Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #17.
Tech
Flight loads miscalculated because women using ‘Miss’ were treated as children
Thomas Claburn for The Register:
The error occurred, according to a report [PDF] released on Thursday by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), because the check-in software treated travelers identified as “Miss” in the passenger list as children, and assigned them a weight of 35 kg (~77 lbs) instead of 69 kg (~152 lbs) for an adult.
The AAIB report attributes the error to cultural differences in how the term Miss is understood.
We talk a lot about how diversity and inclusion is important because it ensures that everyone gets a fair chance in life regardless of their background, race, religion, sexuality, creed, or otherwise. This is why D&I is important on the individual level.
But it’s also important as a gestalt: Monocultures are bad, as monocultures are not universal. This development team included people who speak an English dialect that uses “Miss” mostly in references to children, or who were not native speaks and misunderstood the definition of “Miss.” Having more diverse members who speak and understand multiple variants of English dramatically increases the chances that someone says “Hey, uuuuh… so, I don’t think ‘Miss’ means what you think it means.”
DNS propagation does not exist
Ruurtjan Pul, at the aptly-named nslookup.io:
A widespread fallacy among IT professionals is that DNS propagates through some network. So widespread in fact, that there are a couple of sites dedicated to visualizing the geographic propagation of DNS records. But DNS propagation does not exist.
DNS is just other people’s caches.
The 5 characteristics of high reliability organizations
The concept of HRO has helped engineers, system managers and operators at all levels across industries better understand risk and improve their systems. The result is a significant decrease in system failures through the application of the HRO principles.
TW: Death, first responder emotional trauma, etc.
While this article specifically covers reliability of Emergency Medical Services, the principles discussed are perfectly applicable to our line of work as well.
Learning from incidents: getting Sidekiq ready to serve a billion jobs
Nakul Pathak at Scribd:
Scribd currently serves hundreds of Sidekiq jobs per second and has served 25 billion jobs since its adoption 2 years ago. Getting to this scale wasn’t easy. In this post, I’ll walk you through one of our first ever Sidekiq incidents and how we improved our Sidekiq implementation as a result of this incident.
I have a lot of emotional scarring from Sidekiq, which we used extensively at Bypass. This basically reads like it could have been half of our after-action reports. Datadog AMP - let alone AMP for Sidekiq - did not exist at the time, and Sidekiq did not have great observability at the time.
Probably my biggest single technical contribution at that job was to write a daemon that sat around at monitored the queues directly in redis and export that to Datadog metrics.
Python Packaging Tools: Security Work And An Open Position
Sumana Harihareswara:
New York University (specifically Professor Justin Cappos) and I have successfully asked the US National Science Foundation for a grant to improve Python packaging security. The NSF is awarding NYU $800,000 over two years, from mid-2021 to mid-2023, to further improve the pip dependency resolver and to integrate The Update Framework further into the packaging toolchain. I shared more details in this announcement on an official Python packaging forum.
This is great news! Python, in my not so humble opinion, already has one of the more easily understood packaging frameworks. It’s really good to see yet more work poured into it, especially on the security front.
BBEdit - Free Text Editor (Apr 12, 1992)
Rich Siegel, writing to comp.sys.mac.announce in 1992:
This is the first public release of BBEdit, which is a free text editor that has been under development and extensive in-house testing for the past two years.
BBEdit is 32-bit clean, compatible with any Macintosh running system version 6.0 or later, and when running under System 7.0, takes specific advantage of new features to enhance performance and appearance.
One of the true Mac gems turns 29 this week.
Grab Bag
Supermarkets cheesed off after dairy supplier is hacked
DutchNews.nl:
The hack took place last Monday and took down the order system, forcing the company to return to pen and paper to process orders and regulate stocks, the Telegraaf reported. Director Toon Verhoeven told the paper the company had been attacked by ransomware but declined to give any further details.
This happened back on April 10 or 11 and today (the 15th), all three of my closest AHs still have very, very limited cheese selections.
Personal Note
I have some availability on my calendar for SRE and DevOps consulting work. If you’re an early stage or scale up stage startup, give me a holler at links in the sidebar.