Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #13.
Tech
Net-wide outages in Russia
Today’s outages in Russia appears to have been caused by a bad substring match by @roscomnadzor.
Intending to block Twitter’s link shortener t[.]co, Russia blocked all domains containing t[.]co, for example Microsoft[.]com and Reddit[.]com.
Regex is a hell of a drug.
Amazon ECS now allows you to execute commands in a container running on Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate
On the AWS Blog:
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces Amazon ECS Exec - a simple, secure, and auditable way for customers to execute commands in a container running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or AWS Fargate. ECS Exec gives you interactive shell or single command access to a running container making it easier to debug issues, diagnose errors, collect one-off dumps and statistics, and interact with processes in the container.
I visited Seattle for an Executive Briefing with the AWS containers people and raked them over the coals for not having this.
That was in 2016 or 2017, so I feel really justified in this finally.
Chicken Story
Eyal, about “The time when Microsoft banned my entire country for cheating at Club Bing.”:
Micrsoft ran the game to popularize their search engine, Bing. Everytime that you typed in an answer, your browser would search for it in another frame. This perhaps convinces people to use Bing more but it also increases the number of users that appear to be using Bing. And that number helps Microsoft demand more money from advertisers that want to appear on Bing search results. I worked out that all the scripters playing Chicktionary were contributing 2-4% of all Bing searches. I also did some back-of-the-envelope math comparing Google’s revenue and searches/month with that of Bing and figured out that Microsoft was getting a pretty good return on the game. The appearance of Bing being more popular probably brought in more ad dollars than the prizes cost.
I’d say something witty here, but you should just read the whole thing. It’s worth it.
Real-time Merge Conflict Detection
Sunny Dasgupta:
With our latest release, you can see your teammates’ changes to a file in the gutter of your editor and get notified of conflicts as soon as they occur even across branches and uncommitted changes!
Mind. Blown.
Temperature Sensors in the OVH Fire
@skunnyk:
Petit serveur parti trop tôt, dans la douleur, dans la chaleur :( #OVHFIRE #OVHcloud 🔥
🔥 indeed.
Grab Bag
Rick Steves, Underappreciated
Sumana Harihareswara:
He’s an inspiration to me as an entrepreneur and as a teacher. He started off teaching a class on cheap European travel – because no one else was doing it! – and turned that lecture into his first book. Hearing that story reminded me that the book I’m writing will be a lot better if I test it out as a curriculum as I write it. So now I’m thinking about how to do that with real learners.
And I want to be an entrepreneur who, like Fred Rogers, like Anant Pai, like David Neeleman, like Rick Steves, found a need and filled it, while making money, employing people, and making a little slice of the world easier.
Rick Steves is a true national treasure - perhaps I should say International Treasure. Definitely check out his recent appearance on NPR’s How I Built This With Guy Raz - great episode of a great show.