This Is Just a Test.

I’m currently looking for a fleece jacket to wear as a midlayer when hiking in Winter, and I happened to come across a shop that sells Patagonia clothes. Although they are rather pricey, the brand has a nice reputation and I always wanted to try it on. The jackets and shirts I tried fit nicely, but I was completely irritated by the fact that the zipper is on the wrong side! All my life, the moving part of the zipper was on the left side and I had to thread the right part into the left one – Patagonia does it the other way round. ...

I quit smoking on this day three years ago. I’m quite proud that I accomplished this after 30 years of smoking.

So apparently Apple acts like a child and announces that it won’t release its upcoming Apple Intelligence features in the EU, because… you know… EU == bad. Honestly, I couldn’t care less. In my opinion, this AI hype everywhere is the biggest bubble since dotcom times. Every fucking company thinks they need it, it gets shoved down your throat in every impossible situation, and it’s hailed as the golden grail of computing. ...

I recently watched “The Bear” on Disney+ (highly recommmended show!), and there’s this one episode (one of my favourites, btw) where the character Richie is staging at a restaurant and has to get up early in the morning. So in several subsequent scenes you see his alarm clock go off at: 5:38 5:35 5:32 5:30 and finally at 6:36. I know it’s stupid, but… this irritates me so much! First - this is a digital alarm clock. Who in the world resets it every evening to a different time?!? ...

If you run the Telegraf metric collector in any non-trivial setup, you probably came across the problem that it doesn’t offer explicit routing between inputs and outputs. All the inputs, outputs, and the filters in between share one single namespace, so, by default, every metric from each input goes to each output, even when you use multiple configuration files. This is convenient when you want to funnel metrics from several inputs into one InfluxDB; or maybe you want to fan out your metrics to several databases at once. ...

Suppose you run an OpenShift cluster on VMware and want to try the new vSphere CSI driver. Documentation is practically non-existent, but your PersistentVolumes are already provisioned on VMware, so you guess it should just work out of the box, right? Wrong. You create your PersistentVolumeClaim, attach it to a Pod and then get this fine error message in the event stream: Error: auth service: no shared datastore found for block volume provisioning Google left me with the Github page of the source code where this error message is defined and a dead link to a summary page of Red Hat issues. ...

This week I came across an interesting problem. We are hosting several PostgreSQL clusters for our departments, and some databases are using the TimescaleDB extension. A couple of days before Christmas, an unlucky coworker stumbled over his keyboard and deleted several hundred gigabytes of data from a TimescaleDB hypertable. Thank God for backups! Since this database is shared between different owners I couldn’t just overwrite it from backup, so I fired up a new VM, restored the database to a known good point in time (pgBackRest is awesome!), exported the affected database and imported it back into the original host. ...

It snowed in Vienna today. While not totally unexpected for this time of the year, it’s still unusual, and I can’t remember the last time we had this amount of snow at the beginning of December. I guess a good 20cm came down today. I like this kind of weather, especially when I don’t have to be somewhere. The snow de-accelerates everything. In stark contrast to the grey, cloudy sky over Vienna I found email from Bluesky in my inbox - they sent me an invite code. I totally forgot that I had applied for one a couple of weeks ago. ...

I’m currently trying to get a better understanding of inflation, money markets, debts and all that stuff by reading the excellent book Pricing Money by J. D. A. Wiseman. Although it was written two decades ago, I suppose all the basic information should still be valid. This particular explanation made me laugh: The prices of USTs [US Treasuries] are quoted in thirty-secondths rather than in decimal. And hence a price of 98–28 means 98 28⁄32 = 98.875. A ‘+’ indicates half a 1⁄32, so 99–24+ is 99 + 24⁄32 + 1⁄64 = 99.765625. The US is the only country still quoting the price of its debt in these fractions. ...

As someone who knows a little about monoliths and practically nothing about microservices, I really love this blog post: DEATH BY A THOUSAND MICROSERVICES.