Learning, OB2, Startup, VBox, DR, 2FA, Batteries, Project Scope, Web Bloat, Silent Launch, SPF

Post date: Sep 24, 2017 6:34:55 AM

• Just listened a lesson about professional life and studying. I agree with it. When working on project, it's important to get it done quickly and efficiently. That's when you should use all the boring tech you've got. It's done and works reliably. Then there's free time, when you can study and experiment. In that case, your primary goal is to test things out and see what happens. It doesn't need to be productive nor reliable. It's just quick ad hoc bleeding edge and maximizing the learning experience, even if it would be total disaster. That's just why I've got my hobby projects. Decades ago I sometimes tried to use something new cool for production, and ended up shooting my own leg badly. Lessons learned. kw: [learning zone vs performance zone].
• Installed OpenBazaar 2.0 developer version and checked it out. Looks good so far! Also played with it's REST API a bit. This also means that I had to install golang and run the go compiler for first time.
• Read a few start-up guides, just for fun. At least this was nice and short. - How to start a startup without ruining your life.
• Played with VBoxManage and tested everything out. Sometimes it was annoying when referring to .vdi files that referring to files failed, because the .vdi UUID is already active. It doesn't matter, then you can use the UUID to refer to the file, but ... It would be nice if that wouldn't require these annoying manual extra steps.
• Once again had several hours long workshop about system backup & restore. How to make sure that data integrity is preserved, how to backup different databases without bringing down the database service, still maintaining data integrity, etc.
• What's the point of using 2FA and then "application passwords" without 2FA. When the application passwords are usually much weaker than the primary password I'm using with the 2FA. Hmm. Strange approach. Afaik, the static application password should be very strong passwords.
• Evening reading: Lithium-air battery , Lithium-sulfur battery. We all know how horrible Lithium battery news have been lately. But it doesn't need to be that way. Lithium batteries can be totally safe and double the capacity, and be even cheaper than today.
• Wondered one project manager. He was astonished about the fact, that there were new requirements popping up during the software development project. Scope creep is hardly anything new. I think it's usually more norm than an exception. That's why it's so important to make agreements right and keep project in-line.
• Reminded my self about basic stuff like: Jevons paradox and Griffen good.
• Nice article about web bloat. Shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Most of websites are absolutely full of s...t. Like a news site, with a short 1 KB article, might require you to load 10 Megabytes of junk before you can see that 1 KB article. It's well, bit kind of inefficient.
• Helped a friend to beta test their silent launch with anonymous email forwarding using custom domains. It's awesome and working. I'm now using it for a few of my domains too. It makes email configuration super easy and simple as well as address management. Also featuring email reply mapping / masking. Which allows you to use your custom domain, with any existing email service, which doesn't support custom domains. That's very neat extra feature.
• Using simple SPF include rule is very simple and easy configuration to understand. There's also benefit that, if you change the SPF info. It'll get auto-updated for all users. Otherwise you might end up having lot of angry people. This is also why outlook is doing exactly same. Yet, I think it's stupid that they're chaining the rules, and not forking directly. Aka, it would be better to have one spf rule which refers to others. Than having SPF rule which refers to SPF rule which refers to SPF rule, as outlook is doing right now. Some verification sites claim that the depth of the lookups is too great, and not all email services are going to check all the SPF rules due to excess nesting / recursivity.