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I’ve always wanted to visit Japan, since the moment I started learning about it; I have absolutely adored the culture and the people for longer than I can remember. It’s a culture of contrasts; their incredible technology lives alongside their deeply held and revered traditions.

When the Small Child was talking about going overseas for schoolies, he’d cycled through a few different plans, finally landing on going to Japan with a friend after the end of year 12. Unfortunately being in year 12 the friend didn’t get his butt in gear, so that fell through; fortunately for me, the idea of the trip was still good, so it’s him and me for three weeks in Japan!

Coming into this trip there was a certain level of trepidation because of the industrial action that Jetstar’s been going through of late. Pay disagreements with the pilots and ground staff led to threats of flight delays or cancellations, then loads of flights cancelled for the day we left. Thankfully, we were one of the flights unaffected - Brisbane to Cairns early in the morning. Others on the same route, but later in the day were cancelled, so we got off easy.

This article on “Curving” - a dog body language element was fascinating to me.

Humans can utilize acts of curving with dog interactions. To approach a dog politely, instead of walking straight towards the dog in our very human direct way, you could walk in a slight curve. On approach, turning your shoulder away ever so slightly can put a dog at ease and is polite.

As the housemate of a dog with serious emotional issues, I really need to read more about this - anything to understand her better can only make life better for both of us. 🥰

There’s not much to say really. It’s angular, it’s stainless, it evokes feelings of 80’s and 90’s cyber stuff and it’s a big electric truck.

If I can’t afford whatever it costs by the time it gets to Australia in a few years time, I’ll get my $150 back. If I can afford it, I’ll be buying a badass stainless steel electric truck.

After taking my time playing Automation Empire and really loving it, I got to a point where the tax system really destroyed it for me. The way they designed it was that tax was based on 2% of lifetime earnings for the save game that you’re playing. They claim that this made players have to work consistently to expand their profitability and push to finish maps, but the general sentiment in the forums (and for me) is that it ruins the fun of taking your time and exploring what’s possible in the game. They claim there’s a reset in the algorithm, but it doesn’t actually work.

For everything that Google does which I have strong opinions about, some of their SRE training and information is pure gold. I just finished reading the chapter on eliminating toil and it really hits home for me.

If a human operator needs to touch your system during normal operations, you have a bug. The definition of normal changes as your systems grow.

• Carla Geisser, Google SRE

So, the more time you spend keeping things running, the less time you have to make them better - for you and your end users.

Periodically this thing dies on me. It happened again, so here’s my notes.

Messages stopped coming in, I got an alert, and found this log:

2019-11-11 13:53:56,750 DEBUG pid=20951 tid=MainThread file=connectionpool.py:_new_conn:809 | Starting new HTTPS connection (1): reports.office365.com
2019-11-11 13:53:57,019 DEBUG pid=20951 tid=MainThread file=connectionpool.py:_make_request:400 | https://reports.office365.com:443 "GET /ecp/reportingwebservice/reporting.svc/MessageTrace?$filter=StartDate%20eq%20datetime'2019-10-22T02:53:08.114678Z'%20and%20EndDate%20eq%20datetime'2019-10-22T03:08:08.114678Z' HTTP/1.1" 200 216
2019-11-11 13:53:57,022 DEBUG pid=20951 tid=MainThread file=base_modinput.py:log_debug:286 | No messages returned.  Setting max date to 2019-10-22 02:54:08.114678

The “No messages returned.” bit was the kicker. Lies!

A fascinating look at the northernmost city in the world, touched by climate change in ways you wouldn’t expect.

This post on the facebook Engineering blog about scalable and secure access with SSH really makes me wonder how this’d be doable at-scale, without a fleet of developers to build your own system to do it.

The advice at the end is probably the most important information any AAA system team can take heed of:

A few parting words of advice: When you build your CA, be it a small script or a complex system, make sure you keep track of all certificates you issue. If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of having a compromised certificate (and its respective private keys) and you don’t know how to revoke them, your last resort is to rotate the entire CA. If you end up having a programmatic CA, consider having short-lived certificates, e.g., 24 hours. This shortens the window of opportunity for an attack if you experience a compromise.

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So I’m messing around with a DictWriter and was trying to use the typical “with” syntax I use with short-lived things in python… and got this error:

Error: DictWriter instance has no attribute '__exit__'

Turns out, that’s not really a thing, and I should have followed the example. Don’t judge me please for using Py2, Splunk hasn’t caught up (yet).