Migration, Tor, Tapping, I/O, Quality, Security, Sites, Tier

• Azure to GCP migration by GitLab - Nice post. Well, it still lacks lots and lots of technical details. But in general, it looks really good. Migrating large systems is always bit challenging, if downtime is meant to be kept to the minimum. Just wondering if Google will acquire GitLab.
• Studied Tor 0.4.0.5 release notes. Dormant state and Extra Dormant State are nice additions. It's always so nice to see all the discussion of issues and decisions taken by developers how to solve issues and deciding how to develop and implement new features.
• Read a few new interesting yet not surprising articles about fiber tapping. Which is just a good reminder that E2EE is required always, when there's anything confidential being transported over Internet.
• This paper: I/O Is Faster Than the CPU – Let’s Partition Resources and Eliminate (Most) OS Abstractions (PDF) reminded me about I/O efficiency. I got annoyed a few months ago with a SATA USB adapter which literally hogs CPU and slows down whole system while transferring data. Reminded me about Channel I/O and how inefficient many interfaces are nowadays.
• One day at work we discussed with colleagues that quality of software and services in general is totally horrible. You're more amazed if something simple works, because the default value is that it won't work anyway. I just applied for new credit card, everything worked well. But then they wanted to offer me a better deal and that's where the process got broken. Great work, they think I'm going to call their customer service and explain all this for one credit card, no way. I'm not that interested. Now my guess is that I won't get the standard deal, because they wanted to offer better deal and because I didn't agree the the better deal ever due their platform being so broken, I guess I won't get any deal at all. Life is. I'll vote with my feet and money. Some companies don't get the fact, that actually great, that customers bother to complain about their stuff. Why? Because it only means that someone cares enough to complain.
• Sometimes things go well, even if HSL broke lot of legacy stuff and features while doing their system upgrade, now the system is nice. As well as the end user terminals in public transport got much improved usability. Less lag less clicks and so on. After all good work from that end user terminal perspective.
• Should code signing improve security? Well, at least now it made it worse by destroying reliability. Firefox managed to screw up all add-ons and extensions by failing with certificates and signatures. Awesome job. Making systems complex, makes systems usually less reliable, not more secure. Unfortunately security is often adding tons of complexity to simple things. Hilarious, quite huge mess. Let's see how they clean it up and what they learn from it, if anything. Reddit, Twitter and many other platforms go wild on this. Bug: 1548973
• Google Sites also suck from technical perspective. Cache-control header values are funny, expires is in past, last-modified is missing. Sites rely heavily on JS and are super slow often. Let's see what other funny claims they'll be making. Also it's impossible to choose preferred url, like custom domain. The migration tool sucked. That's something which is blatantly obvious. Etag missing, {"cache-control": "no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate", "pragma": "no-cache", "expires": "Mon, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"}. Wow, they're creating a feature which would show when page has been modified, wow. Also favicon is broken, images are broken in editor and so on. But yeah, that's the usual quality. It feels like there isn't even one full time developer working on Google Sites, persistent problems from year to another.
• Tried fifth and final (?) time the Tier Scooters App. It's great sample of VC funded company, their product is utter c?rp! It's totally unusable. But it's great that VC's are pouring money in so you don't need to care about the devastatingly bad user experience! - I kind of wish I would be in same kind of business. Every time when I piss off my customers, I would get huge bonus. Yes please!

2020-07-05