Thought Bricks

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.

I’ll occassionaly take a look at the most popular PyPi packages to see what’s going on in the Python world in general. The top ten items are interesting: urllib3 has obvious appeal and widespread use due to the heavy use of Python in networked applications. Many other packages reference this as well. six isn’t something that I personally use, but there is a lot of Python 2 code out there and being able to bring it into Python 3 is a common use case.

I’ve got a small Python project that I wrote to experiment with uploading data to SAP Asset Intelligence Network. Someone who I work with heard of this and wanted to use it which is great. However, they are running Windows and have no experience with Python so the installation steps are somewhat mysterious. Not to mention that this was put together fairly quickly and has some obvious flaws. Since Go has an straightforward way to build executables for multiple operating systems it seems like a good fit for this sort of solution.

I enjoyed this article describing the history of the venerable Linksys WRT54G. I had one of these running OpenWrt for years. It was extremely reliable and flexible. It was fun to hack around on it and I used the VPN quite freqently to get to files at home when I was travelling. Although I moved on years ago and now have an Eero with far superior speed and coverage, that ugly Linksys box was a great piece of hardware.

As I’ve written before, I’m interested in the Apple M1. I’m due for a new work computer so maybe I’ll get one sooner than later. It seems that progress is being made (or at least a start is being made) on Linux on the M1. The Registry has an article about the Asahi project. It’s a crowdfunded effort to get Linux working on the M1 by Hector Martin who has quite a history with Linux ports to closed systems.

If you create a cloud virtual machine and run it for anything more than a few minutes, it quickly becomes apparent how much nefarious activity goes on. You will get hit with brute force attacks on all of the known ports (and some unknown ones) pretty much continuously from the first minute. I don’t know that there is much that cloud hosts can do about this. They have known IP ranges and I would assume that attackers constantly troll those known ranges.

The Economist has an interesting article about SAP. It’s pretty much in agreement with my previous post on the subject. These are interesting times for SAP. I like that Mr. Klein is being realistic about what it will take to get this done. It’s going to be very painful to the SAP bottom line but has to be done if they are going to survive as a software power. I don’t think the real threat is other “legacy” companies like Oracle and Microsoft, but rather the rapid expansion and capabilities of companies like Workday and Salesforce.

I wrote a tutorial on installing Nextcloud in the Hetzner Cloud that was just published on the Hetzner Community. Nextcloud is an interesting solution if you want to host your own file sharing space. Combined with the solid prices on Linux hosting at Hetzner, you can get a pretty capable solution for personal or small business for just a few Euro a month. The process is pretty simple since Nextcloud has a Snap package.