today's leftovers
-
Rob Norris ☛ A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system.
It was a pretty intense few days for me, initially one of a few people looking into the bug, and then later being involved in working out a fix, talking to downstream vendors, responding to private and public messages with users, my own customers and the press, and doing damage control. It was mostly done with by the end of the weekend, though took a couple of weeks to mop up, and overall I’d rate it a qualified success for the project.
I’ve been writing this post on and off since then. A lot happened, and I have a lot of thoughts, and I wanted to get them all down, but it got too much. So this post just covers the bug itself, and I’m hoping to write more about the fuzzier stuff soon. If you’re reading this months later and I still haven’t, maybe ping me and remind me that I promised!
-
Redowan Delowar ☛ Reminiscing CGI scripts
The primary reasons CGI scripts fell out of favor are somewhat related to performance and scalability. When a CGI script is executed, it initiates a new process for each request. This approach, while straightforward, becomes increasingly inefficient as the volume of web traffic grows. Although spawning processes have become quite a bit faster in the modern Linux kernel, you’d still have to pay the interpreter startup cost in every request.
Modern web servers and frameworks, such as Flask, Django, or Go servers, address these inefficiencies by maintaining persistent server processes. This design allows them to handle multiple requests more effectively, optimizing resource use and response times.
-
Web Browsers
-
Gizmodo ☛ How to Add a Panic Button to Your Web Browser
If you’re not breaking laws or causing harm, it’s really up to you what you look at on the internet—we won’t judge. But there might be occasions when you don’t want someone in close proximity to see the contents of your open tabs, and that’s where a browser panic button, capable of shutting down your browser with a single key press, can come in handy.
-
-
K Desktop Environment
-
Video Recommendation: Coping with Other People's Code - Laura Savino
As someone suffering from a latent burnout thingy which has become more imminent in recent years and as someone who is still struggling to develop strategies to alleviate its effects on health and general well-being, I wholeheartedly recommend everyone to watch this video and let those points sink. Yes, even if you are not (yet) affected. The video is not all bout burnout but about strategies for sustaining sanity.
-