ANSI Art, GSites, Duplicati, Monitoring, AliExpress
Watched a documentary "The Art of Warez Documents the Lost ANSI Art Scene". It got so many things wrong that, oh well. Sounds, hardware images, etc. It was obvious that the maker didn't have first hand knowledge? Timings, etc. It's painfully obvious when people fake things, they don't fake those right. Just like avionics or space physics in many movies. First write authentic simulator, and the run stuff on it, and you'll get it right. (Or fake CRTs, fake VHS effects or Radar screens). There are very physical reasons why something is happening exactly as it is, like how the VHS rotating head rum stuff works. - Yet some of the scrolling art works parts do work correctly, because the speed varies correctly according the content. Btw, who used ANSI? It was very slow compared to AVATAR. - Yet in general this documentary was nice, even if it started with wrong foot. They didn't mention abusing stolen calling cards for long distance warez, interesting. - From technical point most of the ANSI art was just annoyance, because it took time to deal with it. All systems didn't have short key options which would cut off the art when you did select something. Also even with the cut off short keys there were the problem of buffering. If the art was already buffered, then there was no way to get rid of it. Buffer bloat is not a new thing. Again most people don't realize how inefficient ANSI codes were, check it out.
Google sites (@ sites.google.com) publish / save is broken, latest page modifications aren't being updated. I've now noticed this several times. Clearly pressing the publish button doesn't change latest changes on the page.
One of Duplicati backup sets just got randomly broken again. Yet this time repair did good job and restored the state. But it's good to notice, that the repair (ie. data check & local databse rebuild) can take insane resources CPU time, network bandwidth, temp storage etc. If you've got big backup set. It can take well a long time (days / weeks) to get this task completed. This time I got lucky, it was small backup set and repository remote copy was behind available behind high bandwidth connection.
Finally decided to install bunch of new servers using the btrfs as primary (root) file system, there are benefits and drawbacks, but in general, this is a good option as far as I can see it.
Got sick'n'tired with so broken Matrix - Telegram bridges that I had to build my own... Finally it works, without lag and reliably issues. Kind of annoying, but necessary.
Lots of work with backups, some similar issues as with the bridge above. Some backups are at the same time corrupted and not-corrupted. So extremely enraging. Restore says that backup is corrupted, verify and repair, says that it's good. That's kind of... having serious data integrity issues.
Nasty security issue with Matrix, users can be added to rooms without their permission. - That's really bad - Afaik that's fixed. ref: matrixdotorg
Once again, I caught it immediately. Many people say that monitoring automated processes isn't necessary. But it is, I watched my backup logs and caught it. Symlink default policy has changed from follow to store. Practical meaning? Well, now the backup contains the symlinks, yes the links, no the content of the files being linked. If data is lost and you'll restore the backup, you'll get the links, not the files and content. Ouch! I've changed the symlink policy to "follow" and now symlinked files are stored as those would be hard linked, and the actual data and files are also restored is restore is necessary. Of course good question is if the actual mount points should have been listed to be backed up, instead of using symlinks. That's a good question.
AliExpress, annoying users on purpose. How? They'll always send that the confirmation up is time email well a head, before time is actually up. That's designed to annoy user, because you can't open disupute about not getting delivered before the the time is actually up. This is one of the annoying usage patterns that many sites got. If you notify about something, it would be nice if that thing is immediately actionable. Notifying before the action is available, is just ... Well, it is what it is. Intentional annoyance.
2022-06-12