Simple, BGP, CF, Life, Links, GDPR, Bicycle, Gigantti, EHT, UID

• One colleague said to me, that you really seem to like simple solutions. - Yes, I deeply hate overly complicated solutions in situation where simpler one would server just as well.
• Battleships over BGP - As said, anything over anything works. Nothing new here. Yet it's fun stuff for nerds.
• Cloudflare rate limiting - Nothing new, good stuff. Recommended reading if you have to deal with logins.
• I got annoyed one morning, because I started some tasks while manufacturing my breakfast in wrong order, making the critical path on Gantt chart longer than it should be. - Optimizing life.
• Typical long discussions about process resource allocation, resource allocation slots, task priority ordering and resource planning. Yet that's pretty normal stuff whatever you're doing.
• Symblic links, Junctions and stuff on Windows. Had to play with that stuff for a while. To get optimal configuration. Some times setting up extendable volumes on system is too much hassle. And all that's needed is a simple way to split data on multiple drive. In this case I did choose additional drive and symlinking worst space offenders to it. -> Worked well.
• "GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB". - Not surprising at all, so many webshites are absolutely full of it.
• Bicycles - One day we serviced one bicycle with flat tire. And we found out that it had sharp metal spike inside the rim which punctured the tube. This was especially after service, where they replaced the rim, charging a lot for it. Yet another situation where it's really hard to say, if they're totally incompetent or if this was on purpose done sabotage, making sure that the customer will come back after a while and they can charge more. - So this kind of stuff is not limited to software, configuration or processes, it's universal. Ref: Pyörähuolto M&M Oy, Itsenäisyydenkatu 12, Tampere
• GDPR and Gigantti, I think they're totally out of line with their stuff. Like claiming that home address information and other stuff are required for sales / return / warranty operations. If you claim that information is required, which doesn't have legally required basis, I'm just going to give you pure disinformation and have really fun while doing it. - Actually this has nothing to do with GDPR. It just asking totally irrelevant information and collecting it.
• Daily Linux joy - "E: intel-microcode: unsupported kernel version!" time to remove intel-microcode.
• Awesome, transit authority is starting to accept direct contactless card payments, finally. That's awesome progress. I wish it would be possible everywhere. No need to install crapoware on your phone. Update: Yet, two years later, the service isn't yet actually available.
• Something different: Kardashev scale, Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Unique id handling fun

In one integration it was essential to have unique transaction identifier. Of course we've got that. But the message format was simple, so that the recipient had issues parsing the message transactionally This is perfect example of non-inssue. It's just about how it's implemented and there are endless solutions to this kind of simple "problem".

- They asked if the transaction ID can repeat

- It can, if the user creates sub-items (which is very rare)

Optional solutions:

1) We can add unique sub-item identifier with (per source database), either separate field or composite field

2) We can use unique sub-item sequence number (per transaction), either separate field or composite field

3) We can replace the transaction identifier with sub-item resolution identifier

4) They can allow several sub-items following each other using same transaction identifier (they'll sum it up at their end)

5) We can combine multiple sub-items into one transaction (we can sum it up, before sending)

All of these solutions are technically perfectly working and reliable. It's just about implementation details. Yet they were very worried about audit trail. But any of these methods won't cause the audit trail to disappear. After all we ended with transaction-id and sub-item-id both.

2019-10-27