Thought Bricks

As I was reading through some random stuff on Linux, I came across an interesting project called Lightstream. As the description says, this is a project that continuously replicates Sqlite databases to S3 compatible buckets. That seemed pretty interesting. Sqlite is more performant that most people think and really reduces the complexity of an application. If you don’t have to manage a database server and all of the networking configuration that goes with a database cluster, you can focus on building the app and not yak shaving to get a database set up.

There is some current buzz about Apple copying Tile and various and sundry other predations that have been perpetrated against smaller rivals through the platform power they wield in the App Store. This power is an inevitable byproduct of having a successful platform. Important digital platforms tend to capture much of the value in a market. In some cases, they capture almost all the value. This naturally leads to claims of monopoly by rivals who are subjected to what they consider to be unfair play by the platform owner and calls for legal sanction.

This article on The Register about NFT was great in their usual cheeky way. NFT is extremely interesting from a number of perspectives. Like currency (and Bitcoin), NFTs are worth something because a large enough group of people think they are worth something. At present, they are valuable only because they make the owner feel good and might have some sort of financial return. Think of a painting. We have some nice art in our house which might be worth something (I honestly don’t know), but I would never sell it because I’d rather look at it on the wall.

Bitcoin is on quite a tear. Although it’s interesting, I don’t own any directly but have a little exposure through other holdings. I’m not completely sold on Bitcoin as a store of value. The ownership is very concentrated and murky which means it might be subject to manipulation. The positive corrleation between Google searches and value which indicates how influenced it is by, well, influencers. Lastly, there are the technical risks.

FOSDEM has many interesting presentations. I watched this interesting and informative session by Sanja Bonic and Janos Pasztor that discussed using ContainerSSH to create a honeypot to observe system attackers. I’d not heard of ContainerSSH before and it’s a really interesting tool that creates a container and connects an SSH user to it. The honeypot example was a nice illustration of what you can do with it but there are some other interesting use cases as well for eduction and ephemeral system provisioning.

Although I’m in the minority, my go-to browser is Firefox. One of the chief reasons is privacy. Firefox is usually the leader in introducing privacy features into their browser. The recent introduction of SmartBlock is an example of that. Basically, it short-circuits third-party tracking scripts. This allows pages to use those scripts to work properly without actually passing information. One of the arguments against Firefox is that it is slow (which isn’t really true).

According to a report in The Register, six of ten servers sold in 2020 went to cloud providers. That’s pretty amazing but also not terribly surprising. We did that transition a few years back when we decommissioned our data center and starting using the cloud exclusively. Running things on the cloud is great but you do have to understand how to make the most of it. Is it really less expensive to run a 24x7 monolithic enterprise application?

In a previous post, I describe how I’ve been working with Go on a small project. It’s been quite illuminating. Go does many things in a much different way than Python, which is my most familiar language. One thing that I’m growing to appreciate is the lack of exceptions in Go. When I first discovered that Go doesn’t have exceptions, I wasn’t a fan. Aren’t exceptions just the modern way to handle problems?

I’m glad to see that there is strong effort underway to restore net neutrality in the US. Where we live, there is only one Internet provider and they should not have the power to interfere with content that was associated with other providers. I never quite understood the argument against. Why should a utility be able to discrimiate on what goes down the pipes? If providers need some more incentive to improve the woeful state of Internet infrastructure in the hinterlands, let’s give that directly.