While I had plenty of experience with MySQL and similar databases, I've started learning the ins and outs of MongoDB, and with the appropriate explanation, now "get" why NoSQL is becoming popular. It's pretty straightforward for anyone who's worked with Python dictionaries or JavaScript objects before. That said, my project scope has changed. I'm going to skip doing Python/Flask first. It boils down to the fact that I don't want to mess in multiple languages, and that, despite liking python a lot more, I have a lot more experience coding javascript due to time previously spent doing websites. Incidentally,…
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Eric wrote a good post on the sad goings on at the Open Source Initiative. The article, and comments are, as usual, worth reading (even when I disagree with Eric, which is not so much, here). The historian Robert Conquest once wrote: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” Today I learned that the Open Source Initiative has reached that point of bureaucratization. I – OSI’s co-founder and its president for its first six years – was kicked off their lists for being too rhetorically…
Cataline over at the Dark Herald recommended that if you want a computer upgrade, get it now. No big deal it happens every year. Vendors plan for it by stocking up their inventory. Nobody really likes stocking up their inventory since it ties up a lot of capital in way that can’t be quickly liquidated at need. But it has to be done and once fabrication starts up again the inventories smooth out as the surplus starts to run low. This year the fabrication plants didn’t start up again. Shortly, and I do mean very, very shortly the…
Let's Encrypt is an excellent service and idea, and well executed. Unfortunately, they had a bug in their processes that results in a number of possibly bad certificates. Thee short answer is that if you have a site or service that relies on LE via certbot or ACME, you need to go ahead and manually force an update. My cert has been updated within the last two days so it may have a valid cert from after the glitch was discovered and fixed, we'll see.…
I was held up Friday trying to track down why, oh why, an image backup of a server that had one job, to run a fairly recent version of act, kept failing. That brought me to this post in the help forums: Installation of ACT! reproducibly destroys ability to make Image Backups due to VSS errors. Buried in the thread, after the company rep on the forum had basically said "not our problem, the issue is with SQL, we didn't write that" is this golden bit. I entirely agree with your assessment, based on my all-too recent experience, from which…
Filed under "stuff doesn't work" and "consequences of lost focus" - I ended up dealing with an interesting bug in the new "Catalina" update for Mac OS. No, not the one giving antivirus and other "data protection" types nightmares about the kernel being locked down, no extensions, etc. It turns out for a lot of people, you walk into a Starbucks, hotel, etc., that when you connect to the wifi, it connects, but that login/authentication sheet that is supposed top open up to allow you on the network never does. There are a lot of proposed fixes. Most of…
I can no longer remember which aircraft it specifically was, but if memory serves, there was a helicopter that had such a tendency to rattle that it was often referred to as "a thousand parts flying in loose formation". Which brings me to Linux. Desktop Linux, courtesy of distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint, ElementaryOS, and Pop!OS, has gotten a lot better about making sure updates didn't break everything. On the server side, things can be dicier. Yes, this has to do with the site upgrade. Unless you're paying for a hosted "pro" version, managed by a bunch of guys…
As much as I appreciate the simplicty of ghost compared to working in Wordpress, when it comes tim e for updates it is.... anything but. Especially if you haven't been keeping up with the incrementals. It also doen't do a graceful job of updating dependencies. So. Before I get into the sordid details, a bit of fun.... Also a scary story courtesy of Brian Neimeier's Kairos site. Well worth the read. I may have mentioned in the past that some of the experiences I've had in the past lean me toward believing such tales. Patches of woods that felt wrong…