Outlook, Python 3, APIs, General Magic, Teams, Events, SSL, Zoom, COVID-19

  1. Microsoft Outlook is once again being unreliable email provider. It seems that some of the mail servers are working, and some aren't. I really can't understand how they can provide such a bleeping service from year to year. It seems that many are p*sd off and annoyed by constant reliability problems. - Use cloud, you'll get s**t. - Btw. I didn't have any of these problems while I were running my own server. Yet of course, if there's something wrong, then it's just up to me to fix the issues. Which might be bad if you're traveling or on vacation etc.

  2. Python 3 http.client so enraging, it does something differently that curl. In some cases http.client simply doesn't work, but curl works with exactly same settings out of the box. I remember when we had similar issues where urllib didn't work but http.client did. Nobody ever found out what the problem was. Because in most of cases both of those options work just as well. No difference what so ever. But some implementations are extremely picky about "something", which is now missing in this case. Of course documentation and requirements are nil, as usual. Can't stop deeply hating tasks where 5 minute job starts taking hours. Maybe I'll go with the traditional solution, and just use save data in file and call cURL to process it and then parse output. That's better than using any other options, as I've described. For unknown reasons the remote company also always recommends cURL for making all API calls. I guess there's a reason for that (?).

  3. More mind bending web APIs. On HTTP connection HSTS header is sent. But if you try to access the same service over HTTPS the resource is then forbidden. I just can't stop loving stuff like this. Yet, this works perfectly well as long as the client is coded well enough to ignore the HSTS header and keeps posting everything over HTTP. So classic, simple, yet extremely annoying, complex and hard to debug. Aka brittle junk code. Next I'll try urllib directly, and see if it works. If it doesn't then I'll try requests. Yes, interestingly urllib works, when http.client doesn't. Yet with some other web-servers the situation has been different. urllib didn't work but http.client did. Duh. Ok, issue resolved. But so deeply annoying when standard stuff is totally broken. Daily WTF. And the HSTS issue remains. Just do not honor HSTS and it works. - Know your tools, unfortunately there are situations when you don't have full visibility to the whole processing chain.

  4. Watched General Magic (2018) (@ IMDB) documentary, good stuff. Computers, Networking, Mobile, Technology, Innovation, Business, History, Silicon Valley, integrated mobile device or smart watch with touch screen, etc. It's all there.

  5. I really wish that Microsoft Teams would have a global mute and unmute shortcuts as well as push to talk (PPT) features. But nope, that's way too hard and complex for them to implement.

  6. Again messages without message id, APIs / message queue / event processing. In case of retry or timeout, there's no way knowing if the previous request was processed or not, nor there's proper retry logic. - So classic, so tired.

  7. Once again SSL Certs broken with IIS, constantly. This is so annoying. It's a big reliability issue that systems break down all the time. So annoying. The scripts updating the stuff all were working earlier, but after some Windows and PowerShell updates, those are again broken because required features aren't supported. Personal opinion - Systems which require constant expert maintenance and experts to be 'on-call' to remain operational are extremely annoying, unreliable and of course very expensive to maintain and operate. Three hours later, now it's working. And it even might work automatically next time when renewal is due. Or maybe not, we'll find out. Probably during summer vacation.

  8. Zoom remote conferencing stock is doing great. But Zoom is Facebook malware spying on you. That's a real shame. It seems that almost everything is now being powered by spying.

  9. Something different? COVID-19 (@ Wikipedia) or SARS-CoV-2, Chloroquine, Past and Present (@ ScienceMag) and of course the Chloroquine (@ Wikipedia) as well. Anyway, when this post will eventually come out, this is all hopefully history. And we can clearly see what went wrong in retrospective. It's not hard to guess, this will generate several great documentaries about the subject. Just as every economic crash or any other major event. - Update: Unfortunately this post is now out, and it isn't history yet. Vaccinations are still lagging badly at least in Finland, Canada and in many other places as well.

2021-04-04