Meetings, Excuses, GDPR, Backups, Srcset, SpiderOak, Private Key

• Wondered how some companies can have so inefficient pricing processes. They want to have meetings, waste everyone's time etc. Some providers provide clear documentation on their webpage and clear pricing. That's all what's needed. No need to waste lot of time meeting and talking about totally and utterly obvious things. - Sometimes I think, Sales department is only making things considerably worse for those companies.
• Sick'n'tired of people making excuses. Either something is done correctly and logically or it's fked up. Then hearing all kind of excuses why it's fked up. Sigh. No. If there's a process, which is followed and things are done as instructed, it isn't possible that it's fked up. As developer, it's very easy to say that logical rules are followed as stated, and there's no reason to deviate. If there's something which needs to be changed in the process, that's fine, then let's discuss why and how and change it. But don't deviate from agreed processes. The end result is just big amazing mess, when everyone does something. And not exactly what's defined and instructed to be done. So many major messes are end result of this exact failure. Not all, but almost all. - This is also one of good examples where watching a few episodes of Air Crash Investigation (aka Mayday) will make things pretty obvious.
• Even more GDPR reading about Controller role and appropriate Data Processing Agreement when the other party is in Processor role defined under the GDPR. Difference of personally identifiable information (PII, US) and personal data (PD, EU). Privacy by Design. Also ePrivacy Directive (ePD). Plus reviewing changes made to multiple products & user & administration documentation.
• One "premium" backup provider is only that, by their own statement. Their backup client is so bad, it tries to compress already compressed data. It also copies files again if only timestamp has been touched, and also if the 10 gigabyte file has been extended by one byte, it's also a good idea to transfer whole file again. They claimed they can send their 'experts' to discuss these matters. But I think it's ridiculous, these are absolutely and totally trivial and obvious things to do, unless you're ... Yeah. Phew. On top of this, they also got ridiculous pricing. I guess this goes in the category of companies I've mentioned earlier. Overpriced junk, lots of meetings, and blah blah, and crappy and expensive end result. Great job guys!
• Updated one older project to use srcset efficiently, picking suitable source image sizes for user. Including small low resolution screens, up to huge 4k screens. Now it works out all prefect. And it saves a lot of bandwidth and gives great user experience even for users, which don't want to load huge images and don't have huge high resolution screens. I'm very happy with the update and so are users. In our case, we've got users which are using good old 1024x768 displays and users whom are using laptops with 4k screens. So the DPI difference is quite huge.
• More discussion about automated stock, automated delivery etc. How we can cut all personnel from daily grocery / shopping, stock & delivery, etc.
• About backup applications SpiderOak does de-duplication properly . They also nicely inform their clients about classic traps like compressing files, which does usually break the de-duplication completely. Which reminded my about checking if de-duplication works properly with MS SQL Server database backups. I did understand that usually the de-duplication works well, but who knows. It's better to recheck that fact. This is also excellent comment, why - cross client de-duplication - isn't working. I really like their stuff. Facts, no bs, lies or bogus claims. As mentioned some cloud services do cross account de-duplication, which is cancer and destroys client security.
• This HTTPS private key thing just absolutely demonstrates how broken things are. - Business as usual, it works, so what if it's totally wrong? Good basic attitude towards security.
• Something different? Artillery shell base bleed range extension.

2019-07-28