Ryan Johansen’s signature shootout move has been heavily discussed again lately, because it pushes the limits of the shootout rules.

Last week against the Detroit Red Wings, he took it to an extreme even for himself.

Ryan Johansen's "controller disconnected" shootout move is still working pic.twitter.com/3aYTk5MRtC

— Brady Trettenero (@BradyTrett) April 7, 2021

The rule that gets people in trouble here is part of Rule 24 - Penalty Shots, which reads in part:

The puck must be kept in motion towards the opponent’s goal line

There’s two things that we look at very closely when trying to judge this rule. First, we give the shooter a very small amount of leeway if the puck stops as a natural consequence of their shot mechanics. This is a bit difficult to quantify, but basically if the puck stops for a fraction of a second while the shooter is in the instantaneous act of shooting the puck, that’s generally Ok.

If, however, they do this in a deliberate act of deception, fake out the goal tender by stopping the puck, then move it again and make a completely different action to shoot the puck? That is not ok.

In this case, Johansen very briefly stops the puck in the act of taking his shot so, while this skirts at the edge of the rule, we’re generally going to let it slide.

The second thing is that the motion of the skaters themselves often gives the illusion” that the puck has stopped when in fact it has not. In the act of stickhandling the puck, if the skater’s velocity does not change but they _slow the puck down it will appear by frame of reference to have stopped. This isn’t really the case, though it’s hard to see unless you slow a reply down and frame-by-frame it. So, if the shooter has the puck way out in front of themselves but then draws it in closer, you might perceive this as the being stopped, but it’s not really - it’s just moving at a slower rate of speed.

I’ll also note that there is some slight nuance between rulebooks.

For instance, the IIHF has this to say:

Rule 177 (x) The skater is allowed to use the full width of the ice so long as he demonstrates continuous forward or lateral movement of both his body and the puck towards the goal net. (xi) The penalty shot is considered complete once: … 3. The skater has not kept the puck in continuous forward or lateral movement;

So while the NHL says the puck must be kept in motion towards the goal line, which extends the entire width of the ice, the IIHF wants the motion to be towards the goal net, but they also allow lateral motion.

In practice, these rules are roughly equivalent to one another, they just attack the wording from different angles.

Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #16.

Tech

(Vote) Move Apache Mesos to Attic

Vinod Kone on the Mesos mailing list:

Based on the recent conversations on our mailing list, it seems to me that the majority consensus among the existing PMC is to move the project to the attic and let the interested community members collaborate on a fork in Github.

I would like to call a vote to dissolve the PMC and move the project to the attic.

Farewell to thee, Mesos. We hardly knew ye.

How I’ve improved my remote presentation setup

Lara Hogan:

Then the pandemic hit. I was lucky to have a trusted advisor to lean on as I adapted my workshop content to work better for a fully-remote audience, and for my own brain. But even though I’d successfully revamped my content, I still needed to iterate on the quality of and environment for my remote presenting setup.

This is all great advice for how to setup your remote workspace. While the context is presentations, it’s quite applicable for the modern Zoom era if you need to appear ultra professional.

postgres pager

Everybody who uses psql uses less pager. It is working well, but there is not any special support for tabular data. I found few projects, but no one was completed for this purpose. I decided to write some small specialized pager for usage as psql pager.

CEO after the alcolock crash: “Suspected cyber attack behind”

At three o’clock last night , the taxi drivers at Taxi Göteborg discovered that the alcolock did not work in their cars. Hundreds of cars could not be driven.

I couldn’t find an English source for this, sadly, but here we get another example of the Internet of Things being shit.

Grab Bag

Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th

Nick Statt at the Verge:

Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist.

If we tear down history like this, how will we ever know how is babby formed?.

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.

Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #15: Left Pad Strikes Back!

Tech

Ruby off the Rails

Thomas Claburn for The Register:

Mendler thanked Nocera for letting him know and promptly moved the latest version, 0.4.0, and version 0.3.6 under GPLv2, and withdrew prior versions from distribution on RubyGems.org, the package registry used by Ruby developers. He then archived the mimemagic GitHub repo, meaning it’s no longer being actively developed.

This had the unfortunate effect of breaking the popular web development framework Ruby on Rails, which includes mimemagic 0.3.5 as a dependency.

Do you want a left-pad incident? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET A LEFT PAD INCIDENT!

vim Is the Future

Emily St:

Vim is old. It’s a program that was originally written for the Amiga operating system, first available in 1991.

Emily’s post is quite old but was somehow marked unread in my feed reader this morning. Two main takeaways:

1. I had no idea that vim hails from the Amiga. Very cool.
2. Emily’s dotfiles setup is amazing. I have stolen it, and will have some customizations pushed up soon.

CloudLinux Launches AlmaLinux, CentOS Linux clone

Steven J Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet:

When Red Hat, CentOS’s Linux parent company, announced it was “shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release,” the move vexed many CentOS users. As a result, CentOS co-founder, Gregory Kurtzer, announced he’d create his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement: Rocky Linux. Then, on Rocky’s heels, commercial CentOS distributor CloudLinux announced it would create its own new CentOS clone, Lenix. Now, under a new name, AlmaLinux OS is here with its first release.

One way you know that RedHat fucked this up, is by seeing just how many replacement projects have already gained so much traction and attention.

Fano Framework: Web application framework for modern Pascal

The fact that this exists means I have to do something with it. Like many students of the 90s, Pascal was my first general purpose programming language, and it’s nice to see that some flames are still being carried.

PHP: Changes to Git commit workflow

Nikita Popov, writing to PHP-DEV:

Yesterday (2021-03-28) two malicious commits were pushed to the php-src repo from the names of Rasmus Lerdorf and myself. We don’t yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account).

While investigation is still underway, we have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server. Instead, the repositories on GitHub, which were previously only mirrors, will become canonical. This means that changes should be pushed directly to GitHub rather than to git.php.net.

Good call. I know some older projects that continue to resist this move for entirely valid reasons, but those reasons are becoming less and less compelling by the day.

Glynn Lunney: 1936-2021

Robert Barron writes:

Half a century after the moon landings, Lunney’s words are still relevant to Site Reliability Engineers, not only those responsible for launching rockets, but for deployment in any technological endeavour.

Pour one out for one of the greats. The spirit of the Apollo project, especially in the face of adversity, informs a lot of the technical world today, and Lunney was at the heart of the development of that ethos.

It may seem like a bit of a stretch to get from landing a man on the moon to running a hotel booking or video streaming site, but we have very similar discussions every day. Lunney’s “then we began to build a framework below that for how much redundancy we wanted to have remaining in order to continue” happens every day in our incident management, where we have to trade off fixing problems with what potential problems we could face later on as a result of our choices.

Grab Bag

The Complete April Fools RFCs

RFCs are the documents that the IETF publishes to document how the Internet works. On April 1 of each year sometimes one or two are published that are parodies. This book collects them all under one cover in a book suitable for your coffee table, office, or hidden somewhere so your friends don’t know how geeky your humor is.

I’m disappointed that you can’t have it delivered by IP over Avian Carrier.

Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #14: The Ever Given Edition

Tech

Managed OpenShift on AWS

AWS:

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) provides an integrated experience to use OpenShift. If you are already familiar with OpenShift, you can accelerate your application development process by leveraging familiar OpenShift APIs and tools for deployments on AWS.

I wonder what my last 3 years would have been like if this had already been available…

We are very far from a better Heroku for production apps in a hyper cloud

Michael Friedrich on the Gitlab blog:

This blog post covers the basic learning steps with Heroku and the 5 minute production app. A typical web app requires a database, storage or caching backend, which can get complicated to run with Heroku. We will explore the setup and production experience in future blog posts. In addition to backends, we will also look into TLS certificates and production environments in CD workflows.

Michael got a lot of (righteous) flak for originally titling this post “We are building a better Heroku” before backing off to the current title. Even so, this is some really cool stuff.

Being Just Reliable Enough

Andrew Ford on the Indeed Engineering Blog:

It was way before I thought about getting the tweezers. When I started raking, my definition of a successfully raked yard was too vague. I did not have a service level objective (SLO) specifying the percentage of my yard that could be covered in leaves and still be considered well-raked by my clients.

If you’ve worked closely with me, you know that this is my bag. People demand all these nines, but most of the time they have no idea how much effort those nines cost nor do they even know the difference in what they’d see with 4 or 5 of them. Or sometimes even 2 of them.

Four Prerequisites for Chaos Engineering

Courtney Nash:

Chaos Engineering isn’t adding chaos to your systems—it’s seeing the chaos that already exists in your systems. This particular myth is in part driven by the perception that Chaos Engineering is a form of new, cutting edge technology. Instead, however, it is borrowing from a long tradition of using experimentation to confirm or refute hypotheses you form about your system.

Jeff Palmer’s CI/CD Cost-Benefit Data

Following up on this tweet, Jeff Palmer threw together a great spreadsheet on the benefits of CI/CD for skeptical orgs.

Grab Bag

Dungeons and Directories

Dungeons and Directories is a short text adventure game that you play in your file browser.

Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #13.

Tech

Net-wide outages in Russia

@DougMadory:

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.

Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #12: Let It Burn

Tech

OVH: Major Incident Impacting Strasbourg DataCenter

• At 00:47 CET on Wednesday 10 March 2021, a fire broke out in a room at one of our four OVHcloud data centers in Strasbourg (SBG2).

SBG1 and SBG2 are major European data centers, hosting some really important services. Their loss hurts quite a bit.

SearchEngine Journal has a good running list of the services affected.

It Can Happen to You: Accidentally Quadratic

Matt Keeter:

I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, but in short, GTA Online had accidentally quadratic performance when parsing a large JSON blob (due to repeated calls to strlen); fixing this improved loading time by almost 70%.

“Accidentally quadratic” just became an instant favorite for me. Right up there with “fractal wrongness.””

Our journey from a Python monolith to a managed platform

Naphat Sanguansin on the Drobox tech blog:

Likewise, in production, the fate of their endpoints was tied to every other endpoint, regardless of the stability, criticality, or level of ownership of these endpoints.

Their journey is amazing, but this puzzled me. Monolithic codebases do not necessarily need to be run monolithically in production; you can run canaries dedicated to specific endpoints.

@racheltrue trips on an iCloud bug

Type error: cannot set value true to property lastName

It’s a cheap shot to say that there’s an xkcd for everything here, but even more to the point I’m reminded about Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.

In this case, the code didn’t properly handle the possibility that “True” could actually be someone’s name.

Javascript is a hell of a drug.

git/banned.h

 /*
 * This header lists functions that have been banned from our code base,
 * because they're too easy to misuse (and even if used correctly,
 * complicate audits). Including this header turns them into compile-time
 * errors.
 */

A great list of C funcs that inevitably lead to security sadness, and I love that GitHub (true to their ethos) makes this public.

Half of curl’s vulnerabilities are C mistakes

Daniel Stenberg, appearing here for the second time in less than a month:

Possibly due to the slightly different question, possibly because I’ve categorized one or two vulnerabilities differently, possibly because I’m biased as heck, but my count end up at:

51 out of 98 security vulnerabilities are due to C mistakes. That’s still 52%.

The initial phrasing makes it sound like “C mistakes” are the primary cause of all historically reported vulnerabilities in curl, when it’s really just the majority of still open vulnerabilities.

Henry G. Baker Archive

Mark Dominus:

I discovered Baker’s writing probably in the early 1990s and immediately put him on my “read everything this person writes” list. I found everything he wrote clear and well-reasoned. I always learned something from reading it. He wrote on many topics, and when he wrote about a topic I hadn’t been interested in, I became interested in it because he made it interesting.

Sometimes I thought Baker was mistaken about something. But usually it was I who was mistaken.

Baker’s website was one of the first truly useful and interesting sites I really remember, and it’s just a couple of pieces short of being a proper blog long before blogs were a thing. It warms the heart to know it’s been archived.

It used to be quite common to mirror your friends’ and colleagues’ websites to ensure their posterity, and that’s a social side of the web that sadly has gone by the wayside.

Perhaps I’ll take a moment this week and archive Stuart Cheshire’s site.

Grab Bag

Computational tools reveal secrets of 17th-century sealed letter

Researchers at Leiden University:

The team solved the problem of how to read a sealed letter without damaging it through the use of X-ray microtomography, an advanced scanning technology. A series of thousands of scans isolated the exact position of iron particles in the ink, thus making the writing visible. A computer-controlled algorithm, which itself took four years to develop, was then employed to piece these scans together like a massively complicated 3D jigsaw, allowing the letter to be virtually unfolded.

Absolutely crazy.

Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #11: Stack overflow has a homepage you’ve never seen

Tech

Practiced Humility in Retrospectives

Will Gallego:

One of the fallacies about our collective approach to retrospectives, incident reviews, and post mortems is the belief that the entire process is a rational machine. Pour in a curated series of events, turn the handle, and out pop all of the action items that need completing to fix the world. I can’t speak to every industry that practices Resilience Engineering, but as for Software Engineering it stems strongly from our belief that we’re fully in control of our environment. We’ve built our tooling, architected our systems, and we’re running the retro. Why wouldn’t we be able to simply apply the calculus to our knowledge and change things for the better?

Finger.farm

Finger.Farm implements the finger protocol on top of a modern dev platform.

Do gopher next.

Kubernetes Examples

A reference repository of YAML with canonical and as-simple-as-possible demonstrations of kubernetes functionality and features.

This is great. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve need to look up minor bits about a Kubernetes spec and wanted to just browse examples like this. Top!

Increment: Reliability

The latest Increment is out, and the focus is on Reliability. Rather than linking to any one article, just go read them all. Really.

Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

Evan Klitzke on the Uber Engineering Blog:

The early architecture of Uber consisted of a monolithic backend application written in Python that used Postgres for data persistence. Since that time, the architecture of Uber has changed significantly, to a model of microservices and new data platforms. Specifically, in many of the cases where we previously used Postgres, we now use Schemaless, a novel database sharding layer built on top of MySQL. In this article, we’ll explore some of the drawbacks we found with Postgres and explain the decision to build Schemaless and other backend services on top of MySQL.

Grab Bag

‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Franchise To Expand

Peter White on deadline:

Nickelodeon is launching Avatar Studios, a division designed to create original content spanning animated series and movies based on the franchise’s world.

Be still, my beating heart. Avatar is still, to this day, the best TV show ever made. Don’t @ me.

Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #10.

Tech

Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust

Jesse Howarth at Discord:

With the Go implementation, the Read States service was not supporting its product requirements. It was fast most of the time, but every few minutes we saw large latency spikes that were bad for user experience. After investigating, we determined the spikes were due to core Go features: its memory model and garbage collector (GC).

At Bypass, we saw similar behavior with the Go implementation of our auth service (which had previously been implemented in Rails). While a VP got a bee in his bonnet over this, in our case it just made for an interesting graph but ultimately did not affect the performance of the service, so we let it be.

How they SRE

A curated collection of publicly available resources on how technology and tech-savvy organizations around the world practice Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

A lot of great information about SRE implementations around the world, and further ammo for the “There’s no agreement on what SRE even means” argument.

Klustered

David McKay:

Klustered is a series of live streams in which myself and a guest join forces to fix “broken” Kubernetes clusters … on the clock.

These clusters are broken by members of the Kubernetes community.

This is absolutely brilliant.

How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars

Evan Ackerman for JPL:

This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars. We’re actually running on a Linux operating system. The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.

Cron Jobs as a Hack

Nikhil Choudhary:

My attempts at introducing threading and tuning gunicorn were previously unsuccessful (ping me if you’ve got any interesting low-lift hacks that I could use instead). Cron jobs introduce the perfect opportunity to improve this, since the sending of the notification email doesn’t need to be done immediately.

deadpan dot gif

“I will slaughter you”

Daniel Stenberg, author of curl:

You might know that I’ve posted funny emails I’ve received on my blog several times in the past […] But not all of these emails are “funny”.

This is downright frightening. I’m glad that Daniel passed this on to the authorities and I hope, truly, that this guy turns out to be just having a bad day.

Hello World!

@MIT_CSAIL:

Today’s the day that “hello world” said “hello world!” The term was coined in a textbook published #otd in 1978: “C Programming Language,” written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. https://t.co/1Lv0pyEho2 #tdih #helloworld

Grab Bag

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Remastered 4K 60fps)

This was remastered using machine learning to interpolate frames and it’s just astounding. The quality is just amazing.

Fry’s Electronics is shutting its doors for good

Sean Hollister writing for the Verge:

Fry’s Electronics, one of the last big brick-and-mortar electronics store chains in the United States — and a Silicon Valley institution in particular — is permanently closing nationwide

I frequented the Fry’s in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, going back to the late 1990s. My first custom built PC was sourced from Fry’s. I built businesses using supplies from Fry’s. It’s sad to see them go, but the writing has been on the wall for ages now: I’m pretty sure my last trip to the Austin Fry’s was prior to 2015, and I hear that the store has been a ghost town for years now.

Some will be quick to blame Amazon for unfair business practices but the market has shifted: retail warehousing of goods near consumers is no longer a viable business model.

All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #9

Tech

Preparing to Issue 200 Million Certificates in 24 Hours

From the LetsEncrypt blog:

On a normal day Let’s Encrypt issues nearly two million certificates. When we think about what essential infrastructure for the Internet needs to be prepared for though, we’re not thinking about normal days. We want to be prepared to respond as best we can to the most difficult situations that might arise. In some of the worst scenarios, we might want to re-issue all of our certificates in a 24 hour period in order to avoid widespread disruptions. That means being prepared to issue 200 million certificates in a day, something no publicly trusted CA has ever done.

This is so mind blowing that I honestly got nothing else to say. Read it. It’s worth your time.

Metrics Catalog

The metrics-catalog is a declarative approach to monitoring the GitLab.com application, intended to improve the consistency and reduce repetition of configuration in our monitoring suite.

Andrew Newdigate gave a talk on this approach at ScaleConf in 2020, which provides a good overview of the approach we use at GitLab.

This is a really amazing approach to using Prometheus and I wish I’d discovered it a couple of years ago. Config management for our Prometheus instances at Booking was suboptimal at best, but coming up with something better just seemed a herculean task.

On Not Being a Cog in the Machine

Fred Hebert at Honeycomb:

I found myself looking at Honeycomb’s job ad (PDF) for their first SRE position. A few things instantly stood out.

It didn’t name any specific technology, nor did it necessarily ask for any specific prior titles or education. Instead, it mentioned characteristics of the person they wanted:

• Someone who can debug both automated and human processes
• Someone who can work in both software engineering and automation
• Someone able to find balance in all things
• Someone who enjoys teaching and practice
• Someone with some experience of managing stateful services

This led me to apply despite never having held the SRE title before and not having worked extensively with the main backend language used there.

As someone who a) recently changed jobs, b) has experience as an SRE, and c) has repeatedly joined companies whose tech stack he wasn’t already familiar with, this entire post really spoke to me - but I especially like the direction that Honeycomb went with their job description here.

Sometimes alerts have inobvious reasons for existing

Chris Siebenmann:

So, alerts have intentions, and we should make sure to document those intentions. Without the intentions, any alert can look stupid.

Speaking of, I think these two sentences could practically be a job description.

@thockingoog commenting on HN

TL;DR burstable CPU is a safety net. It has risks and requires some discipline to use properly, but for most users (even at Google) it is better than the alternative. But don’t take it for granted!

Hear hear! We spent months and months discussing how to handle this, and I think ultimately a lot of good could have been made had we just fallen on this side of the argument over CPU Limits.

How I monitor my OpenWrt router with Grafana Cloud and Prometheus

Matthew Helmke writes:

My internet router runs OpenWrt, which is a free/open source Linux operating system designed to replace the software provided by the router’s manufacturer. You can install OpenWrt on a wide range of supported devices. When you do, you frequently end up with enhanced stability along with additional configuration options not available in the stock software.

In this post, I will describe how to monitor the functionality of my Linksys WRT1900AC router running OpenWrt using Grafana Cloud.

I’m a big believer in Grafana, so I love seeing it used for stuff like this.

Don’t Stop Releasing

Click it. You won’t be disappointed.

Grab Bag

We Interrupt This Blog for Something Really Awesome

Paul Lukas at Uniwatch took a short diversion from sports uniform news:

The Baltimore-specific phenomenon of salt boxes, which are these curbside yellow boxes set up on street corners each fall by the city’s department of transportation (DOT). The idea is that local residents can scoop out some salt to use on their sidewalks, driveways, and so on. I’d never heard of anything like that (we certainly don’t have salt boxes here in NYC, or anyplace else I’ve lived), but I liked the idea of it: Socialized sodium, community chloride!

There’s a Baltimore craft artist who’s sort of locally famous for making stuff out of broken dishware. Her name is Juliet Ames, and her website’s URL is actually ibreakplates.com. Back in December, Ames got it in her head that the old, battered salt boxes could use some sprucing up and that she should decorate one of them with broken-plate lettering

Kristin is a Baltimorean and she assumed that salt boxes were normal everywhere. That these have suddenly become a community art project is really cool.

Darl McBride Files for Bankruptcy

As noted by a reddit poster:

It looks like former SCO CEO Darl McBride, who tried to sue Linux out of existence, has filed for chapter 13 bankruptcy.

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.