Posts by Adam Connelly

Terraform fork OpenTF renamed and relocated as OpenTofu

Re: Tofu

Wish I could upvote this more than once.

The point of containers is they aren't VMs, yet Microsoft licenses SQL Server in containers as if they were VMs

I can think of a few, but they probably don't fit into the licensing issues that this article is about:

- I want to make it easier for other devs to get a development environment up and running quickly, but want to avoid having to go through the full SQL Server installation process, or want the ability to switch versions quickly.

- I want an easy way to spin up a database for running automated end to end tests as part of CI/CD pipelines, and I want to be able to just bin it easily once I'm done.

In both those examples I maybe don't care if the performance of the SQL server instance isn't as good as a bare metal install, and I potentially don't care if any of the data is persisted or not. What I care about is that I can get something up and running quickly.

Not saying you don't have valid points, I'm just saying that production isn't the only use-case for running database servers, and there are situations where you want something transient that you can start and stop rapidly.

The reason that Docker Desktop on Windows creates a Hyper-V container is that it needs a Linux operating system to allow you to run Linux containers. Because containers aren't VMs, they rely on a host operating system to provide the low level services that they need to function (CPU, memory, I/O, ...). One way to think of it is that you're doing cross-platform development. If you wanted to do Android development you would need to run an Android emulator on your machine to run your applications without deploying them to a phone - this is pretty similar.

This isn't representative of using containers in production. This is just a development setup that you can use while working with containers locally.

Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR

Re: Interesting

Exactly. A number of US sites like Pottery Barn have taken the approach of blocking users from the EU instead of bothering to become compliant.

I suspect that trying to block all of California as well isn't going to be an option for them, so this could make things quite interesting depending on what's in the law.

Container orchestration top trumps: Let's just pretend you don't use Kubernetes already

Hotel California

"Just beware Amazon, Azure and Google – these are Hotel California"

Sorry if this comes across as being picky, but I feel like this is a bit misleading. Azure currently offers both ACS and AKS (in public preview). ACS is a way of deploying a cluster using your orchestrator of choice (Mesos, Kubernetes, etc), whereas AKS is a slightly more managed version that only supports Kubernetes. Either way, you're not locked in - you're running your own Kubernetes cluster that just happens to be in Azure. So if you want to move to another cloud provider or bare metal it's a case of setting up your new cluster and deploying to it.

Obviously this may not be quite as simple as I make out if you use other Azure services (database servers, storage, load balancers, etc), but you're no more locked in than if you were just using Azure to host virtual machines IMO.

I believe AWS and Google also both have similar offerings, although AFAIK the AWS one is in a private preview rather than being publicly available.

So yes, you can be locked in with the public cloud providers, but they're all currently building / have available services that allow you to create a managed Kubernetes cluster, rather than using their own proprietary container services.

It does a whole load of stuff, but at its simplest it lets you think in terms of a cluster, rather than individual machines. So you basically end up with X amount of resources, and you just ask it to run your workloads, without having to figure out where to put them. Here's a few things you get with Kubernetes to give you an idea:

* If you have something like a web server that you want to be able to horizontally scale depending on load, you can create a service that automatically creates a load balancer for you, and figures out what containers to send requests to. It can add and remove containers to the pool depending on overall load.

* Linked to the previous point, it has built-in support for liveness (is my container running properly) and readiness (is it ready to serve requests / do its work) checks, so it can avoid routing traffic to containers until they've started up properly.

* You can Ingresses to do SSL termination at the edge of the cluster so the containers don't need to worry about it.

* It can handle automatically connecting storage to your containers via volumes (so you don't need to make sure that the container is running on a particular node, for example), and can automatically provision that storage using Persistent Volume Claims.

I'm sure that's only just scratching the surface as well.

Apple tells GitHub to fork off: iGiant steps outside DMCA law in quest to halt iBoot leaks

Re: Infringing Forks?

Yes, hence my "you'd have been better just downloading the code, removing anything infringing, and then publishing it rather than forking" comment...

Infringing Forks?

"Now, it's fair to say all or most copies of the copyright-infringing material will also be infringing. We can't imagine someone forking the stolen iBoot blueprints, and then taking out all the Apple-eyes-only code – there wouldn't be much left, except maybe the source comments."

Even if you did this, I would have thought the fork would almost certainly still be infringing because the original code would still be contained in the git history. Sure, it's possible you could get rid of this via some git gymnastics, but in that case it would seem a bit weird to have created a fork in the first place - you'd have been better just downloading the code, removing anything infringing, and then publishing it rather than forking.

Continuous integration platforms are broken – here's what needs fixing

Re: Stability

I'm not going to downvote you, but I do disagree. Personally I think you should be properly planning and testing as you say AND using automation. They're not mutually exclusive.

Configuring a CI tool really isn't rocket science. If you're a software developer, and you understand the concept of taking the source, converting it to a working product, and ideally running some form of tests against it then you understand how to configure a CI tool. There's nothing magic about it - it's just a case of taking what you already do manually and getting the CI tool to do the same thing.

There's a ton of different reasons for using CI, ranging from getting immediate feedback about problems when working in a team through to ensuring consistency when creating builds. If you deploy directly from your development machine rather than a CI system, for example, you're asking for trouble. I'm not saying you'll definitely have issues, but there's at least the chance that you make a mistake and accidentally leave in debugging statements or work in progress that shouldn't be there. Obviously you shouldn't do this, and you should 100% test everything you do, along with every possible thing it can affect, but people aren't perfect and make mistakes. If you use a CI system these kind of issues pretty much go away.

So yes, you're completely correct that people should properly plan their work, and then make sure that they test it properly by hand. But that doesn't also prevent you from using automated testing and CI systems. Both are part and parcel with professional software development to my mind.

I'm able to take the time to reply to this over lunch because I spent the time 5+ years ago configuring a CI tool and rarely have to worry about it.

SQL Server on Linux? HELL YES! Linux on Windows 10? Meh

Re: Who cares what the OS is!

SQL Server has been available as a service on Azure for years now. You don't need to worry about setting up machines, installing the server, etc. You basically just choose the level of performance you want, and create databases. It handles everything else. You can even get it to automatically scale your databases up and down to handle different load.

But I'm guessing this must be aimed at a slightly different market, presumably because not everyone is comfortable running stuff in the cloud right now.

Microsoft foists fake file system for fat Git repos

Repository too large?

Obviously it's impossible to say without actually knowing the structure of the repository, and exactly what's stored in it, but it basically makes me think that they're trying to bend git to be used in a way that it wasn't intended.

Before git, it was a lot more common to have a single repository with all your code inside it, even if that meant you were storing multiple unrelated products in the same repo. With git, the approach tends to be an individual repo for a single self contained component.

Comparing the Linux kernel with Windows probably doesn't make much sense. It would make more sense to compare windows to a particular Linux distribution. All the code that makes up a Linux distribution certainly isn't stored in a single source repository. I know that's partly because of the nature of open source development, but it also makes more sense to me to split up code into smaller, self contained components like that. Hosting sites like github basically encourage that by making it so easy to setup new repos.

It sounds like a cool concept regardless, but to me one of the main advantages of git is that it allows me to work offline, and I'm also not worried about our central repo dying because every developer has a complete copy of the repo that's going to be at most a few days old. So if I'm understanding the way the lazy loading works, it's not really a feature I would actually want because then you end up with the appearance of having the code available, but as soon as you lose your network connection you're totally screwed.

GitHub falls offline, devs worldwide declare today a snow day

Re: How did the distributed bit actually work

With git, virtually everything that you do on it is completely offline and distributed, so most of what people do in git on a day to day basis isn't actually affected by whether github is online or not. Github is basically just a convenient place to store a definitive copy of the repository, and provides nice dev tools like pull requests. But as far as creating branches, writing code, and committing it goes - you do that totally independently of github. My point here is just that working locally is the normal state of affairs in git, rather than something that you would do in some kind of emergency situation.

Speaking from my experience, the sorts of things that are more likely to be affected by this are things like automated builds, deploying changes and code reviews (via github pull requests). But these issues aren't anything specific to git or github, since you'd have the same issue if any centralized repository went down, and you could easily sort it in an emergency by updating your build server or other tools to point at a copy of the repository (which every dev has on their machines by virtue of the way git works).

Microsoft to Linux users: Explain yourself

Re: Just use Linux and be done with it!

From what I can see, you've totally missed the point here. This article has absolutely nothing to do with Windows.

The request was from the Azure team, who are trying to improve the monitoring of Linux VMs in the Azure portal. This is aimed at people who use Azure for infrastructure, and run Linux VMs.

So to reply to your comment about "Just use Linux and be done with it!", that is EXACTLY what they are doing.

Git thee behind me, Git crit security bug!

Have to agree

This article is pretty confusing. I'm assuming that what this is talking about is that there's a flaw in git clients in general, rather than anything specific to GitHub. The reason that it's confusing is that GitHub provide their own git client, but it isn't the only client that you can use to access repositories hosted on GitHub.

Any chance the article could be updated to be really explicit about exactly what's affected here? Is it a problem with any git client, or is it a problem with the client created by GitHub?

RIP P4ssw0rd? IT giants agree to share patents to rollout two-factor auth

Re: Confused!

Nothing will stop them from being able to access your account if they've got your phone running the 2 factor auth app. But from what I can tell, you can turn off 2 factor authentication, or switch it to another phone, at which point the codes generated on your old phone are useless.

https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/4430955?hl=en#ts=4430956

Obviously, if they've already done the damage and managed to get access to your account, this won't help. But OTOH, they would need your password as well, so it's not any less secure than a username and password.

Look, no client! Not quite: the long road to a webbified Vim

Re: Why bother?

Essentially, because the browser is also the runtime.

Now I don't agree with the assertion that the browser should always be the entire development environment, but you certainly need development tools in it. The reason for that is because the browser also runs the client side code, so the only way to debug the code is inside the browser. Therefore you need a debugger inside the browser, or you need to have the ability to run the browser's Javascript engine outside of the browser in such a way that you can debug it using the IDE of your choice.

Anyway - it's kind of a moot point. Modern browsers have development tools built in, and the vast majority of users have absolutely no idea that they're there since you typically need to actively do something to access the tools.

Let's talk about continuous delivery

Nice Perforce Advert

I managed to read at least 30% of it before my eyes melted with all the buzzwords.

Copyright minister admits: Google has better access to No. 10 than me

Some are more equal

"When it comes to education, is it right that we batten down the hatches and put a blanket on historians who write history books and they're not allowed to be given to schools, for example."

So what's his point there? Is it that history books are too important for us to have to pay for? So if it's a song, it's copyright infringement, but if it's something that he thinks would be worthwhile to be freely available, it's not? I guess the historians won't make much money under this guy.

NFC Forum: We're not just about paying by bonk, you know

I can think of a few things that I'd love to be able to do:

* Load boarding passes on my phone (as mentioned above). I do this for some airlines already, but it's annoying having to unlock my screen to scan the barcode. It would be much easier to just pull out my phone, and hold it up to a reader.

* Building passes. Same as above - it's a pain ending up with a number of passes for various buildings I need to enter, and keeping track of them. Much better to just have it stored on my phone.

* Transport cards. You get the idea.

I can't see this happening for a while anyway. Not so much because of phone support, but because of the infrastructure that will have to be built to support it. Will be good when applications start appearing though.

China visa changes could attract job-hunting IT pros

Re: one china

This is the comment of the day! Upvote.

Orange boasts: We made Google PAY US for traffic

I see it slightly differently to that.

The way I see it is that Google aren't "really" paying Orange to deliver their content to users, what they're paying for is for Orange to deliver their content to users faster than other content is delivered. It's a perception thing. Joe public goes onto YouTube and views a video. The video starts playing immediately and doesn't stop to buffer or anything like that. He then goes to some competitor site and chooses some other video. This time the video takes half a minute to load, and stops every few minutes to buffer.

Since your average person doesn't have a clue how any of this works, they're not going to say, "Google is paying for an unfair advantage over site X," they're going to say, "I always watch videos on YouTube because it's fast. That other site is slow."

I'm not sure how this really fits into your stamps example though ;-)

Lynch mob of bankers say they'll stump up cash to take Dell private

Re: follow up

Does having "Scotland" in the name make it a Scottish bank? What about all their customers from other parts of the world, never mind the rest of the UK. I'm sure the UK government decided to bail it out because it was Scottish, and not because it was the biggest bank in the UK and Europe at the time.

As for HBOS - are you missing the "Halifax" part of its name?

Sounds a bit like when there was that massive oil spill recently, and a lot of the American press were going on about "British Petroleum", despite the fact their name is just "BP" now, and I really doubt they could be classed as a "British" company.

But you're right, since there were only 4 banks bailed out, presumably only a few folk would have been affected if they'd gone under. It's not like these banks are very big or anything. This is another case of us nasty Scots being a drain on England and I sincerely apologise.

Texas schoolgirl loses case over RFID tag suspension

Re: Please leave your freedoms at the door...

Apparently the girl had worn ID badges in the past, and had only complained when the RFID tags were brought in. Given that she's now being given the option to get a badge without the RFID chip, it seems a bit odd that she's still complaining about it. I suppose maybe it took the family a while to work up the courage to take this to court, but then why highlight RFID as the problem, and why wait until this scheme was being brought in to raise the concerns?

About the cash vs casino chips vs plastic cards eroding children's ability to understand the value of money - what a load of crap. Notes and coins are just a way of representing some kind of value. How is it more difficult to understand that I have X amount available to me, when I make a transaction that amount reduces? There must be a way of checking the balance on the cards, and there will be a consequence to not having any stored credit - you can't get food. Exactly the same as cash, just without the annoyance of having to carry cash around, or folk stealing it.

Lastly, I don't have a big problem with kids in a school being tracked inside that school. While they're in school, they're meant to be in certain places at certain times. If they aren't then why not?

NASA's Mars rovers feel effects of TITANIC DUST STORM

I think you possibly need your sense of humour checked. Or is it suddenly not a joke if the person doesn't use the joke alert icon?

Rogue reporters kicked out of conference for network snooping

RE: Bad Form

I figure that the conference is called "Black Hat", so stuff like this should be expected. I don't think the organisers should have kicked the guys out since what they did was presumably in the spirit of the event.

Whether they get charged or not depends on the police, I guess, and if they do - tough.