Telegram, NFC, Apps, Attitude, Pointers, Data Types, Signals, Brexit, Servers, SysAdmin

Post date: Jul 3, 2016 7:58:36 AM

Experimented with Telegram Desktop Client. It's awesome. Yet there's only one really major blowback. It doesn't support secret chats (End-to-End Encryption with PFS), what a fail. Come one. Just fix it!
Had a while to play with mobile phone and try new apps. One nice apps reads your Helsinki Travel Card information using NFC and shows it information. Sure, very basic application. But it's a real application instead of all that nonsense hype.
Positive attitude, yeah sure! Why not. I'm often pretty cynical about everything. But today I gladly announced a customer asking for 'immediate changes' for complex system integration which wouldn't have time to properly (or almost at all) test that: Yes, sure. We cant do that, but it'll lead to interesting and joyful challenges. - Isn't that what we call a positive attitude. We will figure out later what failed and how and how big mess it created and cleaning up that mess is a interesting and joyful challenge. I just wish everybody would be so positive. Cool, my operating system just crashed, now I got something interesting and complex to debug. Yeah! Awesome! It would have been boring weekend without this happening.
Well, I'm clearly not only one screwing up with pointers and data types. Many weeks of intense investigation and all that it takes, is mixing up what short and long actually do mean. Ha, it wasn't my code. Phew. What a great way to create interesting and joyful things to debug. Yet I'm pretty sure that the stakeholders paying the bill aren't so happy about that. It seems that nowadays programmers don't too often care about data types. It was just in that JSON. Well yes, I guess this also counts in the category I've mentioned earlier, know your tools. When you go outside you'll comfort zone, you'll screw up and then you'll learn. It just depends how much the learning will cost. Business as usual no news. Just my thoughts.
Julia Evans post about Signals- Nice post. I've had to deal with signals too. For most of programs I'll just deal with the signals to provide a proper shutdown. Main thread catches the signal and tells other workers to exit properly. To be honest about code quality, I haven't been extensively testing that everything works correctly. But based on logs and evens happening several times / day it seems that everything is working. Yep, I know it doesn't guarantee anything. But it still means that it doesn't fail at least all the time.
If Brexit happens then UK isn't anymore preferred EU location to host servers. I wonder if there's anyone else having similar thought. Then going to move some servers from London to Frankfurt.
Finally reached with servers 'pro' level. First it's fun to tinker and then run your own servers etc. But now I'm reached the pro point. I just shutdown all of my personal servers. Because I don't have time nor interest to run those and migrated just a few things running no those to alternate platforms.
It's always so funny when people claim that server administrators would be interested what's on their servers. No, they're not. They're happy if the stuff works and they don't want to know anything else. So what if they've got access to email accounts of users hosted on that server? They couldn't care less. Can you snoop the information, yes. Are you interested, no. Have yo done it? In technical sense? Yes, technically just to see that here the stuff is. Other interest, nope. It's pretty much same with logging and that data lake approach. Data is there if needed, but I hope I don't ever need it and there's no preparation done to allow very easy exploitation when required.