Checklists, Certbot, Software, Engineering, SLUB, WASI, IPv6

• Read great post about checklists (link is to wikipedia, but this isn't the article i'm referring to!). I'm personally a big fan of checklists. Of course full automation is even better, but for the tasks there's no point of complete automation, checklists and sub checklist automation & scripts are a great way to go. I've had so many system automation & checklist discussions that well, I think the topic is already fully covered.
• Certbot @ EFF / Let's Encrypt @ LetsEncrypt.org (and corresponding Wipedia links: Certbot, LetsEncrypt) - It still seems that the --ecdsa_curve generation parameter has been pulled and merged into the mainline version and master branch. But new official version hasn't been released yet. Which means that Certbot won't be able to generate ecdsa certs. Sure there are workarounds for this, but not interested with that. Of course I could also run my own version with modifications, which is again something I'm not interested doing for this kind of project. Interestingly adding this simple feature has been under discussion and development for four years now. Some later projects also suggest adding --key-type flag, but well, that hasn't made practically any progress in 1.5 years. KW: SSL certificates, letsencrypt, ECDSA, ECC, RSA, Certbot, EdDSA
• Aviation & Software engineering - About 737 max disaster - This is going to be interesting read. One funny thing about this article was classic software engineer approach. The fix, fixes this issue ONLY for the MCAS nose down feature and for angle-of-attack sensor. How about in general fixing all the other similar systems. Well, that's something software guys never do. This is the X which fails, ok, it's fixed. DId you notice that the exactly similar thing can happen into these 20 different spots of code. Well, the issue wasn't about those, it was only about this one place. - Meh... - That's one of the reasons why getting software to work can be so extremely frustrating. So it's probable that they add it to check only the other AoA sensor and forget all the other suggestions, and only in that once place in code. Some times this attitude is taken so far, it sounds more like playing stupid and being pure trolls. As example, they could fix it only for one side of air craft, which caused the problem in the cases. Ha ha ha. - I liked the "Simplify, then add lightness". As well as we all know that complex systems tend to fail. That's why I usually choose very simple and reliable solutions and slightly optimize the worst parts if required. Optimization can add a lot of complexity which makes system unreliable. It's interesting that they took the Challenger case @ Wikipedia as example, I've used it as well several times, last time today, actually few hours before reading this article.
• Anyway, about that over engineering, that's what I find unfortunately with many apps and websites. Those are so full of all kind of cool and useless BS that the site is actually absolutely or at least nearly unusable. If they would have focused on the essential, it would be simple and working. But instead they've made the process cool added bloat, crap, and all kind of needless technology, which then breaks the app or website and prevents user from getting the simple task done. When that's especially comical? When the function is basic form data collection, and they've managed to even completely ruin that and prevent the form from working.
• Read about SLUB allocator, just out of pure curiosity. Sure I did read the Wikipedia article as well, but it didn't contain enough details to fulfill my curiosity.
• Studied WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) - Sounds interesting and at the very same time it sounds like reinventing the wheel. But this is naturally something to follow. It would be so awesome to actually have universal binaries.
• Microsoft joy, Windows 2019 server is constantly losing and messing up it's IPv6 configuration. Way way annoying. No wonder nobody want's to use IPv6 because ISP aren't offering it, and systems are so broken that if it would be offered, it wouldn't work anyway. It seems that this is systematically broken. Need to figure yet another way to fix it. Tested, it's broken. Maybe I'll just need to create startup script which changes the settings on every boot, because there's no sane way to persist the settings. - Sigh! - I've finally found out the reason, broken auto config (which sets wrong settings) seems to override the manual settings al lthe time. If I permanently disable all automatic configuration features and router auto discovery and manually configure everything, then the settings persist after a system restart.

2020-06-21