Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #8.
Tech
Acceptance of Pattern Matching PEPs…
From the Python Steering Council:
We know that Pattern Matching has been a challenging feature that has sparked considerable discussions and design conversations, leading to several revisions from feedback stemming from the community, core devs, and the Steering Council. We are very happy to see that the Python developer community remains passionate and respectful, and we are sure that the result has benefited a lot because of it.
For many many years, I’ve felt that this was a glaring hole in the python language. The only thing I’ve been even more sure of is that I do not like any of the syntaxes given in any of the PEPs. Greater minds than mine spent more time thinking about this than I ever will, though, so I’ll roll with it.
Two new “experimental” stable kernels
jake at LWN:
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 4.9.256 and 4.4.256 in order to try to figure out if there are any user-space problems caused by the overflow of the minor version number for those stable-kernel series. “With this release, KERNEL_VERSION(4, 9, 256) is the same as KERNEL_VERSION(4, 10, 0). Nothing in the kernel build itself breaks with this change, but given that this is a userspace visible change, and some crazy tools (like glibc and gcc) have logic that checks the kernel version for different reasons, I wanted to do this release as an ‘empty’ release to ensure that everything still works properly.” Those who could be affected would be well-advised to test this change immediately as he plans another 4.9 release in a week’s time.
A good old fashioned Scream Test.
How I spend $500 per day because of a misconfiguration
Dirk Hoekstra at ScraperBox:
In one weekend Google Cloud had burned through €1,200 - which is roughly $1,500.
Scraperbox is bootstrapped so this was going to come out of my own pocket. And my money was already limited.
After the initial shock wore off I dove into the problem to fix it as quickly as possible. I was burning €17 an hour after all.
And here I was worried because ACNC cost me $25 more than expected in January (also due to a misconfiguration).
Homebrew 3.0
Mike McQuaid at Homebrew:
Today I’d like to announce Homebrew 3.0.0. The most significant changes since 2.7.0 are official Apple Silicon support and a new bottle format in formulae.
That’s Big SIR to You!
Shirt Pocket’s Dave Nanian:
Good news!
However, after wracking my brain for far too long, I’ve come up with a workaround that will let you make the backups you need to save your files, and to supplement your Time Machine backup. And for that, we need to go Back…to the Future!
Super Duper is a venerable, permanent fixture in many Mac users’ toolbox and its incompatibility with Big Sur has been a real let down. It’s good to see that he’s working on it, and has a workaround for the moment. It’s a bummer that the backups aren’t bootable, but them’s the breaks I guess.
@jpaulreed:
Who out there LOVES THEM SOME CRON?!?!!
Or just uses cron?
Or… y’know… likes a good story. (Involving cron!!)
Well, this is the thread for you…
This SRE atempted to roll out an HAProxy config change. You won’t believe what happened next…
Gitlab’s Igor Wielder:
TLDR
HAProxy has a server-state-file directive that persists some of its state across restarts.
This state file contains the port of each backend server.
If an haproxy.cfg change modifies the port, the new port will be overwritten with the previous one from the state file.
A workaround is to change the backend server name, so that it is considered to be a separate server that does not match what is in the state file.
This has implications for the rollout procedure we use on HAProxy.
I’ve seen this behavior myself, but never had the inclination to look into the cause of it. Crazy stuff.
Grab Bag
Subaru Blames A Single Factory Worker For A Recall
Erik Shilling at Jalopnik:
It would be a poor day at work to come in and find out that you personally were responsible for a recall at the multinational automaker that you work for, but then again it would also be just another one of life’s unique experiences.
At least I can fix my fuck-ups remotely?
The story behind ‘Blue Check Homes’: How an SF artist created a fake company that fooled thousands
But Danielle Baskin, the SF-based artist behind the prank, had no idea the website she crafted to back up the fake service would receive 495 applicants, all hoping for a crest of their own.
I pointed out that this prank violated Poe’s Law last week. Turns out I was right.
The People Wanted Lego Bike Lanes, and Lego is Finally Listening
Andrew Hawkins writing at The Verge:
A thousand years ago, back in 2019, a regional councilor in the Netherlands named Marcel Steeman undertook a seemingly impossible challenge: convince the makers of one of the most popular toys in the world to do something a little different.
He wanted Lego, the toy production company based in Billund, Denmark, to add bike lanes to their tiny, brick-made cities.
Much Dutch. Very Bitterballen.