Mixed, Toki Pona, PEP-0554, DBA, KPXC, SXC

1. Mixing programming languages makes anyone rarely happy. One project in past contained lots of code in: cmd, ps1, VB .NET, C# .NET, ASP Classic, Python, PHP, SQL and Java. All so nicely mixed, and it was true hell for everyone. Especially situations where same logic had to be re-implemented using another language, because creating interoperable channel between the specific modules would have required too much effort to reuse the existing code from another library. And then we've got all the implementation differences between the versions, etc.

2. Toki Pona (@ tokipona.org) - Had long discussion about how complex and annoying many languages are nowadays. I just happened randomly to encounter some discussion about toki pona, I don't know how I've missed it, but it seemed to fit this topic very well. Toki Pona (@ Wikipedia). It's constructed language and designed to be very simple and easy to learn and use.

3. Temporary Containers for Firefox. Still, after years. They got the same buggy crap code there. It gives overlapping container IDs. So, I can have several containers with ID 23 as well as some times the list shows invalid number. Interestingly I just had similar kind of issue at work, and only conclusion to draw from it, that somebody wrote really crappy code. Thank god it wasn't my code. Now I cloned container 23 to container 23 and closed container 23 and now container 23 is working. Confused? Yeah, you should be. It is. - But I did hear that the the developer is dead sadly, so no fixes are expected.

4. Revisited concept of Python sub-interpreters (@ python.org) coming with Python 3.12. I'll wait those to become mainstream. But probably many of my programs currently using multiprocessing could just as well use sub-interpreters instead. When those are officially out, I've gotta take a test run.

5. Daily DBA fun. Did you know that you can't run script generated by SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) using SSMS (@ Wikipedia) or sqlcmd. Yes, that's right. Microsoft's code is so bad. I had to write my own alternate script executor in Python, to run the script and get data from the dump back into another database. Quite enraging experience, but now it's done. It's always so joyful to notice, that even Microsoft doesn't know what they're doing, nor they do things in sane working way. - To be honest, I really did not expect to experience this kind of lame and silly problems with MS stuff, but yeah, reality bites. Bad code is just about everywhere. tag: it battle stories

6. KeePassXC (@ Wikipedia) finally got Passkeys support with version 2.7.7. This is so awesome. kw: passkey

7. Read "The 2024 Sophos Threat Report: Cybercrime on Main Street" in detail. As expected ransomware is the most common way to extract "value" from SMB's using cybercrime. Nothing unexpected there. Good report to review and as always, it's very important to keep systems secure and data backed up.

8. SimpleX Chat - Post-Quantum Crytpography (@ simplex.chat) - TL;DR; SimpleX implemented PQ crypto (PQC) (@ Wikipedia), as everyone else is doing nowadays. It's nice that they're improving protocol and applications very quickly when comparing to some other platforms. kw: privacy, security, encryption, messaging, apps, SXC, SMP

9. Even more tuning, postgresql, guacamole, nginx, certbot, all with docker, configured and setup. It took me a short while before I realized that the Apache doesn't directly support HTTPS and you'll need a front proxy like Nginx there. But after that it was all a breeze. Documenting and configuring, user and security accounts and logging. All the basic stuff. DNS, Servers, Firewalls, SSH, Docker build files and so on for automatic customization and configuration.

10. Something different? ngRADAR (@ ngradar.nrao.edu) would be so nice for (near) radio astronomy and Magnetohydrodynamics (@ Wikipedia) for controlling missiles and plans flying at hypersonic speed. Agni-V (@ Wikipedia), MIRV (@ Wikipedia) nuke time!

2024-12-08