drfritznunkie

Oh great, I look forward to our next Slack renewal when they foist another 125% licensing increase on us for yet another AI add-on we don't want. This year, they decided that our Enterprise plan wasn't paying for another floor on Benhioff's tower fast enough and so forced an 125% license increase. They then played the game of "if you renew early, we're going to cut you a special one-time deal because we're feeling generous and allow you to renew at a slightly discounted rate, subject to the approval of our deal desk, of course ". barf.

Certainly there are people locked out of their bikes, but perhaps not for the reason you're thinking about. Just recently, I bought a NIB VanMoof on CL. The owner had never put together and it sat in his basement for 2 years. So the batteries in it are dead (the controller battery was a spicy pillow, but the motor battery may still be okay), so I figured at the price it was offered at, it worth it just for the parts in the worst case.

I knew about the BikeyApp, and getting the encryption keys downloaded before I went to go buy the bike, but unfortunately, before I could stop the PO, he deletes the bike from his VanMoof account because I now own the bike, and he wanted to release it so that I could register it to myself. So I own it now, right? Wrong... Even though I now "own" the bike, I cannot register it because I don't have the original manual for it (the PO lost it), which has a special QR code printed on it to register the bike.

The PO, who has a receipt for the bike, cannot get VanMoof to transfer the ownership to me, so the bike is parts (which is a risk I was willing to take). I'm going to strip the craptacular electronics from it and just make it a regular 4spd pedal bike.

The funny thing is I was able to get the controller powered up and guess what? The bike was defective from the factory... the controller throws charging over-temp errors regardless of it being hooked up to anything, even dummy loads. This apparently is not an uncommon experience with these bikes from the forum posts I've read about them.

Also, as an aside, f* having to carry a phone to use a bike. This thing might look cool but it's a garbage fire of bad decisions fueled with VC money.

Look up "Earth ships". I have a pretty good book on them, but will have to get back to my library before I could tell you what its title is. I was researching these for awhile and honestly a lot of the reference material is going to be from the 70s. I bought a ton of books about passive solar and such and I think the vast majority were published during the oil crisis.

It's definitely a good option, but you're going to be pushing the boundaries of your local contractors and the materials you can source and or hire a crew to install. If you're motivated, there are any number of ways to construct these dwellings, but the most interesting and appealing method that I saw was one made like a commercial warehouse. It was in Virginia, maybe around Roanoke in the mountains, but the owner used steel warehouse trusses and a dexpan roof (poured concrete over a substrate like corrugated metal). Since it was a known method, he hired a commercial crew to do it and they didn't have a problem iirc other than getting the crane down his driveway. Istr I found this on the break time finehomebuilding forums...

I don't think anyone has any idea how disorientating tech can be until they've witness this for themselves. Also how hostile and large a divide tech creates that the industry doesn't give a damn about (I'm looking at you, Material Design and your crap low contrast fonts and lack of clear clickable buttons that has resulted in more support calls from my aging parents than probably anything else).

Anyhow, a neighborhood homeless man and I became friends and I'd help him out with $$ and food and drink from time to time. We'd hang out and I get to hear stories of all the crazy shit he'd seen in the past 40 years in the neighborhood, from growing up through the civil rights era and seeing the city burn in 68, to the lines of people around the block waiting to buy crack at Rayful Emmonds grandmothers house. He'd been in and out of jail, run with gangs, the full nine yards. After getting hit by a drunk driver on his way to holdup a liquor store to get money to buy his new baby diapers, he'd ended up on the streets with nothing but his stories and a bum leg.

Along the way, he told me about his wife and children, his stint at the Navy shipyards in Virginia Beach, and his childhood in North Carolina. He told me about how one day he'd love to travel back to his childhood home town and see his mother, who he'd purchased his childhood home for with the proceeds from his successful dealings at the shipyards.

One day, he mentioned he'd gotten some money and wanted to send his mother flowers, but he couldn't remember what the address was. I asked if he remembered how to get to the house, and he said he did, so I grabbed my laptop, opened up Street View in the center of the town and asked him which way to go.

I've never experienced quite such a reaction in my life. This was black magic fuckery to him and he thought I was using some secret government technology. I explained to him the general principles of it, and he just didn't believe it. Incredulous wouldn't describe a tenth of his reaction.

That reaction wasn't anything compared to when we finally found his mothers house. He couldn't believe that he was looking at the house he grew up in, had purchased for his mother and that he'd not seen probably 30+ years. He teared up looking at it and got quite emotional. I offered to find her phone number so that he could call her, but it was too much for him at the time, and he waved it off.

He eventually got housing through a city program, and I lost touch with him as he stopped frequenting the neighborhood.

Old Dirty, if you're still out there, I miss your company and stories and hope you're doing well!

Yes, but cognito endpoints and pools ids are regional and globally unique, and there is no way that I know of to setup duplicate userpools in multiple regions and have requests served by either region. That means the customer IDP side would need to have two different SAML apps configured for each region...

Cognito is one of the most frustrating AWS services I have to work with, it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike an SP.

We're using it to federate customer IDPs through user pools, but this ends up with customer configs being region specific.

Has anyone figured out how to set up Cognito in multiple regions without the hijinx of having the customer setup trusts for each region? Not to mention, while multiple trusts are I think possible with ADFS (not that I've tested it), I'm pretty sure that Okta doesn't support multiple trusts, so regardless of how many regions, we'd still be SOL there...

I am not surprised, being that it's one of the oldest AWS services? What I do love about IAM is that with the work that the Automated Reasoning Group is doing with Zelkova, it's really a dream to be able test IAM policies before deploying them. I really hope their work trickles back to the service teams so that they too can leverage it to see their way out of those dark corners in IAM :)

Having spoken with core teams like IAM and Cloudformation teams at length, this appears to an internal AWS organizational issue. Those teams are not responsible for the services integration with them and so they're at the mercy of those teams priorities.

But honestly, I think the reason that Cloudformation support isn't as widespread or a top level priority is that it simply exposes the poor architecture and behavior of many of AWSs second tier services and teams. There are many services that simply do not behave well when managed by Cloudformation, but are also completely janky on their own and I'm betting it's far easier to cover up for poor architecture in the console than expose all the services dirty laundry with a Cloudformation integration.

Additionally, there are a lot of service teams that probably don't have a lot of customers using Cloudformation, so don't prioritize it or half-ass it completely. I'm looking at you DMS, and your terrible turd of a Cloudformation integration.

I'd say nearly the same thing about IAM and service teams inability to implement it well. I still do not understand why AWS has not mandated all services need to support both tag and resource based policies and predictable IAM semantics (looking at you Glue with your little fu of love called the write action "glue:GetMapping").

Cloudformation and IAM are, to me, the two of the most killer services from AWS, neither of which I've seen replicated at other providers.

I think it's a combination of CYA, government regulations, and simplifying operations for AWS. Without an ICP, you're not allowed any web presence in CN, which would require AWSCN to either modify services that are publicly available by default or not offering them. Instead, if they make an ICP a requirement, they have a defensible position with CN regulators, who really just want a throat to choke.

As AWSCN is reasonably far behind compared to Global regions, and they've already enough complexity just doing business in China, so I think it's completely reasonable the trade-off they've made or been forced to make here regarding ICP.

You'll still have to go over the firewall, you'll just be closer to it. It will be nice to see if the new region decreases the latency between the cn-north-1 or cn-northwest-1 regions and AWS global regions over DX connections. Right now, the majority of private leased connections in/out of China surface in HK, so ap-southeast-1 has been our region of choice for the global side of DX connections.

> I'm owning a X1 Carbon

Just curious, what generation X1? Gen3s through gen5s in our fleet have been quite robust, but Gen6 have been problematic from the linux support side. We have a couple of problematic individual X1 laptops in the fleet that have been in for service multiple times, but knowing the owners of the laptops in question, it is not surprising.

We've got between 40-60 X1s (gens 3-5) and I'd say their issue rate is at or below that of our fleet of 200+ 13" MBPs. In that time, we've had one X1 with a broken hinge, one with a dead fan, and one with chronic user issues :)

The new 13" MBPs have been particularly bad with chronic keyboard, battery and screen issues. So much so that people with the old MBPs are holding off to the very last minute to update. Which sucks because in most cases, their problems with them would be fixed by new batteries and an OS reinstall, but since they're not serviceable, we just bin them for a 3rd party service provider to deal with later.

Also, the fact that Apple refuses to provide any type of pickup or onsite service contract is absolutely ridiculous. The damn things fail so frequently, it's cheaper for us to overstock Mac laptops just because it can take weeks to get a laptop fixed even through our 3rd party service provider. Our service provider often cannot get parts or has to wait for Apple to approve the release of a part to them even though they're an Apple certified shop.

Even going to the Apple Store is a complete and utter yardsale in our experience. Most of the time, it'll take them a week or more to fix anything, usually they say, because of parts availability (we're talking 13" MBP and 13" MBA mostly).

> If it’s DNS, don’t be too clever and name it Route 53. Name it Amazon Cloud DNS. Then anyone knows how to look for it in the console, web search for it, etc.

Please no. The unique AWS product names while occasionally inconvenient mean that you can at least find relevant information about them when searching, and you know that someone isn't confusing an AWS product with another platform or another style of deployment.

If you really don't like the AWS product names, then Azure is for you. Now go try to search for help with "Azure web apps" or "Azure sql database". Wade through the posts about locally deployed IIS, SQL server and the like.

Coming from a family of people in the medical professions, they've all seen reports of how _everything_ is going change in their fields because some new computer program can do X...

To which my father usually mutters something like: "Why fuck are they wasting their time with that? Can't they fix the fucking medical billing system instead?"

Most of the medical professionals I know echo similar sentiments.

Even when you have control over both endpoints, months of uninterrupted service will be punctuated with weeks of playing hide and seek with the Firewall. BTDT.

The problem is when you have a global endpoint that Chinese customers want to access. What do you do then? You either have to figure out how close you can get your services to China and hope and pray they don't whack your traffic one day, or take the bigger risk of deploying your endpoint in China. Either is fraught, but if you want to service that population...

And remember, no multicast traffic in China...

You're missing the point. Even if you go through the entire process, get all the licenses, find excellent local partners, setup your infrastructure correctly, and only publish what the Party wants, you STILL have to go through the firewall. There are no exceptions, and your business suffers because you cannot do simple everyday things like having a conference call with your BJS office, or copying an image up to your CN servers.

Yes, the pain of doing business in China is great and asymmetric, but in some fashion, I'm happy that at least the firewall is a symmetric, universal problem.

I have friends in Shenzhen who regularly walk across the border to connect to HK LTE just to get important work done.

And their office has 4? different ISPs, so I know it's a bad day on the firewall when they're working from HK.

This article also doesn't touch on the simple technical pains of having to work across the Great Firewall and the effects of it their ability to do business outside of China. Even when you have an excellent partner in China (or vice-versa), so much of the back and forth ends up coming down to issues going across the firewall. Your collaboration tools don't work, so you're split across Slack and WeChat. Github is a disaster in China, and of course, the Googs isn't something you can require anyone in China use. Usual day-to-day stuff is neither simple nor reliable when you have to cross that firewall.

And too boot, it's amazing that Chinese companies are still doing a really poor job of figuring out how to connect well to the outside world. They'll turn to you asking why your API/whatever isn't working for their developers, and then expect that you have some miracle solution to get rid of the 200-400ms of latency (each way!) across the firewall, as well as a cure for the hours of it just dropping all traffic. Perhaps the Party has scared them enough they're not willing to chance employees doing illegal things on the company's connection...

The firewall is a fickle, cantankerous beast that, to me, is really at heart of this matter. Because they want throats to choke for every packet on Chinese soil, they've created this huge barrier that touches everything you might want to do in China or with a Chinese company.

I live a couple of blocks from this boondoggle, but some of the issues aren't strictly the streetcars fault. For instance, this very morning while walking my dogs, a DC tow truck sped past us all code 3. We rounded the corner onto H ST, and saw the tow truck using the wheel lift, fully extended, to push a car out of the way of the streetcar. And it wasn't like this car was just over the line, the driver had left its ass end hanging about a foot and a half out into the traffic lane. Whomever was driving that wrecker was masterful, blocking the entire street for only about 60 seconds while he rammed the car into place.

Any improvement in public transit is also going to require improvements in the quality of driving out there. People are selfish idiots when in their cars.

Having just come off a stint with Azure, my experience with generic names (like many you suggested and like most Azure service name) is that they're huge negatives. It makes searching impossible even when you're using the service's documentation. Got a problem with Azure Web Apps? Good luck searching for it. What about Azure SQL Database? Or Azure Virtual Network? Azure Storage?

One can only hope this effort improves the miserable MSBuild documentation. Exposure to the .Net ecosystem and MSBuild are recently events for me, and I can't say I've had a day where I've not cursed out either the documentation for Azure or MSBuild. Thank god I found a single reference in a single engineering blog post to the very very beta at the time ARM Resource explorer many months ago (resources.azure.com). It was the only way I was able to reverse engineer the ARM provisioning templates since nothing was documented.

Now if the people responsible for all this awesome effort in cross platform tools and open sourcing products could go down to the licensing and support divisions and bust some heads, I might be willing to continue working on the platform. But as it is, I've been playing 10 hour Bangalore ping-pong for almost a month now trying to get them to acknowledge the Azure support contract that was paid for a month before that! Ultimately, if Microsoft doesn't fix their baroque and Kafkaesque licensing and support process, all this work is going to be for naught.

How are they poor choices? Methinks you're just looking in wrong places if they're languages you want to continue using at a job.

Embedded is hot right now, so sign up for the Jack Ganssle's Embedded Muse Newsletter http://www.ganssle.com/tem-subunsub.html. The jobs are going to be mostly US based, but some place to start.

And look for companies that you know are going to be using C/CPP from their products. Even if they don't have jobs posted, find someone on the engineering team via GH, FB, LinkedIn, their blogs, guessing their email address, conferences, where ever and email them a nice note talking about their products and how you'd love to work with them if they have a position open.

If you can engineer a piece of code, I feel you can also socially engineer your way to a contact somewhere you want to work.

Else if you really want to be some "rockstar" web developer (and I only ever use that term as a pejorative), then start using a relevant language, and learn how to talk to employers about how your deep C/CPP experience is actually an advantage that no other diploma-mill code-school grad is going to have.

It's never more depressing then when you've hauled in a candidate for a review because they've got great past experience, but the candidate has zero ability to relate that experience to conversation at hand.

Remember, this is Microsoft we're talking about here, which means we've got about 50/50 chance of only half the company actually following through and implementing this ;)

Do not, under any circumstance, underestimate the sheer insanity of any Microsoft licensing scheme. At my new $dayjob, they spend $1-2MM/year on Microsoft licenses and support, and it's taken close to 9 months to get Microsoft to fix some incorrectly issued licenses. Not to mention, Microsoft has rolled out some new license portal that only like TWO people know about at Microsoft, so a bunch of shiny new licenses (to the tune of $750K) went "missing" because no one, even our Microsoft rep, apparently knew about the new portal which the licenses had been created in (and which, in fine Microsoft tradition, does not support any of our old licenses...)

As the only linux guy here, it is astounding, absolutely astounding to me, how many man hours are wasted just dealing with Microsoft licensing. They probably could have ported their entire stack to open source alternatives in the time it's taken just to get our SQL Server licenses straightened out. But I get the feeling that being a Microsoft shop means you have to develop Stockholm Syndrome just to make it through your day, or else you'd go mad from dealing with Microsoft and their VARs.

I've been spending some time myself designing remote phosphor lighting and I'm wondering if they've really developed a new remote phosphor technology, or if they're sourcing a custom phosphor blend and substrate from someone like Intematix.

Also curious if they're using a film (like WhiteOptics White97) or having the cavities coated (I forget the product name). None of the coatings were cheap when I was researching them, but a % or two better than the films.

I'd love see the LED driver board on these...

But anyhow:

It's incredibly cool stuff, especially when you show someone the raw blue leds (blindingly bright), then drop a remote phosphor over it.

Kudos for going for it, and good luck. I wish I had your fortitude!

If that were only the case... My parents live in one of these rural Western Massachusetts towns building their own fiber networks, Leverett, Ma. The town, is which directly north of Amherst and the Five College, had ZERO available landbased broadband options.

So no, they didn't spend huge amounts of money just to avoid the monopolist ISPs as there are none servicing the area. And this is pretty typical of the towns participating, it's not that they have crappy service, it's that they have NO service.

Also, having fiber has other ramifications. Try selling a house these days without available broadband and tell me how far you get or how much you have to drop the price. You'll get nowhere. My parents went through this several years ago when they were planning on moving, and quite literally had people simply turn around walk out when they found out that broadband was unavailable at the house.

Verizon is basically letting the copper in the area rot... it wasn't until 97? or 98? that my parents got touch tone dialing, and after every storm the line quality got worse and worse. At least now, for better or worse, the town and its residents are on the hook for the quality of service.

And I think everyone should have to dogfood their own products over a satellite connection. You'd be surprised how much everything sucks or breaks when you've got huge latency and basically modem++ speeds.

If anything, riding against traffic in the lane of traffic freaks out drivers and their reactions to it aren't always good (there are bunch of contra flow dedicated bike lanes in DC, so I'm not talking about those). I find the drivers are actually worse at gauging distance on drivers side of the car and will drive past you dangerously close. It may also be illegal outside of dedicated lanes (not to say that I don't regularly ride one-ways the wrong way, but that takes a different level of awareness).

The other issue with it is that it severely reduces your options. When riding with traffic, you can take the entire lane if necessary, something I have to do several times on my commute because the traffic flow around me is dangerous if I don't. Riding against traffic means you're stuck riding the gutter, somewhere I actively avoid on city streets if only to save my tires.

I don't ride with headphones, and shoulder check constantly to maintain awareness of what is behind me. My hearing has saved my ass several times (nothing quite gets your adrenaline going like hearing the roar of cabbie flooring his Crown Vic behind you in an attempt run your ass over).

Bicycling, like motorcycling, requires constant vigilance and awareness, it's naive to believe otherwise. It's tough to do and lapses happen all the time, but on a bicycle you don't have 5,000 lbs of metal and electronic nannies, just your wits and senses. And a U-Lock if it comes to it ;)

Retro reflectives and their impact on accident rates is still pretty contentious within the bicycle community, and personally, I think it gives people a false and very dangerous sense of security and visibility.

As a daily bicycle commuter and motorcyclist, the only rule I follow is that I am invisible when on two wheels. So I ride in a way that makes me safe, and that usually means doing things that most people would probably find dangerous.

In over 15 years of daily commuting (yes, all through the winter, too) I've been hit a half dozen times. The majority of those accidents were intentionally caused by the car driver, only a couple were truly faultless. None of them were the result of the driver not seeing me, they were all the result of the driver behaving badly.

A reflective jacket or spray isn't going to do ANYTHING if the driver decides that they own the lane and they're okay mowing you down to get it. That to me is the big flaw with any conspicuity safety measure, it relies on drivers actually being aware of the road around them and honoring your use of it. At least around here in DC, those two things are seldom present.

Most riders are foolishly naive about their safety. Traffic laws aren't going to keep your head from bouncing off a hood, and a reflective vest isn't going to make the driver put down their cell phone and pay attention to the road.

I'm right there with you... My Thinkpad fleet is all older models, T42, T60, T61p, X200 and just yesterday, I added a T420.

The quality difference between even between my X200 and the T420 is substantial, the T420 has thinner plastics, the keyboard isn't as nice (a little too bouncy), and the screen is less than impressive. It's the last of the T-series with the good UltraNav keyboard, so if you're okay with a last-gen laptop, check it out. If you need dedicated graphics, go look at the T420s.

What is impressive about my T420 was price (ebay: $200 for one in B+/A- condition with a core-i5, SSD and the 1600x900 screen), and that it'll take 16GB (~$130) of RAM. My X200 wasn't cutting it as a mobile workstation for Inventor and doing EDA, and I don't have money for anything more expensive, so it'll suffice for the next year or so.

I had the opportunity to use the new X1 Carbon a couple of weeks ago... The keyboard is a step down and the lack of physical trackpoint buttons is TERRIBLE. I wish Lenovo would grow some goddamn balls and stop attempting to copy Apple. Their UltraNav design paradigm was perfectly valid in the market, but they've decided they need to go play me-too even for their core user base.

Sadly, as much as I wish I could switch to a Dell for their screens, their keyboards are so fantastically bad that it's never even occurred to me to look. And the same goes for Macbooks, the trackpad and keyboard just don't work for me. I'm half tempted to pick up an old one and see if I can graft an UltraNav keyboard onto it...

As anyone who's done any level of enterprise support knows is that people hate email, but absolutely freak out when there is the smallest problem with it. For awhile I had my staff attempt to work in a lesson on email during tech orientation for new employees, the problem is that everyone thinks they know how email works, so they'd just tune out. Try explaining the concept that successfully "sending" an email only means that the local server has agreed to accept it, it doesn't mean that the recipient received it and see how far you get. Trying to fix email is a lot more complicated than some fancy pants Framework-Of-The-Moment application purporting to declutter your inbox, it actually is going to involve somehow getting people to understand, at a basic level, how their email gets delivered.

I think the lowest hanging fruit is simply making it easier for the hoi polloi to connect to their accounts easily. NO ONE does a good job with this, not Apple, not Google, not Thunderbird, not Outlook, NO ONE. I've done more freelance work (at absurd rates) simply fixing email client setups than anything else and just making sure that all my client's devices are setup the same. This should be trivial, but it's not.

And don't get me started on all the fantastically crappy email providers out there. I'm looking at you Godaddy, your craptastic email service has wasted more of my time in the past month than I care to think about.

Go Fastmail!

I regularly tested the "email regex du jour" at my previous job whenever these types of articles came up. IIRC, it was against 15+MM known good email addresses, and probably double that in known bads and nearly every one tested had its issues. [edit: we had something like 150,000 distinct active domains, and probably 1/2 that of distinct MXes (if you rolled up all the google-biz and microsoft hosted stuff)... if you think getting your email delivered by gmail is difficult, try a school district in Wyoming that appeared to have a 300baud connecting it to world running an ancient version of Groupware that rejected email according to the weather report as far as we could tell...]

Most people working on the code for that sign-up page (/what have you) neither have the regex-fu necessary nor the understanding of email to write the regex correctly... So you get a lot of shitty regexes (especially large corporations) that don't support apostrophes or dashes/plus signs in the local parts. And it doesn't matter how good your regex-fu and RFC comprehension abilities are, there are a lot of broken implementations out there and blocking a subscriber because of their broken system isn't a great business.

It took awhile, but eventually we switched our signup forms to do a couple of very effective things beyond a very simple address regex: 1) auto-suggest for common misspellings of our most common domains (gmal.com, yaho.com, etc.) 2) while the "please re-type your email" gave us enough user delay, we did a DNS lookup of the domain, then an MX lookup. If there was a problem with either, we passed an error to the user like "Please double check the domain of your email address..." 3) check for domains you know have moved. We were B2B, so if you watched your bounces closely, you'd know that asdf.com was moving to hjkl.com, so you could update your existing records, but people have serious muscle memory, and it's worth reminding them on the signup page.

I was working on tying in our bounce database (you are keeping a record of all your bounces, right?) so that automatically flagged domains would prompt the user with an error like "We've been unable to deliver to your email domain recently, if your email address is typed correctly, we recommend using a secondary email address if you have one..."

Ditto. Small(er) phones are getting harder and harder to find. If I could find a phone the same size as my Sony Xperia Ray with upgraded guts, I'd be ecstatic.

Even so the G has been great for me as well. I hope the new one has a better camera, that's really the Achilles heel of v1.