I only went briefly to San Jose a couple of times when I was working in San Francisco, but I would have made the trip here for sure if I knew. It look beautiful and, most importantly, it’s prime desktop background material.
Thanks to Maya Visvanathan for sharing this on Wikimedia Commons.
I don’t know how I found this link site. Maybe it’s because I’m a sucker for conifers 🌲. Many people have a Linktree profile, but this one is mine:
I’m missing a ton of stuff, but you get a pretty good idea of my interests from it. It’s strange that some services like Apple Podcast feeds appear as single icons at the bottom, instead of a coloured bar with text.
This was entirely pointless, considering my About page and Omake section has all the links to all my stuff. But sometimes we don’t need to justify everything we do.
Data Centre Knowledge ran an article about some of the practical challenges managing encryption in enterprise settings. They identified:
Managing keys, including dissemination and revocation
The arms race between patches, exploits, and brute-force catching up to mathematical complexity
Hardware implementations of ciphers that physically impede future upgrades
Quantum computing
I can think of a few more I’ve seen:
Not Invented Here Syndrome™, leading to insecure implementations based on misunderstandings or hubris.
Monocultures, where we end up with an OpenSSL heartbleed situation, speculative attacks against x86, or network security breaches based on the use of only one company’s router.
The backfire effect, where people work around overbearing security policies to do their jobs. Checking out encrypted documents and putting them on Dropbox, or printing their regularly-rotated passwords on paper next to their desk, for example.
Misplaced priorities or worries. I liken it to putting armour where you have bullet holes.
Still an industry-wide lack of appreciation for internal threats. I don’t need outbound firewall rules!
Security is trust, and you have to anchor it somewhere. The two questions are: what data are you trying to protect, and from whom?
Just on software, you’re trusting the integrity of its communications, access controls, compiler, cipher suite (both its implementation and academic proof), container, operating system, the silicon running it, physical security of the hardware, and the jurisdiction in which it resides. You can distrust all of this, but living in caves isn’t tenable for most people. The alternative is to weigh up the pros and cons of each tool, what mitigations you have in place for a breach, and what risks are appropriate and reasonable for a given circumstance.
My silly blog doesn’t need Fort Knox. Enterprises depend on well-tested, patched software from reputable companies with established track records, legally-binding contracts, and SLAs. If I’m an informant, I’m handing sensitive data to law enforcement the old fashioned way and leaving the phone at home. But even that assumes that the room where the exchange takes place isn’t bugged, or I haven’t been followed, or the person I’m giving to is who they say they are, or aren’t acting under duress.
Absolute security is impossible. Where you place the pin on the scale is up to you. That goes for individuals and businesses.
It made sense given how much joy she brings Clara and I every day ^^. I should have done a lot sooner.
Gurren Lagann was a seminal anime series that shook my world when I got around to watching it. Released in 2007 by Gainax, it set the state for Studio Trigger and is still highly regarded today for its themes, art style, comedy, and gripping story.
Only two years prior, Palm released their LifeDrive device. Other Palms were produced after it was discontinued, but it was the technical pinnacle of a platform that had started with the original Pilot in the early 1990s. It ran PalmOS Garnet on a 416 MHz Intel XScale CPU, with a 320×480 display and a sleek case design that I think has aged especially well. It had built-in 802.11b Wi-Fi, a toggle switch for portrait or landscape operation, a dictation button, SD card slot, and a headphone jack.
But it was its target market and storage that set it apart from other Palm devices and PDAs. It was billed as including all the media one might need during the day, wedding the Palm’s legendary PIM tools with office software, photos, and video. I used to think of it as the child of a classic iPod and a Palm TX.
It wasn’t a market success. People were willing to excuse the slower performance of Microdrives on iPods for the huge jump in storage, but it made interactive devices like the LifeDrive feel sluggish and unresponsive. It was also quite a bit thicc’er (cough) to accomodate the Microdrive and the larger battery it required, making it less pocketable. Reviews from the time said it made too many compromises to be useful, which I can’t fault. Emerging smartphones, including the ones Palm sold, probably didn’t help.
This didn’t stop me wanting one! I was in the Palm ecosystem for years by the time the LifeDrive came out, and the idea of having all that capacity with the familiar PalmOS environment was hugely appealing. I already had an iPod at the time though, and still clung to my Tungsten W as my Palm smartphone, so I couldn’t justify saving my meagre income at the time to get one.
Today I suppose the closest we have is the iPod Touch, or the Android-based Sony Walkman. I miss when hardware manufacturers tried new and cool things, but that’s for another post.
A decade and a half later, I posted this teaser about Palm nostalgia:
[..] I’ve had some saved eBay searches and price ceilings up for a few years, and have got some replacements for my long-lost and stolen original Palms in the post. I even managed to score a Grail that I always wanted growing up, but could never afford.
She arrived on Friday from the gentleman in Sydney who bought her at the Hong Kong airport new back in 2005! She’s in immaculate condition, and comes with two stiluses (stilii?), the LifeDrive Palm Desktop software, the original USB HotSync cable, and the wall charger.
My next step is to take the Microdrive out, image it, and replace it with a higher-capacity CompactFlash card. This looks to be a common mod, and gives the device performance comperable to other Palms at the time. Only with more storage!
Now I just need my old Palm IIIx back, and I can do a family reunion.
I overheard this at a coffee shop this morning:
Alex had an atlas, to himself!
Sounds great to me. I still have the frayed, tattered atlas my parents saved from the year I was born, complete with the crumbling Soviet Union and East Germany. It wasn’t much longer before they were gone.
I might load up my DK World Reference Atlas multimedia CD-ROM this evening on my P1 machine and do some exploring.
While I’ve touched on tools such as FreeBSD jails and Ansible here before, I’ve had people come to me over the years asking about my decision process for what orchestration tools to use. I wouldn’t dare profess to be a expert on such tooling, but I’ve used enough in production, and worked with enough clients on implementations, that I think I can offer a modicum of salient advice.
After significant deliberation and reciprocal iteration, I’ve concluded Dockernetes is the cost-effective, high-performance solution for most workloads. It’s based on a crude idea of unilateral phase detractors, but has stood the test of time and proven its worth under any workload I’ve leveraged from it thus far. The maintenance of lightweight containers, simple VMs, and physical servers are eliminated with this top down, multi-layered approach to administration, and sets a new standard for uptime, reliability, and operating excellence.
Dockernetes is founded on the agile methodologies and principles of open field software, for which any contributions can be blocked from upstream. It’s disruptive precisely because it inverts the requirements of the host system, to be ordered inline from any recursive dependency. While not avoiding the issues that plague compostable systems outright—system architects are still responsible for any monad that traverses its elliptical JSON binaries—it negates any of its performance impact by ensuring no two architectural nodes are bound by the same highly-available couplings.
(As an aside, how great is it that we live in a world now where we don’t even need to consider what scrum barrier to implement on this framework? I blanch at the idea of using introspective assets in any pipeline ever again, to say nothing of batching ERPs)!
The introspective capabilities of Dockernetes aren’t limited to this modular approach of scalable processes. Cohesion of the very symbols that render these encrypted payloads ensure:
collisions occur with a high degree of static inference;
hyperscale operations are not bound to the same encapsulated predicates that plagued prior beta releases (don’t we all know that);
and, if I may say so, no initialised faults lodge within orthogonal states… with or without inheritance!
Operating systems, for which rainbow-tabled variables are dependent on absent floating-point unit-tests, aren’t unique to the Dockernetes instruction set (or any operation over OSI layer 12, if we disregard UDP’s stringent type constraints). That said, they’re a critical feature of any solid-state, garbage-collected module with line-rate multi-tenancy that cloud-enabled packet-switching can hyphenate within any target key-value store or cross-connected state-machine.
(Okay I kid, you can’t decompose those attributes for which foreign keys are only available in incremental improvements, but who’s counting protected classes outside monads anyway? I haven’t heard anything beyond PCI-compliant integer casting, even assuming resources have fault-tolerant recursion or adaptive generics).
Finally, Dockernetes ensures the integrity of its disparate inode streams through its encrypted, self-referential package manager. The system presents a diff’d, signed, counter-signed elastic interface to each clustered pool of interdependencies not only for this purpose, but to ensure the correct operating parameters previously prescribed in parallel for the provisioning of proper process patches.
This flexibility is ascribed below in a typical entropy pool, as photographed by the New Zealand Defence Force IT department. Note the raising of the cluster’s port side, permitting cabled DMA to the platform’s core swap space:
So how does one compose these API-based constants within Dockernetes, if not using blockchained VPNs or polymorphic schemas? It’s a salient network question beyond the scope of any discussion of qbit resiliency, but I’d say provided the seventh discrete parameter is aligned with its deprecated kernel thread, premature tokenisation can be enhanced (if not inferred). This not only renders the resulting cluster tightly coupled to any reserve implementation, or compiled against trained learning machines, but ensures such manifolds are only decapsulated at the router’s edge.
(Not that ephemeral idempotency doesn’t guarentee that Dockernetes cylinder blocks will be slipstreamed in unordered protocols during initialisation. But it’s an exercise for users to fork hyperconvergence in such lambda pointers anyway).
But as has become a theme here, communications are only worth the relativity that business owners themselves can prognosticate. Evaluated paradigms within the synergistic model that Dockernetes orchestrates doesn’t just argue for technical limitations within enterprises, it’s at the heart of any effective digital transformation. Such cognisant verticals can build upon existing financial models with any given matrix of minimum system requirements, which makes them eminently flexible and easy to elevator pitch.
Truthfully, this is what makes Dockernetes such an elegant MVP, for use in any CRM or a la carte removable PaaS spindle that any remote client can invoke. If you can please your CFO at the same time as your legacy stakeholders, you can be productively congruent with any implemented value chain! 10x accountants might use spreadsheet as a programming language, but can any of us blame such interpersonal actors for resource constraints in the real world? Maybe your manager can, but I’d prefer to err on the side of the coin.
I hope that provided some insight into my Dockernetes orchestration regime, and why it’s stratification and infrastructure as code most certainly aren’t a case study in brittle, overengineered infrastructure as code to be deprecated, poorly-documented, and unsupported at the mere site of new shiny.
Thanks for importing this header!
Darjeeling is judging me with her cool expression, not only for stooping to the level of instant coffee, but for not even having… darjeeling. Such is her silent disdain she’s oriented her cup to scald her thigh with the contents of it if she’s not careful.
As an aside to anime figure collectors who have the Darjeeling Beach Queen, have any of you figured out a way for her to hold her tea upright? This is the closest I could get without involving superglue, which I’d rather avoid as it sounds painful for her, and messy for me.
But I digress. Everyone and their anime figs have an opinion about coffee, to the point where discussion of said aqueous comestible is fraught with peril. I drink single origin coffee from local roasteries, and have my own opinions about which regions of the world produce the best ones. I’m rather partial to Costa Rica and Colombia.
But I also have what I call a coffee stratificaion system, the details of which are for a future post. In a nutshell coffee fruit, I don’t judge instant coffee or Starbucks on the same scale as those aforementioned beans. Not because they’re any better or worse, but because they’re entirely different. I don’t say a whiskey is better than a specific beer when discussing alcohol, or a text editor with a package manager. The comparison doesn’t make sense.
Sure, instant coffee and a masterfully-roasted single origin are nominally the same type of beverage, but coffee is about the beans, the skill of the barista, the equipment, the quality of the water, the atmosphere, even your mood. The Aeropress in our tiny apartment works absolute magic, but sometimes I’m bitten by nostalgia and am too tired to futz around with a machine. I do objectively think International Roast and Nescafe are horrid, so what else is out there?
It’s with all those disclaimers that I mention that Moccona’s instant coffee with “a hint of natural hazelnut swirl” is nicer than I expected, and a bit of a treat.
Wait, that was the whole review? Yes, such is the nature of the Internets in 2021, you have to defend yourself from any incoming arguments that are as predictable as they are volumentric. I’m pretty sure I didn’t use that word correctly.
I read this in the wrapping for my lunch today:
Said the toe to the sock: “Let me through, let me through!”
Said the sock to the toe: “I’ll be darned if I do”.
I really stepped in that one. Toed the line. Feet to the fire. A shoe-in. Sock it to me! Nailed it. Heel… hmm, lost it. Sandals!
This post is dedicated to Asherah, who sent the first comment in response to the post I mention below.
I wrote what some would consider a contentious article about the Free Software Foundation and the effect of the GPL on open-source software, alongside discussions about Palm nostalgia, pop psychology views on confidence, and a couple of posts on FreeBSD 13. And yet, this comment I made at three in the morning last Wednesday generated the most comments!
I counted Aloe Blacc saying he needs a dollar twenty times in his 2010 song I Need a Dollar. That means he needs $20.
For someone who just spent time talking about whimsy, this warms my heart. And gives me an excuse to pivot to the weird lyric in the title of this post. For those who don’t want to scroll back up, it goes:
We’ll party like post alone! ♫
There’s a specific formula most pop music follows now, where they have a verse, a weak chorus, and then a looping techno hook which carries the song. It’s impossible not to hear this pattern everywhere once you identify it. As someone who otherwise loves electronic music, it grates to hear this instrumentation relegated to such a pedestrian role. I’m not old!
I’ve heard that one specific song continuously in coffee shops, and loudly from the headphones of inconsiderate commuters. It’s otherwise a forgettable tune, but I’ve been fascinated with what “post alone” means, and why someone would want to party like it.
These are the only meanings I could think of:
Having the confidence to spin around a lamp post and sing in the rain, because you’re alone with nobody else to judge you.
A person received a delivery of something specific in the post, which they’d use alone on themselves for a party. Cough.
The satisfaction and joy philatelists feel putting their parcel in a mailbox. That still sounds like the second point.
Urban Dictionary didn’t shine much more light. They define “post” as describing things that are “dated, unhip” that were once “in vogue and in style”. Maybe it means enjoying a hobby that would otherwise consign you to being socially ostracised? Sounds more like point 2 again.
I finally heard it at a coffee shop again today and managed to snag it on Shazam. The title of the song is Post Malone by Dutch DJ Sam Feldt, sung by RANI. I still didn’t know what a post malone was; is it different from a pre-malone? Is it what you use on your malone when recursion doesn’t work? Is it a monad? A lambda? Something else that sounds like a sheep? Is it a functional form of posting?
Wikipedia sorted me out:
The song was referred to as an “ode” to American rapper Post Malone and features the lines “Tonight, we go all night long / We party like Post Malone!”.
Being in my thirties doesn’t make me old, I’m just Post Young.
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