you posted and gave me some hope. Most of the software I write now in .NET is able to run on Linux, but the specific CMS I use is still tied to MS SQL Server for production. I can use SQLite for development, but moving from SQLite to MS SQL Server is quite a big extra step. If I can use Visual Studio and MS SQL Server (Express) in a VM, I can do most of my daily tasks directly in Linux.
progmetaldev··on What to expect from Debian/Trixie
Curious what you run, instead of Debian. I haven't had the same experience as you've had, but for myself, Debian has just worked other than having to provide my own wireless adapter driver .so file when I installed off a thumb drive without an Ethernet connection. While I have more experience than the average Linux user, and got started with Slackware in the 90's and then moved to Red Hat in the very late 90's, it's been a good 20 years since I used a Linux system full time. That's as a desktop, I've had no issues running as an application server for 2 decades.

I haven't run into a scenario where the desktop has caused me issues, only with Windows-only software that I sometimes require. What software has caused you issues that doesn't play nicely with Debian? What hacks are in place to mitigate upstream issues? I'm honestly curious, and if you don't use Debian, what distribution do you use regularly?

progmetaldev··on What to expect from Debian/Trixie
Are you running your own system for personal use, a service available to the public, or both? Do you normally see your system used consistently, or does it get used differently (and in random ways)?

Since you state you're running a browser, I assume you mean for personal use. Unfortunately, when you run a service open to the public, you can find all kinds of odd traffic even for normal low-memory services. Sometimes you'll get hit with an aggressive bot looking for an exploit, and a lot of those bots don't care if they get blocked, because they are built to absolutely crush a system with exploits or login attempts where they are only blocked by the system crashing.

I'd say that most bots are this aggressive, because the old school "script kiddies", or now it's just AI-enabled aggressors, just run code without understanding things. It's easier than ever to run an attack against a range of IP addresses looking for vulnerabilities, that can be chained into a LLM to generate code that can be run easily.

progmetaldev··on What to expect from Debian/Trixie
I think you're 100% correct in that this isn't a normal event to occur. I believe it's probably one of those things where someone felt that setting it to memory is just more efficient in the general case, and they happened to be skilled in that part of development, and felt it added value.

Maybe the developer runs a standard desktop version, but also uses it personally as a server for some kind of personal itch or software, on actual desktop hardware? Maybe I'm overthinking it, or the developer that wrote this code has the ability to fix more important issues, but went with this instead. I've tackled optimization before where it wasn't needed at the time, but it happened to be something I was looking into, and I felt my time investment could pay off in cases where resources were being pushed to their limits. I work with a lot of small to mid-sized businesses that can actually gain from seemingly small improvements like this.

progmetaldev··on What to expect from Debian/Trixie
This is exactly why I use Debian when I install Linux. I want something that will keep chugging along, yet may not have the most cutting edge software. I can take my time with the system, and know that it is solid.

If I need newer software that isn't in their package repository, I understand that I have the ability to compile what I need, or at least make an active decision to modify my system to run what I want. Basically, the possibility of instability is a conscious choice for me, which I do sometimes take.

progmetaldev··on LetsEncrypt Outage
Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but local government's legal system is not the "one authority which matters." What local government is able to keep up to date on TLS certificates?

Your users that visit your website and get a TLS warning are the authority to worry about, if you're running a business that needs security. Depending on what you're selling, that one user could be a gigantic chunk of your business. Showing your local government that you have a process in place to renew your TLS certificates, and your provider was down is most likely going to be more than enough to indemnify you for any kind of maliciousness or ignorance (ignorantia juris non excusat). Obviously, different countries/locations have varying laws, but I highly doubt you'd be held liable for such a major outage for a company that is in such heavy use. Honestly, if you were held liable, or think you would be for this type of event, I'd think twice about operating from that location.

progmetaldev··on Show HN: Beyond Z²+C, Plot Any Fractal
I spent many hours experimenting with Fractint, trying to get the inner and outer coloring just right, along with the zoom magnification that I could handle walking away from the computer for long enough to get something interesting. The worst was zooming somewhere that looked interesting, and coming back many hours later to find out you had nothing of value.

I spent my early teen years addicted to Fractint, before I could even really show off my creations except in person to my friends. I still look back at those days as more interesting with computers than now. Maybe I need to go back and write my own software to render fractals (or work on existing fractal software and see if I can improve it). In the mid-2000's, I was using GnoFract4D to render fractals, and the results were far more impressive. A change in GNOME or Ubuntu created an issue with the render window for me, and I ended up abandoning it.

progmetaldev··on GPUHammer: Rowhammer attacks on GPU memories are practical
Shame is an underrated way towards pushing for better standards. The problem is getting people in the know, and having them vote with their wallet, or at least public sentiment (social media pressure).
progmetaldev··on Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers
Curious if the content on those sites might have high value to Google? Such as if they have data that is new or unavailable elsewhere, or if they're just standard sites, and you've just been unlucky?

I have had odd bot behavior from some major crawlers, but never from Google. I wonder if there is a correlation to usefulness of content, or if certain sites get stuck in a software bug (or some other strange behavior).

progmetaldev··on Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers
I believe it's both. We're at a place where legislation hasn't really declared what is and isn't allowed. These scrapers are acting like Googlebot or any other search engine crawler, and trying to find any kind of new content that might be of value to their users.

New data is still being added online daily (probably hourly, if not more often) by humans, and the first ones to gain access could be the "winners," particularly if their users happen to need up to date data (and the service happens to have scraped it). Just like with search engines/crawlers, there's also the big players that may respect your website, but there are also those that don't use rate-limiting or respect robots.txt.

progmetaldev··on Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper
Working for a smaller digital agency, while using .NET Framework, and then moving to .NET Core (now just .NET) this savings was felt. Using a performance profiler and slightly complicating the code a bit (at least in terms of the documentation for the CMS we use), I was able to get the code in less than the minimum recommended requirements for the base CMS software, without having to alter the source of the CMS. I did this with the Umbraco CMS, but also started using it in 2013 when the documentation was lacking, so reading the source code was a requirement to getting as much as possible out of the software.
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