During this worldwide and deadly pandemic a fair amount of ink was spilled about how difficult it was to stop working when the normal hours of business operation were finished. I find this kind of hilarious because it’s nearly impossible for me to get anything at all accomplished that takes more than 10 minutes because I absolutely know I will be disturbed at least once during that increment. I spend more time talking people thorough problems they’re trying to solve in completely inane ways during the day than I do working on things that would potentially solve some of those problems ahead of them being dragged to my (virtual or otherwise) desk like the corpse of a murder victim.
That person is dead. You should really be thinking more about burying them before they start to stink than how we could potentially jolt them back to life with a sufficient charge of electricity.
I’m an operations guy at heart despite what my job title may say about being senior guy who cleans up terrible messes or whatever. I wouldn’t say that I run towards the sound of a car accident necessarily but I do chase ambulances just to see what broke and who might be responsible. It’s a terrible habit that I’ve never successfully broken myself of. The one aspect of those situations that I’ve handled better as the years progress is waiting until everyone clears out of the office or until the Slack DMs slow down to 3 per second or so. I’m not going to get anything accomplished while the people who are right up against a hard deadline (sorry!) or the gawkers who read trade magazines are peppering me with (dumb) questions and (well intentioned) ineffectual offers to help out if they can.
Anyway, obvious mockery of self improvement listicle sites aside, I think this guide, which ironically was published before Covid-19 was a virus we are all too familiar with, has a solid list of strategies to avoid feeling like you can never mentally leave work. It was what instigated all of the venting at the beginning of this post in large part because I wish I was better at incorporating straightforward measures towards making work a lesser part of my life. It’s a short and pointed list that avoids all of fellow pandemic kids tactics that more irksome sites lean on especially hard and we could all use a 1100 word break from that.
Author: goneaway Page 7 of 8
This bit about Google Cloud Platform’s habit of killing everything useful in it has been all over all of the places I look at during lunch and it, despite being hosted on the most noxious platform for putting words out onto the internet: Medium, is worth reading if you have any opinions at all about the methodology that Google uses to poop what they’re not interested in any more out of their software stack (that’s deprecation for those of you who capitalize the word ‘engineer’) and not just because it’s funny. It’s also worth reading if only because it’s written from the perspective of someone who has actually used the things he’s talking about in a production capacity. Typically everything that I read critical of GCP falls broadly under the umbrella of tried this once and I didn’t understand some part of it so it sucks think-piecing. I’d love to think that the idea of building things with an eye toward them being useful for more than 3 months might make a comeback in the not so distant future. People do love to say the word ‘deprecating’ during meetings though.
All of the above said, I’ve never once wanted to invest any effort into getting my head around Google Cloud Platform. As Steve Yegge said in his post, the documentation is godawful and mostly non-existent and I don’t enjoy needing to mess with things when I don’t have to. The decades of IT work have made risk adverse even when I’m just messing around with conceptually. The odds of me learning much about something I know will break and will break by design are next to zero. God forbid I built something useful to a handful of people and then have to keep revising it just to make sure the framework keeping all of that shit together doesn’t silently decide that I’m doing it the wrong way and subsequently requiring me to rewrite something I no longer care about. I have the option of taking that posture because 1) I don’t write any code that any one else should ever read much less use and 2) because I’m not selling people services that may or may not work tomorrow due to engineering whimsy or boredom with something that doesn’t disrupt the paradigm, bro. No thanks and next contestant. I get to be that petty and arbitrary because no one is paying me (well, except my work and I do nothing but manage tools that manage other tools there these days) for things that started out fun and then got tedious quickly. I completely get it. It is fun and rewarding in a punitive way to work on things that sort of work well enough and then move onto another more novel and interesting problem. That is great method of creating things for a hobbyist. No one expects to pay a hobbyist (against a running meter much less) for their sorta working and might not see much new work in the future projects. The evidence for that is everywhere. I think Source Forge is basically a monument these days to projects that started strong and sunk silently into obscurity and obsolescence. The operative difference with Source Forge is that if something there is something people find useful and necessary then after the original author has moved on to other things there is opportunity for other people to pick up where the first person left off. Google has an utterly hobbyist attitude towards the majority of their products and no tangible accountability other than lighting the occasional stick of incense on the altar of Our Lady of The Perpetual Beta to atone for their indifference to any user of their software that doesn’t also work for Google. I guess if you sell enough advertising then you buy the right to just mess around on every front.
Ironically, after all of the Google bashing, I realize that I’m typing all of this up on Pixelbook which is my favorite in an increasingly gigantic stack of powerful and portable machines. The reason I love it so much is because it’s absurdly overpowered for what it needs to do, still has great battery life, and stays the fuck out of my way for the most part. I even get to choose which branch of Chrome OS you want to run on it and even if you make the wrong choice (p.s. the correct choice is the Beta branch) you can just power wash the machine back to newness and start the mucking up all over again in a matter of minutes. I’m acutely aware that they’ll probably never build a machine as cool as this again but I’ll be using this machine until it either rattles apart or isn’t eligible for OS releases any more. I’m betting the latter will likely be the end instead of the former.
Speaking of companies who have have incomprehensible piles of money to burn and utter disdain towards all but the smallest fraction of their users and the vast majority of people writing software for their platform, I also enjoyed this post about the pain of installing software that didn’t surrender 30% of its purchase price for the right to inclusion in App Store. I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to create anything intended to run on macOS. It makes me wonder if any of the developers that were around for the old days of being a tiny percentage of the marketplace and making cool things for the people who haloed themselves in an aura of rugged and tasteful individualism by buying from the scrappier millionaires are adapting well to the utter irony of those artisanal mass market computer manufacturers dominating the market and using that dominance to make everyone resent their presence in it. While they’re likely making a better living (minus that 30% obviously) these days it’s undoubtedly a much more expensive and bureaucracy-laden process to even get to the point where someone without a Developer license would even be able to install something they’ve written.
Over the years, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time coaching people through the maze of workarounds needed to accomplish seemingly basic maintenance tasks on their ‘just works’ computers so I feel this pain in a palpable way. My frustration towards the design decisions Apple has made over the past handful of years mirrors the way that I feel towards the way the Gnome project veered much to the dismay of folks who appreciated Gnome 2 for its measured simplicity. I’ll be the first to admit that the Apple demographic may be the worst group to try to explain things to since the idea of a mod-click of any kind seems alien to them, thus the Can’t you just right click title of the article I’m talking about.
While this whole plague that’s killing people while they ignore it thing is going on, I’ve been working completely from home since March so the functionality holes in user controlled security has been the most persistent pain point for me in administering my shrinking fleet of Apple hardware. Every user in my organization now has the local admin account password because I need to give to them so that I can walk them painfully through the process of enabling screen recording and accessibility functions in System Preferences. Super duper cool, Apple. The most frustrating part about all of this is that Apple has yet to create any tools for managing their machines in what should be a managed environment. I know Microsoft has rolled out some paid solutions equal in vexation to the 3rd party JAMF suite that is supposed to allow me to have some degree of control over these precious slabs of silicon individuality but there’s always a way to work around that damage on the Windows side of the house. Again, backwards fucking compatibility motherfuckers!
The list of things that Apple keeps me from being able to do easily and cheaply continually grows. Wanna reimage any machines that thankfully don’t have T2 chips and are running Catalina? Prepare to fuck around with DeployStudio forever just to route around that damage. Need to install or update anti-virus? Get ready to become bffs with csrutil because you’re going to be hanging out a lot. Super cool to decide that monolithic imaging is dead without providing any method for replacing it. Oh yeah, keep your finger on that csrutil button if you want to do something crazy like removing FaceTime or any of the other included software that isn’t necessary for most business cases. In short, it’s awful and again it’s a case of being forced to cater to the whims of their innate need to control all aspects of their machines. Locking down common functionality and intimidating users by popping up warnings about malware and potential harm to their computers is really, really user friendly as is non-standard deinstallation of most software: it’s super easy! You just drag the Application to the trash and later go and find all of the plists it left behind that are breaking other things! It just works (for us)!
Automattic ended up in a battle of wills with Apple wherein Apple wanted them to build in purchasing capability (for domain purchases and non-free hosted WordPress plans) so it could collect its 30%. Luckily, they yielded in the face of angry users and relented. Apple isn’t a company that I’d ever choose to work with but until they make enough decisions that piss off a huge majority of mobile phone buyers most companies are forced to donate a third of their application revenue to the scrappy little computer company worth more than a trillion dollars. My interpretation of their position is that your product should already be worth millions of dollars before you even attempt to besot their App Store with your feeble stab at relevance otherwise they’ll relegate you to working in the gift shop on a commission basis. I liked it much better when the reality distortion field was smaller and didn’t infect and destroy more interesting things. I liked it better when Apple wasn’t so fucking huge and equipped with an infinite supply of blank checks for belligerently hostile behavior under the guise of aesthetic purity. Crazily, I liked it better when pre-SP2 Windows XP was the most pressing issue that I had and that is saying a lot.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here (insert no one being surprised about anything here) and the world has completely and utterly fallen apart over the past six months. My kid and I were talking about how odd it was to think about just walking into a restaurant, without any planning or forethought, to pick up something to eat. It seems like years have passed over this handful of months and I can still remember the conversation I had with my manager at work a few days before Denver basically shut all the way down for a few months. Both of us were a bit skeptical about how severe the impact of Covid-19 would actually be and verbally walked through a few different possibilities that largely ended up with everyone rolling back into the office in a month’s time. Sometimes I’m really, really wrong. As I go from the realm of ironically referring to myself as an old man to teetering on the precipice of actually being that point of reference, I’m more comfortable with admissions of ineptitude than I’ve ever been. It’s hardly upsetting any more.
If you are one of the zero or less people who actually read the old Team Murder that was active between 2002-2010 then you might detect a slight change in my perspective. This is not just years at work but over the past 2-3 years I’ve moved through a towering pile of changes and things are vastly improved and more stable these days, plague times withstanding and all. Since the last time I wrote anything on this domain with any earnest a healthy number of things that I felt were foundationally defining in my life sprouted legs (or wrote themselves a blank check with ‘Midlife crisis’ on the memo line) and Riverdanced the fuck off the map on into the great hereafter. While the majority of the more jarring changes were happening, I tried to make myself feel better by doing stupid yet outwardly invisible things that mostly didn’t stay with me. I used to try to ingest some variety of hallucinogen every few years because it would give my increasingly fixed perspective a necessary slap upside its metaphorical head and jolt me into cognizance of the narrowing circles I was pacing around in. I haven’t felt that need recently perhaps because it’s legal(-ish) in this state now and doesn’t have the urban legends of potentially losing your mind or whatever. The appeal is missing now, I think, because I was unstable for a couple of years. Of course, my idea of instability is pretty pedestrian and points to how much of a privileged wuss I am: I had a semi-amiable divorce, I moved into a very nice if depressing apartment, I discovered that being a part time parent makes me a much better and more engaged parent, I got married again and now I’m a step parent, and I bought yet another overly large house in the suburbs without feeling the slightest twinge of ex-urban angst while I post this over a 1G/1G fiber internet connection that costs less a month that the PPPoE aDSL internet connection that I had when I first started posting things on this domain.
What’s new with you?
Outside of this site which I abandoned entirely for something like six years I’ve never been one to document all that much of my life and even less so with the intent of being consumed by a public audience, imagined or otherwise. The obsessive selfie takers have always annoyed me and before that the person in a group who wanted everyone in that group to pose in front of things to get group photos while the remainder of us were happy to just walk around and be there in the place we were visiting. My former family-in-law were very much like this and trips would be spent dutifully marching from one spot to pose in front of to another and I’m very glad that I’m not obligated to do this anymore despite being completely impatient with the practice and idea when I was participating in it.
As disinterested as I typically am in photography (the practice not the product) article about the destructive and egotistical practice of forcibly inserting your looking glass self into everything you do was well worth reading. The separation between whatever thing you do with your spare moments and your identity is one I think is healthy.
Due to the unwillingness of our old pal Google and my hated phone carrier Sprint to work together, I’ve been without a phone for about 12 days now. The short story is that Sprint wouldn’t exchange phones under the Google warranty and since I didn’t purchase my Pixel 3 XL directly from the mothership, Google did the standard 2 day shipping warranty return which isn’t spectacular given the 7-10 days that they guarantee. I’m bitter about both of these blockages but the plain simple fact is that I haven’t had a phone for a very long time and I’m getting impatient with all parties involved.
This will be my very last phone with Sprint since they’ve gotten considerably less inexpensive and replaced by other carriers with unlimited data. Plus, I’m hoping to never have a representative, who was otherwise very nice, tell me that despite the fact that my phone is not in working order that I’m just going to have to mail it back to Google and wait patiently while I pay for phone service that I’m unable to use. Fuck every little part of that excepting the part that will motivate me to jump providers after six years. I also hope to never see these particular words together again:
Please be assured that the process will be completed withing the specified time frame of 5-10 business days from start to finish.
. Again, very nice but not helping with all the compliance required MFA that I’m not capable of doing. Sigh.
One of the internal dev servers at work got bitten by this old Jenkins bug that I noticed a month or so because it popped up in the firewall logs. Because this isn’t a production machine and is mainly used as an internal testing server (it’s also running a pmta server which is pretty scary), we just shut it down and disconnected it from the network. I assumed the developers would probably torch the entire machine and start over. They didn’t and I had to find the offending lurkers and rescue this box. I’ll admit that I did it the laziest way: I just installed Sophos and waited for the client to either confirm that I had an admittedly tentative false positive or start crap bombing the cloud console with notifications. The crap bombing commenced about 75 seconds after the client piece was finished installing. It managed to open about 12 cases in our ticketing system before I could even disconnect the network.
Once the AV picked up on it I at least knew which file was being obnoxious and could go clobber it and make sure it hadn’t set up any cron jobs to reestablish itself afterwards. The path was something like /tmp/.jenkins/jenkins/-bash. Yup: -bash. It was the end of a pretty long day and it took forever for me to remember how delete a file like this in bash. I hadn’t actually considered that when I first started sawing on it. The remember this idiot from this particular situation is that bash assumed everything that begins with a hyphen is going to be an argument. I futzed around with quotation marks and backticks for a while and got nowhere but frustrated. The oddly easy answer was this: rm -v — -bash. That didn’t come from memory or anything like that but a frustrating round of trying to google up a solution with every query I could think of that didn’t actually use a hyphen which becomes an exclusion argument for that search. So, the short story is that everything after the double hyphen becomes a filename that bash no longer cares about evaluating. In retrospect, I probably should have renamed it and taken a look at what it was actually doing. It was the end of a long day though so I just nuked it from ssh. It was the only way to be sure. Actually, I wasn’t ever sure so I yanked the network again and kicked off an AV scan before I left. A learning experience, yet again, that wasn’t a whole lotta fun especially when my load average is above 4 on an already aging server that I apparently need to preserve.
I am generally opposed to invasive advertising and not for the reasons that you might suspect. Like Doc Searls, I believe that news organizations have the right to generate money to pay their bills and all of the usual justifications and if the aforementioned media outlets don’t try to draw me into some horrific listicle/slideshow layered in trashy js or attempt to hijack every cookie in my browser then I’m okay with letting that stuff load. If you don’t actively interfere with my ability to read text then I don’t get upset at you. I am getting tired to the excessive attempts to get me to subscribe to the dead letter version of a publication in order to read more than excerpts online or the siren call of logging in with another authentication network so the page can reload without delivering the thing I actually came to the site to read. I love Doc’s savage and apt characterization of that variety of advertising:
Tracking-based ads, generally called adtech, do not sponsor publications. They use publications as holding pens in which human cattle can be injected with uninvited and unwelcome tracking files (generally called cookies) so their tracked eyeballs can be shot, wherever they might show up, with ads aimed by whatever surveillance data has been gleaned from those eyeballs’ travels about the Net.
It sums up very concisely the feeling that you get when you realize that as meaningless as the website that its advertising is hosted on is to the ad networks and that they’re only interested in the dim and distant possibility that you might click on one of their advertisements accidentally which will then tally a meaningless click that will eventually demand payment.
Long winded and vindictive as all of the above might be towards being annoyed and inconvenienced by much of the methodology twiddled over above, that brand of advertising which is rapidly becoming (already is?) the predominant source of advertising revenue is completely ineffectual. It’s a shell game where the potential reader, the publisher, and the entity trying to actually get the word out about something they’re selling are all being ripped off and categorized in the most meaningless and superficial way. In the interest of avoiding participation in this circus of stupid I’ve stopped reading or linking to WaPo or the NYT because they aren’t interested in returning readers but a few potential pennies from a herded set of eyeballs. It just makes the experience of trying to read important bits of journalism feel like you’re being hard sold by a carnival barker. I’m more than finished feeling that degree of condescension without wanting to lash out at the source of it. I’m a nonparticipant in it not because I feel like I’m going to fundamentally change anything by removing a ghostly pixel of demographic from the sea of other poorly categorized junk data but because I don’t want to have anything to do with any part of it. It’s the same reason that I’m vegan: I’m not going to change a damn thing but I do not want to be part of any of it.
Man, this autopsy on the last great internet breakage was definitely a breath of fresh air when it comes to public disclosure of mistakes companies with thumbs in a great deal of interwebs infrastructure have made. Again, like most of the major outages (remember the S3 one a few years ago?) it came down to a single mistake that cascaded out to wreak havoc and, at least in this write up, the person responsible wasn’t thrown under any buses because regular expressions are hard and difficult to test definitively in many cases. This also reminds me of how easy it is to break many things at great speed when you have a pile of automation in your stack and that automation not only doesn’t fix everything but can make small issues global pretty quickly.
Anyway, it was nice to see a comprehensive write up of what happened that didn’t lay blame on any individual human or service. Reading this also made me clench with fear since I have the opportunity to make mistakes like this, albeit nowhere near the scale of this one, all the time and often under pressure.
Ok, so the title is a bit misleading. I do object to huge scale companies crushing smaller and nimbler competitors out of existence to quash any competition and doing so with the size and influence that comes with that size instead of making a better product. As someone who touches the administrator back end of Office 365 every day at work, Microsoft is pushing Teams absurdly hard right now. The popular opinion right now is that Microsoft is trying to smoosh Slack into grease. That doesn’t seem unrealistic but after using their sterile and half baked product in a test drive I have to say that Slack at least feels like does what it was intended to do. In my case means that my co-workers can skirt any ticketing/change management process and just bombard me with requests that it would be awesome if I could “just do real quick.”
I wish I could say that I was surprised by the outcry over the fact that digital assistants like the Google Home actually record audio of your requests. I don’t actually have a problem with this in my own house since I’ve largely transitioned over from Amazon devices to Google devices that have a mechanism for disabling listening for wake words. Google filled in some of the blanks about how this data is used so hopefully people are a little less afraid of the all hearing ports of our robot overlords for the moment.