Thought Bricks

I passed my certification test on Design Thinking and got a nifty badge. Although it is subject to the same hype as agile practices in general, I like the general approach of Design Thinking and believe it can play a role in building innovative solutions. The key point is that anyone can be creative about desigining a solution. Creativity is a human process that isn’t limited to those who have designer or architect or creative(shudder) on their business card.

Serverless computing is one of the new hot things so I wanted to check out OpenFaas. It worked as advertised during some experimentation on MicroK8s. The Kubernetes requirement makes sense for scalability and robustness, but adds a lot of overhead and complexity. It’s overkill if you just want to do some simple some simple experiments. Enter faasd. Faasd is “git push” for functions and is much simpler to run than the full OpenFaas.

I tried to follow the documentation to run MicroK8s on LXD. However, it didn’t work because the microk8s nodes (really node since I was just trying on one system) wouldn’t start. I’m not sure of the root cause of that but it was vexing. After a little bit of searching, I found an article on the Ubuntu blog that described running Apache Spark on MicroK8s on Ubuntu Core in the cloud.

The Steam Survey found that Linux is a 1% share of the market. A rare breed. According to NetMarketShare the overall Linux desktop and laptop adoption is 1.79%. With a share that is a bit more than half of all users, I guess gamers aren’t as geeky as I thought. Or Windows just has a stranglehold on the gaming market. I’m not a huge gamer but I’ve got a few favorites that I play from time to time and they work great on Ubuntu 20.

I did a Green Web Check on my blog. Unfortunately, it’s not on a green hosting site. I host with Netlify and have been very happy with it but this is a bit of a negative. I use the free starter so I don’t have any money in the game, but I’ll send them a note asking about their hosting policy. It’s not that hard to source green energy for web hosting and they should try to do it.

I use LXD to create virtual servers on my main system to experiment around with stuff I might not want to install directly. It’s simple, fast and works well. I was curious if I could use it to do the same thing on a cloud server at Hetzner. The only problem was how to access the LXD container from outside. They are assigned IP4 addresses but those aren’t routable. However, the IPv6 address are routable.

T-Mobile US had 100 million user accounts compromised. I think this is about the millionth time I’ve heard of a major company getting personal data about customers (you know, the little people) stolen. I’ve got some personal skin in the game on this one as I’m a T-Mobile customer. I’m not to pleased that I’ve read about this in many places online but have yet to be contacted directly by T-Mobile telling me what is going on.

Many things are beautiful or impressive but impractical. A beautiful thing that I’ve been casually following is the Ashahi Linux project to bring Linux to the Apple M1 platform. Progress is being made but there are some stumbling blocks with the graphics drivers. The skills and dedication of the people involved are impressive. The idea of creating a virtual machine to intercept the calls to the subsystems and mimic them without looking at the source is brilliant.

Firefox, my browser of choice, just released a new version. I’ve been running it and it seems nice. There are some nice new cookie management features and more HTTPS coverage in private windows. All good and claimed to be 10-20% faster (I haven’t noticed). Although I don’t run Firefox on Windows, the new Windows SSO feature seems very useful. The real problem is the decreasing market share. Despite some lackluster marketing efforts, Firefox is losing users at a pretty good clip.

Edward Snowden says in a blogpost that “an out-of-control Insecurity Industry” is responsible for turning your iPhone into a “potentially lethal threat”. He has a point. The company he cites in the post, NSO Group, produced software that enabled Saudi Arabia to murder Jamal Khashoggi. NSO Group claims on their website that: NSO creates technology that helps government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.