Revolut, Ubuntu, Scrolling, GIMP, Google Cloud, FCM, GCF, DDoS

• Revolut more of their scam attitude. They advertise that the card is free. But when you're in their service, the card is free, but delivery is expensive. When you don't order it and wait for a week or so, then the delivery becomes also free. I really can't stop hating service like this enough.
• When using Ubuntu Live from USB stick or other medium. It's interesting to notice that if it the live version finds any Swap partitions, it'll auto mount those and start using as swap space. Hmm, depending on situation that can be a great or very bad thing.
• Hyper-speed scrolling - Small but so annoying things. I don't know what happened. But suddenly on one Xubuntu workstation, M705 scrolling started to work in hyper-speed mode. Now one "click" of the scroll wheel, scrolls down about three pages, instead of three rows. Wow, this is annoying. It's also impossible to click anything with the center button (which is the middle wheel) because even touching it scrolls half a screen up or down. I hadn't even earlier thought about the fact that there's such a high resolution sensor on that scroll wheel. After reading lots of different problem cases. I found instructions to unplug and re-plug the USB receiver. Didn't work. Day later I was again greatly annoyed by the scroll speed problem (because it's truly enraging!). I did read many more posts and finally tried something else, resetting the mouse power. Yep, that fixed the problem. It wasn't about the receiver, but about the mouse and now it's working. I also know which caused the problem. I booted my Xubuntu systems with Ubuntu Disco Dog Live for testing some things. It seems that after this the problem persisted in Xubuntu until the mouse was rebooted. Phew!
• GIMP User Experience, I know GIMP's logic is bit different and it often frustrates inexperienced users. But today I noticed something really awesome with GIMP. I were editing a screenshot, and when I decided to exit the program it said that, Screenshot (exported) is unsaved. True, image is unsaved in GIMP format. But it's already exported to PNG and it told me that. This is great user experience. Because I've been so often annoyed by the fact that it says image is not saved, even if I've just exported it. If you've got many images open at times it requires you to go through checking process which images are actually exported and which aren't. This is technically very small thing, but from user experience stand point it reduces mistakes, ie. closing images not saved / exported and makes task of knowing if the image exported so much easier. - Thank you for that. And this time it's not even sarcasm, ha!
• Studied Google Cloud / Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Also studied Google Cloud Functions (GCF / FaaS) which is something which I might use in future for in some of my use cases. Bit more solution compared to App Engine. Yet also lighter, which means that it's suitable for different kind of workloads. Currently all of my real work work loads are almost always ETL type jobs, which are very badly suited to this kind of cloud itself. Of course data transport could flow through cloud, but even that's not mostly necessary. Long running processes with large memory requirements and direct database connections and so on. Or in rare cases, just data transformation, that could work well in cloud, if it's just format transformation. But in every ETL job there's the extract transform and load steps naturally. I'm just now working on one project where I've already completed the extract and load parts, and the transformation is still being developed. After that the project will be officially certified for production use for a major client.
• Famous Large DDoS Attacks @ Cloudflare - Really good reading, some history and scale growth well presented. Interestingly Cloudflare got their units wrong gbps? Isn't Giga with G? Units are such a mess, many write Kbps when kilo is a small k. And is B for bytes and b for bits? Mess is guaranteed under extra description is provided or the reader is experienced enough to make educated guess what's the right unit. I'm sure I've got several of similar mistakes in this blog as well.
• Something different? - Future Vertical Lift.

2020-09-20