Thought Bricks

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.

I finally got to the very last part of building a recommender engine. Starting from my post a couple of months ago on the topic, I created a very simple Flask app that serves the model created by the nearest-neighbors recommender. It’s not very exciting but at least shows how it can be done. As I mention in the README for the project, the results are not exactly what I was hoping for but I think that beer recommendations are more complicated than “if you like this, you will like that”.

This is a very realistic take on SAP strengths. As an “operating system” for business, it’s really strong. There is quite a lot of depth in the ERP applications and, despite warts, they just work for many, many businesses. However, the SAP cloud offerings represent a risky move for many customers. They have years of experience and operations based on their existing SAP ERP. In some cases, this is supported with extensive customization.

I just saw that RedHat is changing the way they are running the CentOS project. I’m not a fan of this and it seems like a money grab. I’ve used CentOS where I needed the equivalent of RHEL but didn’t need support (e.g. experimentation, testing, etc.) I do have a RHEL Developer Subscription, so I could use the real McCoy for some of this testing, but it just isn’t as convenient in some cases.

The recently announced mac1.metal instance type on AWS is interesting. I can imagine it would be very useful for building iOS apps and the like that require a Mac or running site tests with the Safari browser. The aren’t running the new M1 chip, but are on some pretty decent Intel i7 processors, so they should be plenty fast. I don’t suppose you care too much about power consumption if it’s in the cloud.