MMDC, Integration, Email, Agile, Scope, Geohash, PEP 557, OSCP

• Micro-modular data centers (MMDC) / Modular Data Centers (MDC). Currently no need for such solutions. But sure is handy, if you need serious computing power at some edge locations. Portable data centers are awesome for rural or hard to access locations, where high computing power is still required. Science, Industry, etc.
• One Microsoft NAV integration finished. But as said, it doesn't matter what the system is. Everything can be changed and configured as customer wishes. Nothing new. There's nothing especially hard about integrations. Sometimes there are just so many things to consider, getting the flow right, having all the configuration and code correct. And so on. But I really do prefer quick iterations and a nice test data batch. With that, trouble shooting is quite quick, of course covering all the annoying edge-cases. - Also mapping between internal logic of different systems is sometimes so joyful. Like in this case, "refund", what does it mean? Negative quantity, negative amount or is that transaction just flagged as refund, what about returns? What about refunds of returns? And so on. And the list goes on.
• Daily email management fun, it seems that Outlook has switched to new MX servers. Clearly powered by Outlook.com infrastructure and booting the old Hotmail MX servers. No problem, but it would have been just nice to know. Now I had serious email issues, because I didn't know that configuration update is required. But now it's done, and everything is good.
• Agile development, Scrum and Sprints is very slow pace. When we finished one Navision integration, we did around 10 daily updates, releases and then rerun the integration testing and if there were any issues, those got immediately fixed, and new version was released and tested. - This is the pace which I like. You can get job done in a few days, which with many projects would have taken weeks or even months.
• Once again, daily WTF. One organization is (pretending to be) very keen about their security, everything is nightmarish including credentials management etc. But they still use stupidest passwords ever and do not even allow users to set new passwords. This is security by disinformation. You'll get all the drawbacks of heavy credentials management, but you'll completely ruin it by forcing users to use moronic passwords. - Business as usual.
• OVH has changed VPS Cloud disks to "Thin provisioned drive" type, now defrag only performs Trimming and some slight optimization instead of full traditional defragmentation of drive(s). Of course you can override that with /d parameter when defragging.
• Once Microsoft has done something good. When the old Hotmail systems retired and new "Outlook" systems kicked in, they've finally fixed the issue with addresses including + sign. Now you can send email to random+address@example.com and it works just as it's supposed. Earlier Microsoft claimed that the address is invalid always, if it included + sign.
• Scope, scope creep and so on. I'm so often amazed by people who don't get scope at all. Nor they understand modules and isolation. It's just so common that these things are totally bleeped up. Even more often, customers especially require things to be made messy, instead of lean and clean approach. - Sigh. Does your cars manual include documentation about your garage? Well, I think it should... - NOT!
• USB Flash Drive Endurance Test. Very nice post. Yep, it seems that many USB Flash drives aren't that great. Many say that flash will handle 10000 to 100000 writes, but that's not true anymore. Even some SSD drives are failing around 2000 write cycles. Trend is going down all the time, especially on consumer flash drives.
• Studed Geohash - Geocoding alternative. Why? Trigger: kqpgs75hk5
• PEP 557 - Data Classes for Python 3.7. Interesting stuff, yet it'll take a while before 3.7 is in production.
• OCSP stapling - Reminded my self about OCSP stapling. Yet currently I'm not hosting any sites which would be so high priority, that revoking certificates would be probable.

2019-04-07