Minitel, Jets, Skylake, Skype, Alibaba, Malware, Communication, KISS

• Minitel - Really nice article about Minitel. Online service a new idea, yep, it depends. Minitel @ Wikipedia.
• Fighter Jets - Read a few background articles which describe political and technical decision making behind the last purchase of Finnish Fighter Jets. That time we ended up choosign McDonnell Douglas F/F-18 Hornet. Those papers have been kept secret for 25 years. It's claimed that it wasn't political decision, but F-18 provided best bang for buck ratio. That's something I personally like.
• Intel Skylake bug. Very nice post. Yep, sometimes it's not your program causing the issues, it might be something deeper.
• Read a fresh and long discussion thread about Skype and Skype for Business. Everyone seemed to agree, that Microsoft has made everything they can to sabotage their users and provide as poor as possible user experience. It was actually quite hilarious reading. It would be so nice to see the Skype team meetings, it would be probably a good sitcom. And now all the joy when users should start using Teams and SfB interconnect is something totally horrible.
• Alibaba Cloud Hosting, Alibaba CDN. Wow, they got plenty of stuff to offer. Elastic Computing, Storage & CDN, Networking, Database, Management, DSN, Analytics, Application Service, Media Services. So as expected, they're really full featured cloud provider. And got even two locations in Europe currently, Paris & Frankfurt. Alibaba Cloud @ Wikipedia.
• Hybrid Analysis - New virus / malware scanner service from Payload Security using VxStream Sandbox 6.70. This is a nice addition to Jotti's Malware Scan- and Virustotal.
• Asynchronous communication. It seems that many people with all this IM crap have totally forgotten how async works. As well as they don't have any kind of sane process of handling incoming messages. I'm total expert on async comms. I do handle messages often in large batches / topic as a single run. It's very very efficient way. Yet it seems that some people don't get that, yes, you can send me messages at any time. And I'll be processing those at 'any time' in future. It might mean that I'll get back to you in two months, maybe four? Or maybe tomorrow. But it doesn't mean I'm ignoring you. It's very clear that time management doesn't work, because we can't affect time. But batching and focus management does work. So I'll be handling the actionable stuff with highest priority. And if possible preferably then quite large batches. So even if you send me IM messages, you can send me 200 messages. I'll reply to all of those at once in a week or so. Extremely efficient. Yet, it seems that some people are so bad at managing messaging, that they don't even realize that they got 50 replies in a batch. They just read 1 or 2 of the last ones. Which is btw, extremely annoying. It's a failure in process. Replying late, or in batch is not a failure. But ignoring received messages completely is. - I do personally love async communication / messaging. I usually also disable all message notifications, because I'll handle your case, when it's time for it. It doesn't mean I'm ignoring you. Yet partially this is also caused by bad engineering of IM software. Which doesn't provide easy traceability which messages have been processed etc. I've found this to be problematic with Slack and with many other apps it's even much worse. You'll have to record the timestamp in secondary application where you'll need to continue processing that queue. Because many apps jump right to the end of queue. Really bad engineering to begin with, combine this with average users and well, results are bad.
• Keep it simple and robust. That's what I'm trying to do. Just had a discussion with a few colleagues, whom are getting sick'n'tired of ever more complex software stacks, frameworks, cloud stuff, etc. After a while your software will pack dozens of different layers and technologies. It might be cool, but it's going to cause also probably major problems in long term. What if some of the components you've used doesn't get maintained anymore, etc. Ouch! Still considering using Brython for something. Yet WebAssembly @ Wikipedia version would be awesome.

2018-09-16