Ubuntu Bugs, Duplicati, OVH, Principles, Integrations, Encryption, Apple Engineering

Post date: Feb 4, 2018 7:24:47 AM

  • About old bugs in software, it seems that current Ubuntu is still affected by this stupid bug. Or maybe it's Ubuntu malware joining Ubuntu computers to Ubuntu Botnet? What's the point of contacting checking for daisy.ubuntu.com for every 8 seconds? Really annoying. And this is not new.

  • List of Duplicati 2.0 supported backends: aftp, amzcd, azure, b2, box, cloudfiles, dropbox, file, ftp, gcs, googledrive, hubic, mega, onedrive, openstack, s3, od4b, mssp, ssh, tahoe, webdav. Why? Because it's not trivial to get this list, and it's not mentioned on their website, I think. But it's only available from command line help.

  • Boondoggle - Just learned a new word. I guess this is nothing new. There are just so many projects like this out there. But I didn't know there's a specific name for those projects.

  • OVH finally fixed their IPv6 address compression fail. Hah, it took quite a while. Several weeks to get it to work properly. Actually it's still bit funny, now the address is lead zero compressed, but the gateway address isn't. Just so inconsistent.

  • Julia got nice blogging principles - Afaik, nobody should tell what you should do. We can tell what we did and why, but it's up to you to decide what's best approach for you. Things are so complex, there's no one absolute this will be best solution for you for anything.

  • Daily integration limbo. One integration works on around 90% reliability. Customer wanted that if we could add redundancy. Ouch! I don't like that. I would prefer making it reliable, instead of adding triple 90% redundancy, which still isn't reliable. Sigh... It also makes the issues occur less often, which means that nobody bothers to check if it has failed and failures go unnoticed and boom. At some point someone notices that and starts to complain. I don't like that at all.

  • Another problem is that people don't get how integrations work. I always prefer model, where all new data is transferred. It can mean that even if you got only 'todays' batch. It can contain anything, from any previous days etc. This is absolutely the best way to go. But it seems very hard to grasp for some people. They seem to think that the transmission time got something to do with the content. No. It doesn't. Content is content and transfer time is transfer time. Sometimes those correlate in some way, and other times those just won't. But it's annoying to encounter all the time people who seem to mix these things up. Todays file, can contain stuff which is three years old, or it can also contain stuff which is year in future, if someone has just dated the data so. It doesn't mean anything, that you got it 'today'. Sigh. That's exactly why there's time stamps in the data.

  • Integration, why simple is better. - They wanted very cool structured XML - After some discussion. It became evident they'll just extract that XML to CSV. There's no point of making advanced custom formats, which just add intermediary mapping / conversion layers for no reason. After all the coolness of XML discussion. They ended up requiring XML more like. <data><col1 /><col2 /><col3 /><col1 /><col2 /><col3 /></data> Sure. That's doable, but phew just why. Also funny thing is that many of the columns contain redundant data. That's because structure where <data><header /><items /></data> Was way too complex for their advanced integration framework. - Sigh. Ok. It would have been just better to go with tab csv aka tsv from the very beginning. Simple, easy, works. No fuss. Done. I don't mean that making XML or JSON would be any more complex. But for some integrators those just cause so much trouble.

  • Encryption Workarounds - All of these sound pretty familiar to me: Find the key, guess the key, compel the key, exploit a flaw in the encryption software, access plaintext while the device is in use, and locate another plaintext copy. - All pretty obvious and old methods.

  • Still laughing at Apple products. Some of their designs is so highly counter intuitive that it's out right ridiculous! Like when you have fast unlimited data, they're still requiring WiFi for certain things. Like updating things, and syncing stuff, etc. That's just so ridiculously stupid that ... Solution? Have a two Apple phones, so you can network from one phone for the another phone, and vice versa. That's true engineering. - I just can't loving artificially created stupid engineering, which requires even more stupid engineering to work-around. - This is something which is of course long term trend. Whatever service or design is showing such signs, makes me laugh and cry. - Maybe there's some other smarter work-a-round for this, but at least it wasn't trivial to find in 15 minutes.