baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Pompeo Hints at Huawei Ultimatum to Countries Buying Equipment
I forget who it was but I remember someone commenting along the lines of: They don't need to add back doors they just need poor security. Or, to double paraphrase. Any sufficiently bad firmware is indistinguishable from back doored.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Drivers Complain Raised Crosswalk Slows Vehicles
In the UK the limit is the limit. There is leeway to exceed the limit by up to 10% to allow safer overtaking (you're usually using the oncoming lane and opportunities are scarce) and to take the accuracy of car speedometers and police radar guns into account.
In Australia you can be fined, heavily, for exceeding the limit by any margin. e.g. Limit was 100kph you were clocked at 102.
If you're driving so much over the limit that you're damaging your car on a properly built speed bump you're going too fast. In the UK you'd run the risk of getting hit with "Driving without due care and attention".
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Drivers Complain Raised Crosswalk Slows Vehicles
At a train station where you're raising pedestrians to get over the tracks already it'd be less difficult to integrate.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: My video with 47M views was stolen on YouTube [video]
No but some people, who just want their video to stay up and don't care about the ad revenue, will purposefully add a snippets of content to trigger multiple copyright bots into filing competing claims. When this happens the video stays up until the claims are resolved and since there's no actual people involved and it's covered by fair use anyway they just time out eventually.
[edit: grammar]
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Sydney Opal Tower: Thousands evacuated after 'crack'
My experience of equivalent buildings in Melbourne matches up. Leaks and cracks all over the place. All these building seem to be built out of prefabbed concrete panels in a hurry. Bonus points if it's also covered in a flammable cladding.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got (2012)
When they've gone on an unauthorised excursion through some code that has say, safety critical or legal, concerns some off the top of my head examples.
Hey guy's I've rewritten:
- The dosage control code for radiotherapy device so we can remove that expensive mechanical interlock!
- The data access layer of our patient records system!
- How we calculate x in out guidance software we can go to a cheaper CPU now!
especially if said code was rattling in the building around somewhere it might get into the code base.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Safer bash scripts with 'set -euxo pipefail' (2015)
Hilariously I was having to write init.d scripts for a crusty version of CentOS yesterday and used `set -e` instinctively. Died inexplicably importing `/etc/init.d/functions` until I noticed a comment explicitly saying to _not_ set that.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Terraform Collaboration for Everyone
I primarily deal with a weird OpenStack system but also bare metal, AWS, Azure, and whatever someone in authority decides we need to use this week. Terraform works, kinda, which is more than can be said for most of the alternatives.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Using HAProxy as an API Gateway, Part 1
To be honest I'd sat Kong is slightly harder to set up as it wants a database (PostgeSQL or Cassandra) but offers more functionality out of the box. HAProxy is more focused on being … well a proxy for example it can handle straight TCP too.
Its like the PostgreSQL vs ${NoSQL de jour}. HAProxy works fine to great as a default choice unless you've some requirement that makes Kong more attractive.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Intel can’t supply 14nm Xeons, HPE recommends AMD Epyc
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
IIRC you're allowed to use any crypto you like and fix flaws that are found but you're also required to add flaws if asked to. Well they call it a "technical capability notice" but it includes such things as "Installing, maintaining, testing or using software or equipment given to a provider by an agency." and "Removing a form of electronic protection applied by the provider, if the provider has an existing
capability to remove this protection". You don't have to compromise your crypto you just need to install this black box library that does … something.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Shifting Gears
We looked at it. It was our second choice. Ultimately, its entirely self-hosted nature was it's greatest strength and weakness. We like self-hosting but don't have the resources to get it going at the moment. It's interesting enough that we'll keep revisiting it.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Shifting Gears
At ${DayJob} Jenkins is our default of yore. Returning to refresh a 1.x install for one group's product we're faced with the poster child for a Jenkins install gone bad. Looking at you Chuck Norris plugin. We can't upgrade and we can't migrate to a fresh install due to how Jenkins handles plugins. So we're left with a critical chunk of infrastructure that's a time bomb.
Ultimately instead of making the jump to 2.x and Jenkinsfiles we're trialing Buildkite with great success so far and the confidence that we can jump ship to CloudBuild, TravisCI, Concourse, CircleCI, ect should we need to.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: PgModeler – PostgreSQL Database Modeler
We had a developer start using this quietly a few years ago. Rapidly discovered when the the build broke and a ticket to install pgmodeler on CI server popped into my queue. From memory it's, at least was, very opinionated or limited depending on how charitable you want to be.
baylisscg
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7 years ago
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on: Convergence to Kubernetes
If you're using Helm charts you can add hooks to a few points in the deployment process to give you database migrations. Currently I'm using an install hook to create the DB and upgrade hooks to migrate on deploy.
baylisscg
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8 years ago
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on: What's the ultimate way to defy depression, disease and early death? Exercise
Actually, yes. It's difficult to try and take control of a situation when simply doing all the things necessary to keep being alive is a challenge. Couple that with the social stigma of being diagnosed with mental problems and yes it's completely possible.
baylisscg
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8 years ago
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on: A successful Git branching model (2010)
Feature flags _are_ widely used. They generally manifest as commented out code. Like many features that migrate down from these massive codebases it's a common behaviour thats been systematised.
baylisscg
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9 years ago
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on: The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence
baylisscg
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9 years ago
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on: Spring vs. Java EE
I'd add a few more caveats.
- Not all Spring projects seem to receive equal love. They can and do stomp on each other.
- Spring's get-going-quickly seems to mostly come from serious design assumptions. Which is fine per se but they are not made clear which is not OK.
- Spring is far too automagical. My latest bugbear is it deciding to change defaults depending on what it thinks I want. Bonus points for there being multiple settings that control the same behaviour only one of which can override.
You're not using Java anymore you're using Spring.
baylisscg
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9 years ago
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on: The no excuses culture
But there is the flight recorder which let's you both see the state of the plane and what the pilots were doing. Thinking about it many roles where people make major decisions independently have a concept of records being kept either automatically or as close to the event as possible for later forensic use.
