blog.dasrecht.net

This week was busy, next week will be busy. Let’s keep this brief and head over to the links:

Google removes ‘View Image’ button from image search (engadget.com)

Say goodbye to the “View Image” link in Google Images. Google announced a few changes to its image search today, one of which being the removal of its option to check out an image without visiting the site that hosts it. It might be a bummer for some, but since it was a stipulation of Google’s settlement with Getty Images, it was only a matter of time before it happened. In a tweet, Google said today that the changes “are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value.”

Oh FFS!

From OSX to Ubuntu | Code | Nicolas Perriault (nicolas.perriault.net)

A year earlier I decided to switch from OSX to Ubuntu, so now is a good time to make a little retrospective. TL;DR: Linux now offers a pleasant desktop user experience and there’s no way back for me.

As i’m doing some development for features on pygmy that need to be tested on Ubuntu I decided to switch partially to that system for development. Used that article to get me around the hardest starter issues but I reckon that would be a seperate blogpost for here

FINMA – FINMA publishes ICO guidelines (finma.ch)

FINMA has seen a sharp increase in the number of initial coin offerings (ICOs) planned or executed in Switzerland and a corresponding increase in the number of enquiries about the applicability of regulation

Fertig wilder Westen in der Schweiz

Capturing Starman from 1 million miles away (deepskycolors.com)

After a quick nap, I go back to all my shots but find nothing, still puzzled about the whole thing. Then it hit me!! When I created the ephemeris from the JPL’s website, I did not enter my coordinates!! I went with the default, whatever that might be! Since the Roadster is still fairly close to us, parallax is significant, meaning, different locations on Earth will see Starman at slightly different coordinates. I quickly recalculate, get the new coordinates, go to my images and thanks to the wide field captured by my telescopes… boom!! There it was!! Impossible to miss!! It had been right there all along, I just never noticed!

I like the work that went into finding Starman with a huge telescope 🙂

Let’s Learn About Waveforms (waveforms.surge.sh)

A very good primer about Waveforms

EHANG 184 AAV Manned Flight Tests (youtube.com)

Flying Robots!

NGINX – HTTP/2: server push. (hg.nginx.org)

Resources to be pushed are configured with the “http2_push” directive.

HTTP/2 server push lands in Nginx

OpenSSH/Cookbook/Multiplexing – Wikibooks, open books for an open world (en.wikibooks.org)

And of course all that can be put into ssh_config(5) as shown in the previous section. Starting with 6.7, the combination of %r@%h:%p and variations on it can be replaced with %C which by itself generates a SHA1 hash from the concatenation of %l%h%p%r.

Learning of the Week: SSH Multiplexing issues fixed by not using hots and the remote usernames. Just using %C is enough with newer OpenSSH versions.

VLC 3.0 now supports Chromecast and the world is a better place (thenextweb.com)

• 8K support (hardware decoding is on by default)
• HDR and 10 bit video
• HMDI Audio passthrough
• Network browsing for NAS systems
• 360 video and 3D audio
• Modifying subtitle size live
• Drag and drop support
• HD DVD support

Yeah : VLC 3.0 is out!

Earlier this week I geeked out for the SpaceX landing. For starters, I planned the Dinner to be ready at T-5mins and then SpaceX pushed back the launch which meant my pizza finished nominal but the real launch got delayed. Well, that happens. If you missed the Falcon Heavy launch head over to youtube rewatch it..

But on with the links.

Exploiting modern microarchitectures (fosdem.org)

Recently disclosed vulnerabilities against modern high performance computer microarchitectures known as ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ are among an emerging wave of hardware-focused attacks. These include cache side-channel exploits against underlying shared resources, which arise as a result of common industry-wide performance optimizations.

More broadly, attacks against hardware are entering a new phase of sophistication that will see more in the months ahead. This talk will describe several of these attacks, how they can be mitigated, and generally what we can do as an industry to bring performance without trading security.

I saw this talk live at FOSDEM18.
If you are into microarchitectures and want to know the details of Spectre and Meltdown, look no further: 45 Minutes – an in depth look at Spectre and Meltdown – Brace yourself it’s a lot of information!

KPTI/KAISER Meltdown Initial Performance Regressions (brendangregg.com)

Applications that have high syscall rates include proxies, databases, and others that do lots of tiny I/O. Also microbenchmarks, which often stress-test the system, will suffer the largest losses. Many services at Netflix are below 10k syscalls/sec per CPU, so this type of overhead is expected to be negligible for us (<0.5%).

An close look on the performance implications around the Meltdown mitigations.

Epic Games’ Fortnite (epicgames.com)

Fortnite hit a new peak of 3.4 million concurrent players last Sunday… and that didn’t come without issues! This blog post aims to share technical details about the challenges of rapidly scaling a game and its online services far beyond our wildest growth expectations.

I like to read post-mortems. It gives good advice on how I can improve when writing a post-mortem together with our team.

Online Security Guide for Journalists (protonmail.com)

Part of our mission at ProtonMail has always been to give journalists, dissidents, and others the tools and knowledge they need to do their jobs safely. Journalists are one of the largest groups in our user community, and over the years, we have given dozens of talks and workshops on email security in order to help journalists stay safe.

Good Advice on online security for journalists (but it’s applicable for many people dealing with sensitive information)

Questions after talks at conferences (ericholscher.com)

At my own conferences, Write the Docs, we have established the norm of not having full audience questions. After each talk we ask the speaker to come to the front of the stage, and then have a conversation with members of the audience with questions.

A few hints on handling Questions at conferences differently.

Year in Pixels (year-in-pixels.glitch.me)

This tool was made to keep track of your mood during the entire year, using pixels. You can load this page every day and select how you’re feeling. The tool will keep track of your mood and give you a visual for how you’ve felt during the year.

One thing that struck me when I put the daily pictures i take during a year on one page. A year which seems like soo much time looks short when you boil it down to 365 moments.

IPFS is the Distributed Web (ipfs.io)

A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open.

wg/wrk: Modern HTTP benchmarking tool (github.com)

wrk is a modern HTTP benchmarking tool capable of generating significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. It combines a multithreaded design with scalable event notification systems such as epoll and kqueue.

Interesting tool as load generator for loadtests

10 open-source Kubernetes tools for highly effective SRE and Ops Teams (abhishek-tiwari.com)

If you run kubernetes you should give yourself a few minutes going trough those tools and check if some of them could help you in your daily work 🙂
I started looking at kube-ops-view which is already quite interesting.

A Love Letter to Plain Text (blog.afoolishmanifesto.com)

General Nerdery with plain text blogging systems 🙂

Basecamp doesn’t employ anyone in San Francisco, but now we pay everyone as though all did (m.signalvnoise.com)

We don’t actually have anyone who lives in San Francisco, but now everyone is being paid as though they did. Whatever an employee pockets in the difference in cost of living between where they are and the sky-high prices in San Francisco is theirs to keep.

Interesting take on salaries at Basecamp