Intermittent SSL certificate and connectivity problems

Some of you may have noticed, and in fact contacted me about this, that occasionally, Dedoimedo is not available. Specifically, when you try to access the site, you get an SSL certificate warning from your browser. I would like to inform you that I am aware of the issue, and I have been trying to get my hosting provider to resolve this for a while now.

In more detail, the problem is that when the issue occurs, the certificate warning tells you that you're trying to connect to *gridserver.com rather than my site, ergo dedoimedo.com. The aforementioned grid is part of the shared hosting environment where my site resides.

My guess is that the hosting provider has a fault with one of their loadbalancer or Web server nodes, which does not properly terminate SSL. I have contacted them numerous times about this, wit no resolution provided yet. As to you, my dear readers, if you encounter this, the fix is simple. Just wait 2-3 minutes, and then refresh the page. You will then most likely land on a different grid node, with correct SSL termination, and everything will work fine. On my side, I will look at perhaps using a different hosting provider. Thank you for reading.

How Anti-Right-To-Repair Companies Try to Have it Both Ways

One of the greatest innovations of the 18th century came about in wartime and soon helped to enable the industrial revolution. And it involved a simple idea: Machines in which all the parts could be replaced with other, similar parts. But as the parts get smaller and more sophisticated, one could argue that the big innovation at the center of modern repairability is under threat. Simply put, interchangeability, a feature that won wars and enabled much of modern culture, is falling out of fashion in favor of obsolescence and disposability. Today’s Tedium ponders the long tension between these two competing ways of thinking about the objects we buy and use on a daily basis.

sqlite-utils: a nice way to import data into SQLite for analysis

This is a quick post about a nice tool I found recently called sqlite-utils, from the tools category.

Recently I wanted to do some basic data analysis using data from my Shopify store. So I figured I’d query the Shopify API and import my data into SQLite, and then I could make queries to get the graphs I want.

But this seemed like a lot of boring work, like I’d have to write a schema and write a Python program. So I hunted around for a solution, and I found sqlite-utils, a tool designed to make it easy to import arbitrary data into SQLite to do data analysis on the data.

5 things SREs and Sysadmins should know about ROSA and cloud services

Kubernetes, containers and highly scalable cloud services are the modern elements of business software success. But making the jump to Kubernetes requires training, understanding and a good deal of work from developers, architects and systems administrators alike.

To save time, speed up development cycles and limit organizational agony, it often makes sense to choose a managed Kubernetes offering, rather than running your own. If that’s a decision you’re considering, here are five things you should know.

DevOps inspiration from Toyota Production System and Lean considered harmful

Note: This text was originally the synopsis for a much longer article which I intended to write as the followup to a lightning talk about the subject I did at my workplace. Acknowledging that I probably won’t get time to write the long version, I think this synopsis can stand pretty well on its own as a statement of intent.

DevOps and DevOps-related practices has become a huge thing in the software industry. Elements of this, such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment and the focus on monitoring production systems and metrics has resulted in large improvements in the handling of large-scale deployments. Especially, the act of deployment to production, in traditional systems often an error-prone process riddled with cataclysmic pitfalls and requiring huge amounts of overtime, is reduced to the trivial pushing of a button which can easily be done in normal office hours.

When open source meets academic publishing: Platinum open access journals | Opensource.com

Academics routinely give away their work to companies for free—and then they buy it back! Can you imagine a farmer giving away free food and then paying to get it back for dinner? Probably not. Yet academics like me have been trapped for decades in a scheme where we give free work in exchange for job security and then pay millions of dollars a year to read our own writing.

Fortunately, this is changing. The results from a study I just finished show that it is possible for academics to get job security without paying for it. My study found hundreds of journals that are platinum open access (OA)—that is, they require neither the author nor the readers to pay for peer-reviewed work—yet still carry the prestige and readership to help academics succeed in their careers.

This trend is exploding: The Directory of Open Access Journals lists over 17,300 journals that offer a means of OA at some level, and over 12,250 have no article-processing charges (APCs). I used a handy open source Python script to compare this list to a list of journals ranked by the frequency with which their published papers are cited in other articles (The Journal Impact Factor List). It is clear that the last few years have seen a growing trend towards both OA in general and platinum OA specifically. These trends have the potential to accelerate science while helping prevent academic servitude.

Take the 2022 “State of Open” Survey from OpenUK

OpenUK’s second “State of Open” survey” is now live and runs until midnight BST on June 12, 2022.

This year’s survey aims to capture UK open source adoption levels as well as take “a deep dive into the impacts and consequences of maturing open source software consumption, contribution and redistribution,” according to Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK, in the survey announcement.

GNU Linux Debian 11 (should also work for Ubuntu) – compiling the latest kernel straight from kernel.org : (Linux/x86 5.17.7)

Ubuntu Blog: New Active Directory Integration features in Ubuntu 22.04 (part 2) – Group Policy Objects [Ed: Ubuntu or Canonical will keep pushing Microsoft until nobody bothers with Ubuntu]

Linux Active Directory (AD) integration is historically one of the most requested functionalities by our corporate users, and with Ubuntu Desktop 22.04, we introduced ADsys, our new Active Directory client. This blog post is part 2 of a series where we will explore the new functionalities in more detail. (Part 1 – Introduction)

In this article we will focus on how Group Policy Objects (GPOs) can be used by ADsys to change dconf settings in Ubuntu after a client has been successfully joined to a domain.

In this area, as well as for all the other new features delivered by ADsys, we tried to offer a user experience as close as possible to the native one available in Microsoft Windows, with the aim of enabling IT admins to reuse the same knowledge and tools they acquired over the years to manage Ubuntu desktops.