it took me a few hours to figure out the new subtleties. new computers from Apple with a built-in T2 chip (i.e. new iMac Pro and Macbook Pro 2018 edition) have a dedicated operating system protection. what’s the problem? first of all, by default, they can not be booted from an external medium. it’s part of the security that Apple introduced to make it more difficult for a potential hacker....
i just realised, that there’s a port! you just need to install xhyve… and that’s it. you don’t need VMware or VirtualBox anymore. have a great virtualization!
great and unfortunately very short book about british geeks. it consists of couple of short chapters covering specific areas - from satellites (Ariel program), Blue Streak missiles, through Concorde (and all history of trying to keep it in service), to geeky pieces like legendary David Brabens Elite game. you won’t find too much about Elite game itself, as author is focusing more on the business side of things. however, there are couple of interesting pieces - like David relentless work on optimizing game code for BBC Micro (20kB of RAM!...
I bought it, so you won’t have to. ‘blood, sweat and pixels’ is book of Jason Schreier - kotaku fame. and to set record straight - it’s very, very bad book. to further add to insult, one of the chapters is focused on our very own ‘witcher 3’. let me shorten your torment, and save 30 PLNs by summarizing the diagram that Jason uses to describe the process of creating each of the games:...
another trilogy worth reading, rightly celebrating popularity as part of the (weak, and painfully crippled) Netflix screening. it consists of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. they all cover adventures of a single hero, however because of the “altered carbon” specifics, it’s almost like three different books. Takeshi Kovacs is single character, former Envoy, but given he’s constantly using different bodies, books are fast paced and interesting. ‘broken angels’ keeps ‘altered carbon’ tempo and adds some interesting twists, and ‘woken furies’ in my humble opinion is weakest of all three, but still written well and keeping the level overall....
all three books are great, and whole trilogy - delightful. they’re refreshing in style, and for me personally very similar to writings of Stanisława Lema (well, at least there where it’s close to intergalactic travels and technology) and Asimov. everything embedded into chinese cultural environment that i studied recently for professional reasons). some of that can be seen very clearly in long term (really long term) strategies mixed with tactical execution....
for the first time in a few years I took three weeks of vacation. …and this is starting to catch up with me :) i took few books with myself, but only some of them are worth mentioning - like ‘Hit refresh’ by Satya Nadella (though I have not read it yet) and ‘Now. The physics of time’ - I am in the process and it is fascinating to read....
it was not built for US military. it wasn’t even built to enable survivability of US military infrastructure after nuclear war. there’s a myth in the “internet circles”, that i’m fighting for couple of years already. recently, i was reading great book - Dream Machine. it’s as good as (at least) Dealers of Lightning or 747 - but maybe even better. you probably heard the story already - US gov ordered RAND to check if they could built survivable comms system....
140 characters at most, 5 minutes, sandwich you catch up while on the run… and then silence at around 2am and wake up call at 6am… this is how life of most of us looks like. daily. I had a chance to get back to book I’ve read too long ago - Rays Bradbury 451* Fahrenheita'. just take a look at following dialogue: “People don’t talk about anything.” “Oh, they must!...
if you build motto for your company vision, and it’s blunt like, for example, ‘don’t be evil’… people may notice when you decide to remove it. ‘do the right thing’ doesn’t sound so convincing and blunt. while the ‘don’t be evil’ is left in the last sentence of ‘Code of Business Conduct’ that employees need to accept, it’s softer and flattened. sign of new times?
ARPA, established in 1958, was first and only space agency at that time in United States. to this day it drives fantasies and is unequivocally identified with the emergence of the Internet, but did you know that ARPA (before it became DARPA in 1972) was responsible for underground nuclear testing (as seismology allowed to determine whether other countries somewhere on Earth were conducting their nuclear tests), guerilla warfare (ARPA reps travelled to and stayed in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos long before US under falsifed “proofs” attacked North Vietnam), or development of machine rifle that became what is today known as M-16?...
as you can easily guess, i’m networking geek. my home network was thus built with hacking, not with ‘smallest footprint possible’ in mind. it’s great if you can test your “great” ideas before recommending them to anyone, and of course getting feel of new features is also a plus in this case. so, my first assumption was it has to be fast - fiber. both floors are connected with fiber network, that’s aggregated near front door, in the cloakroom....
we are herd creatures, naturally social. we have created many tools for remote communication and although the echoes of the electromagnetic wave of our radio transmissions travel fainter and farther into space, today one of the most used tools is the good old e-mail. it was born in around 1971 so already 47 years ago. contrary to the bigots shouting radical slogans louder and louder, i believe that humanity is created for an open exchange of ideas....
plnog, plnog and… it’s gone. twentieth edition - how the time flies… from the beginning we knew it may be hard, but we can make it. ’let’s target 60 people!’ was the second decision after we agreed to ‘do this’ and create PLNOG. 124 of you showed up. i don’t really remember all of the things that happened that day. and that was only 10 years ago! i remember only the fact, that we couldn’t fit you in one of the Cracows Wawel room that Andrzejs team was able to secure for this experiment....
it should be. it’s kind of tricky to get right and may feel a bit like an abstract concept. random values should be random (unless you’re talking about Debian randomness). so, let’s try that - take a cube in hand and throw it three times. what’s the probability that you’ll get three times the same number? small, but there is one. similar experiment - your friend throws coin ten times, and eight times there’s eagle....
my 256GB SSD drive in MacPro 2013 started to fill up recently. i went on short googling to see how to extend it without relying on NAS of course. and i get nice offer. it seems that good people in the internet found a way to interface typical NVMe disk drives with the socket Apple uses. and so i became user of 1TB Samsung SSD drive. that upgrade gave me also speed bump - on encrypted drive transfers shoot up from 500MBbs (reading) and 380MBbs (writing) to 1....
…if everyone is trying to make your life harder. couple weeks ago I refreshed my private email server on FreeBSD. for some time spam levels were raising and I had to do something about it. old spamassassin was not handling it accurately enough anymore. enter spamd from OpenBSD. current postfix has built in greylisting server that’s working quite well. for my installation I tuned it a bit, by extending period of time that has to pass from last delivery attempt (to 1200 seconds, which is 20 minutes):...
during one of the design discussions with one of our Customers, I had a chance to discuss a bit about using anycast to scale out delivery via CDN. unfortunately, as more ads served even on popular sites is malware or even miners for different cryptocoins it begs a question - how should you protect the site you’re maintaining? using reputable CDN is good first step. the other one, i didn’t know about (and it seems to be quite natural if you think about it) is to verify hash of the attached resources....
6:51 AM, 30 APRIL 1975: SWIFT 22 IS OUTBOUND WITH 11 PAX ON BOARD INCLUDING THE LZ COMMANDER. ALL THE AMERICANS ARE OUT REPEAT OUT. this traditionally short message from NSA signals intelligence, was everything that was needed to confirm that all US citizens left US embassy in Saigon. Saigon changed name to Ho Chi Minh a day later, taken over by North Vietnam army. signals intelligence changed significantly from that time, but the book i’m writing about right now was published way before Snowden era....
jeden z moich znajomych zauważył bardzo celnie, że mam często ‘krótki lont’. nie mogę się nie zgodzić - czasami tak po prostu jest. zrozumienie i opanowanie tego to katorżnicza praca, która w dodatku wymaga codziennego szlifowania umiejętności. każdy kto próbował - wie. na wielu poziomach ten temat dotyka zagadnień dominujących dzisiejsze tzw. szkoły biznesu - jak zbudować zespół, jak jego członkowie powinni wzajemnie się uzupełniać, motywować i jednocześnie - zachęcać do wartościowej pracy....
my whole summer vacation this year is a week by the sea. however, I was able anyway to catch up my reading backlog from last few weeks - books put aside and waiting patiently in their queue. so let’s go faster this time, but through the whole list: Matthew Syed - The black box method - a great book describing the process of correcting errors; it starts with aviation, which over the last decades has led to a dramatic increase in flight safety....
have you thought recently how oversubscribed are acronyms you’re using daily if you’re in IT? i just spent the whole day listening about VPC, but not vPC or VPC - but about Virtual Private Cloud in AWS services. not about virtual Private Channel or Virtual Path Connection and neither about Virtual Packet Core. and i have to admit, i liked it. i’ve spent whole day on a Mirek Burnejkos training dedicated to clouds....
my old poor LSI 9211-8i RAID card, that was powering my cache NAS server, decided to die. my spare 9261-8i, to my complete suprise, was halting FreeNAS at the boot… and i was not able initially to troubleshoot the problem. it was dropping mysterious timeout errors: mfi0: COMMAND 0xfffffe000150dc08 TIMEOUT AFTER 59 SECONDS mfi0: COMMAND 0xfffffe000150dc90 TIMEOUT AFTER 59 SECONDS mfi0: COMMAND 0xfffffe000150dc18 TIMEOUT AFTER 59 SECONDS run_interrupt_driven_hooks: still waiting after 60 seconds for xpt_config my google-fu immediately shown me some potential solutions, but they were totally random nad kind of voodoo-magic (‘disable Firewire controller!...
after being absent on three PLNOG editions, i finally made it to the conference and to agenda. my presentation slides are here. i tried to cover everything important from networking perspective starting from IMP and ending on NPU, reprogrammable ASICs and what’s lurking in the future. of course if you’ll vote by your surveys, i hope to get back to delivering presentations. what’s interesting is that Krzysztof Kania also picked up architectural topics in his article about first routers - go read!...
some of us know it better, some worse, and the rest haven’t heard or thought about it (or claims “i don’t need it”) work ‘in the zone’ got popular immediately after world ended being enchanted by open spaces and mandatory offices, and got back to using rooms or - in XXI century - in “home offices”. the fact that giants like Facebook or Apple still build huge offices and promote unconstrained mobility, availability and capability to forget about home given work is the most important thing you can do (hence “socializing” is as well), doesn’t change too much....
during the last 30 years, processor speeds has increased from millions of cycles to billions - multiplied by multi-core and special mechanisms that increase the efficiency of working with ‘boring’ cores. Pentium 66 processor from 1993 contained 3.2 million transistors, which is anyway quite a value, considering they are packed into a space comparable to that of four dices - and contains one main unit. available today Xeon E5-2699v4 has 22 cores operating at nominal frequency 2....
NASA spent recently a lot of effort (and i suspect - money) to find Fortran proficient developer to rewrite code working still on Voyager. ideal candidate was found finally at NASA. this begs a question - how much you can do in Fortran having 64kB of RAM and less than 3W of power? it’s completely different task than our typical computers, not to mention bad practices they learn to junior developers due to abundance of hardware resources....
somewhere around 2013 (and precisely - for ‘small’ Santa Claus, so 6th of December), OpenSSH was extended to provide new way of storing keys. it’s important because the old format - MD5 hash - can be cracked veeeeery quickly. developers decide to use modification of bcrypt, that will slow down GPU-assisted cracking attempts in hashcat from gigahashes per second, to at most kilohashes. what you need to do to upgrade your defenses?...
FreeNAS is special edition of tuned-up FreeBSD, with GUI available over WWW to enable easy setup and maintenance. i had to migrate recently my old Synology 1815+ thanks to well known Intel SNAFU with Atom CPUs. interestingly enough, even Synology own service department declined to RMA the NAS, without even discussing the situation. so i managed to setup quickly 12x 3.5" bay server. i had five 3.5" 8TB HDDs from Synology that i wanted to rescue data from....