KEX/PGP, MBR>GPT, Boot, TestEnv, Funny Requests

• One guy wondered why I wanted to out-of-band verify PGP key fingerprint. Well, of course that should be done, unless you can do it even better and cross sign when you meet. Accepting new public key from someone without any checkes nor being signed with old key, is like meh, fail.
• I just can't stop loving some people in marketing. I just got bunch of documents which have been redacted to hide most sensitive information. Except if you just copy paste the text, you'll get the whole original document. Hiding the secrets is done by drawing black boxes on top of the text. These so called experts make me laugh out loud. This is also one of the reasons, why all complex document formats should be avoided anyway. Those are inherently insecure, on so many levels. With pure ASCII test file, this kind of fail wouldn't happen.
• How badly Google has taken the world? One day I heard marketing guys saying, that we need to create Google Pages. - Yeah. Everyone needs to have Facebook Pages and Google Pages, of course, also YouTube Pages can be beneficial.
• In one project the stuff that has been implemented, has been already re-implemented four times. This is so awesome, at least not going to run out of work anytime soon.
• GPT / Windows boot - Very simple basic stuff every computer user should know even when they're sleeping: GPT FAQ and of course the BCDBoot. Also one way to fix that, would be installing GRUB2, which I've been using with dual boot environments. It's funny that you can use either Linux or Windows bootloader to load either of the operating systems. I've played with both configurations. And good example of things to know, which you can once again use and ask. WTF you're trying to do? Dont you really know anything about computers, this is just basic stuff. And now this is how it's done and it's really easy. I don't get how you could have wasted so much time on such a simple thing. Eh. Even more instructions from Microsoft. Oh joy, bcdboot tested, nope, won't help. Windows still hangs on boot. Next step getting latest Windows installation media image, which might contain the mft2gpt tool, which could work. I've found so many ways to fail this thing. Actually MBR -> GPT conversion isn't a problem, but getting the windows to boot after that conversion is.
• From the FAQ I found out that the super floppy format also works with Windows. Yet I haven't ever used it. With Linux it's obvious that file system can start from the beginning of block device, without creating or using any partition table at all.
• Also another observation was that people have been laughing that Linux can't UEFI boot from ext4 or btrfs. But that's not funny at all, because Windows can't either. It uses FAT32 UEFI boot partition, just as Linux does, but it's hidden better from the end user.
• It's also very true, that every production setup, you should have similar test setup. So if the production requires some "operations", you can try and study those with the test setup, without affecting the production environment at all. Nothing new. Usually just the cost of test environment is prohibitive for many projects / use cases. Like in this case, actually it doesn't matter if there's downtime, when the system is just available every now and then, so stuff which gets back logged can get processed between. Which of course means that before I try something else, I have to take backup as well as create fresh image, which I can restore, if things fail. Like I've done already several times.
• One customer demanded that unsigned integer needs to be negative. Oh well. Not going to happen anytime soon. Sure, there can be another field, which can turn this unsigned integer into "negative value", but in the specific message format requirements they've specified field to be unsigned integer and there's no other field. Let's see how this turns out.

2019-06-23