Jupiter Rising, Pythong Wheels, OVH, SQLite4, PostgreSQL, Batteries, Cloudflare, NVMe, etc

Post date: Aug 17, 2015 3:02:06 PM

• Reminded my self about TCP connection listen backlog on Linux.
• Studied different car door designs. Don't ask why. IDK. It just happened to be interesting.
• It seems that also the game industry uses all kind of heh, not so clean, methods to fix their code. Why bother to fix a bug, if you can just quickly write some new code to work around it? I guess everyones code is like that, they just don't want to admit it. Ha!
• Dolphin Browser for Android is just so full of bugs. At one point it crashed constantly, now it doesn't crash. But some times it's totally unresponsive, you can't open new tabs. And at times, it does open links in new tabs, but doesn't load those. When you open the tab, it's empty also the address bar is empty. But when you click edit on address bar, it shows the page address it was supposed to load. Then you'll just click go and it loads the page. Who writes this kind of bleep applications. Fail, fail and fail. Well, this is better than crashing, but it's still quite lame.
• Excellent Postgres Guide (PostgreSQL Guide) - This version is also delightfully compact, so you can browse through it pretty quickly.
• Checked out 24M lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries, those should be cheaper to manufacture and contain more power than previous generation lithium-ion batteries. It's interesting to see if that's true, because we've all seen so many new great ideas which will change the world and then... nothing happens.
• Upgraded multiple systems to use Windows 10, without problems so far. Phew. It's just like major distribution upgrades with Ubuntu. You hope everything will go well, and probably will. But you'll never know when you'll end up in really deep hmm, water? Only problem so far has been the fact that with Windows 7 IPv6 worked well but with Windows 10 IPv6 isn't working by default. That's strange. It it worked on some workstations, which probably means that it didn't work on workstations that had 'more tuning' done. If those would be using clean default settings those probably would work. I don't remember anymore what I did to get the IPv6 to work, but it was more like duh, of course. Yet it wasn't anything like enabling / disabling / resetting settings, routing table or so. Maybe I wrote it up somewhere, maybe I didn't. Yet it took quote a while to figure it out.
• Also found really fun stuff, if you open cmd.exe and then close it using the close button, whole Windows 10 will crash. That's priceless. BTW. This only happens if you have BitDefender installed, but it was still really fun. Also if you write exit and hit enter, window closes without any problems. Then I hit the usual problem, it seems that Windows 10 got problems larger than 2 TB drives, wonderful. Let's move data off the drives and reformat those. Yep, it takes more time than you might think. Also SMB sharing over Internet failed do to some messy firewall senttings, which didn't start to work after 'normal' configuration. Then I just went through all settings switched things on and of and after that it started to work. Yet I don't have a clue which was the actual trigger. Business as usual, unfortunately.
• Windows 10 adds tons of new features and protocols. So it's safe to assume that it's guaranteed that there will be serious security issues in future.
• Emailrelay - Yet another annoyingly buggy and unreliable software. It labels messages as bad and stops forwarding those due to 'error', even there's no error. I just can't stop hating annoyingly unreliably software. When you manually reset those messages those are sent out just fine, even if there was earlier fatal error. Duh! Also the software doesn't support IPv6 on Windows.
• Usually it feels like most of software is buggy and bad. If it doesn't give you directly that impression, just wait for a while and try doing something bit more complex and boom, there it is. It doesn't work and requires fixing.
• I'm not sure if it's my WinFileLock which is buggy or the software using it, but I encountered one annoying bug today. I'll need to checkout what the problem is. Or maybe I'm just misusing it and assuming that locking was successful even if the locking failed. Either the bug is in the routine calling the locking or the locking it self after it time outs with failure. Shouldn't be too hard to find it out.
• Checked out Borei-class submarines (Project 955). Which are capable of burping out aka launching RSM-56 Bulava missiles.
• Read several articles and studies about LTE-U. And if it should use 3.5GHz instead of 5GHz and how it might affect WiFi and other IMS band users. Ericsson calls this technology License Assisted Access.
• Updated systems to use LibreOffice 5, it's just awesome.
• Reminded my self about BWR, ESBWR, PWR and EPR nuclear reactor types and differences.
• I've been reading more and more stuff about Ethereum. It's so complex stuff that it's a good study. Makes you really think. Tons of stuff and more stuff and then you'll need to link up that all together in your mind after getting the subcomponents ignested first. That's good learning job to keep your mind fresh. After every section read, just stop and think hard, what does this really mean for the whole Ethereum system and ecosystem. So far based on what I've read, it allows really complex contracts, but scalability might be the issue. I haven't so far found any good description how they are planning to make it actually scalabe. With current design, it just get's worse when there are more users, contracts, network latency and peers (nodes), miners, etc. Also contracts which run out of gas can cause interesting situations, yet that's predictable for people who can predict it. But I guess some users will be surprised that their contract got reverted back and they still paid the fees. Just because they didn't provide enough gas to full fill the contract processing needs.
• Are daily backups required? Sure, Microsoft Excel just corrupted one important table, and I had to restore it from backup. Yawn.
• It's funny to notice how bad flaws some engineers leave into software. Like one project had multithreaded processing for clients. But the login process was single threaded and blocking. So if client opened TCP connection and didn't just waited, it prevented all other users from logging into the service. Only when login was completed or rejected, new thread was started for that client. These kind of flaws go easily unnoticed in small local network where all clients are official and well behaving. But when you enter the wonderful world of Internet, it's guaranteed that you'll be getting a lot of trouble.
• Read: Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network - Really much stuff there, I'm quite happy, not a single part of it wen't over my head. Most of people just don't need to deal with networks like that anyway.
• Now all new servers are equipped with NVMe (SSD) drives. Nice! Works beautifully in production, about depending from use case makes I/O tasks roughly 10x - 100x faster.
• Read: Cold fusion - Someday it's coming, or not? Who knows. Hopefully ITER will work out.
• It seems that OVH data centers in Roubaix start to get full? Now they're offering new servers at Gravelines and Strasbourg. For international traffic Gravelines is optimal. But for traffic from Finland it's bit hard to decide. Because some operators route traffic to Amsterdam and some others to Frankfurt. So either of those two locations can be 10+ms faster than other, depending what operator is being used in Finland. - Just as funny addition it seemed that last Sunday almost all services on OVH network went down for more than one hour. So far I haven't been getting any information what went wrong. And I couldn't find any report about it from their status service.
• Wow! Cloudflare is adding new datacenters and cache POPs out on really incredible pace. Now they're extending to MENA area.
• DeepSound Audio Steganography software.
• Reminded my self about crowdsourcing and crowd work and about On-Demand-Economy.
• Reminded my self about SQLite4 LSM features and usage.
• It's nice to promise ultimate new technology fro VOIP telephony, Zyptonite promises: "Zyptonite keeps your calls connected even in the elevator and when you have no reception.". Just for some strange reason that really doesn't convince me.
• Python Wheels - Wheels are the new standard of python distribution and are intended to replace eggs. - That's really nice. Somehow I really haven't liked eggs so far. Yet PIP is awesome when you want to install some libraries which require compiling and aren't pure python libs.
• Had plenty of problems with Remote Desktop Protocol (Terminal Services, Remote Desktop Connection). It seems that it's just very vulnerable to all kind of Denial of Service attacks (DoS). Basically anyone can bring the services down easily on purpose or even purely accidentailly. RDP host seems to be really bad at handling these issues. It's a great question if many of the attacks agains SSH, HTTP or TCP can be counted as attacks. Those are just utilizing exising features and causing Denial of Service via the known standard methods. Is that a problem or not? Depends how it's being viewed. It's clear that Microsoft thinks it's not a problem if system is trivially DoSable.
• In SSD security discussions we had long discussion if overwriting SSD is actually required. If drive supports RZAT there's no easy way to get around that. Unless the drive contains something really valuable, it's highly likely that nobody bothers to work around that. At least on consumer level.

That's not all.