Some Reading on Application Containers

One aspect of my pending migration to Ubuntu Linux on my primary laptop has been the opportunity to explore “non-traditional” uses for Linux containers. In particular, the idea of using Docker (or systemd-nspawn or rkt) to serve as a sandbox (of sorts) for GUI applications really intrigues me. This isn’t a use case that many of the container mechanisms are aiming to solve, but it’s an interesting use case nevertheless (to me, anyway).

So, in no particular order, here are a few articles I found about using Linux containers as application containers/sandboxes (mostly focused around GUI applications):

A Docker-Like Container Management using systemd
Running containers without Docker
Containerizing Graphical Applications on Linux with systemd-nspawn
Debian Containers with systemd-nspawn
Using your own containers with systemd-nspawn and overlayfs

I was successful in using Docker to containerize Firefox (see my “dockerfiles” repository on GitHub)), and was also successful in using systemd-nspawn in the same way, including the use of overlayfs. My experiments have been quite helpful and informative; I have some ideas that may percolate into future blog posts.

iPhone after 10 years: Google overwhelms the iPhone like Microsoft overwhelmed the Mac

In 1991, Harvard Business Review article Computerless Computer Company by Andy Rappaport and Shmuel Halevi explained how Microsoft’s PCs overwhelmed Apple’s Macs. Most of the article’s wisdom would hold true today if applied to Google and Android’s domination of the iPhone.Since Steve Jobs orchestrated Apple’s turnaround in the late 1990s, Apple has recovered from the near-death experience when when Jobs returned and Microsoft loaned Apple $150 million. Apple is now one of the world’s richest companies in the world and is no longer in what the authors called a battle for long-term survival when they asked the question:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

54% off Quicken Deluxe 2017 Personal Finance & Budgeting Software, Disk or Download – Deal Alert

Take control of your finances with Quicken's finance and budgeting software, updated for 2017. Quicken imports your bank transactions safely and automatically, even from loan, investment & retirement accounts. It categorizes your transactions and puts them in one place. Use it to create a plan to pay off your debt or save for college, a down payment or retirement. Quicken has been discounted 54% from its typical list price of $75, so you can buy it on Amazon right now for just $34.56. This software is for the PC disk or software download. Quicken has personal finance & budgeting software for the Mac currently discounted 40% right here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Postscript to the Leap Second

The inexorable progress of time clocked past the New Year and at 23:59:60 on the 31st December 2016 UTC the leap second claimed another victim. This time Cloudflare described how the Leap Second caused some DNS failures in Cloudflare’s infrastructure. What's going on here? It should not have been a surprise, yet we still see failing systems.

After Two Years, Do I Find Self-Employment Worthwhile?

In March 2015, I started working for myself exclusively. That is to say, I went from working for someone else full-time while also operating my own company full-time to working strictly for my own company. How am I feeling after nearly two years of self-employment?

Fulfillment

Working for myself has proven to be fulfilling. I like the correlations to be found among opportunity, effort, risk, reward, and failure. I can weigh all of those things, make a decision of how to proceed, and benefit (or suffer) directly in accordance with my decisions. That is fulfilling to me.

Suffering, by the way, isn’t a bad thing. We could all stand to do a bit more of it today, so that we do a bit less of it tomorrow.

Process

I am free of silly processes that cripple my ability to get things done, not that I believe process is inherently bad. With my own company, I still have to define processes, but I can keep them both streamlined and fluid. I’m also free to let the people that work with me define their own processes, with me providing only the input required to achieve the desired result.

Balance

When working for other employers as an IT professional, Continue reading

Response: Proposed server purchase for GitLab.com | GitLab

Gitlab is talking about heading into the private cloud after successfully building a cloud-ready application. The savings are substantial for a small, technology-rich company:

The cloud hosting for GitLab.com excluding GitLab CI is currently costing us about $200k per month. The capital needed for going to metal would be less than we pay for 1 quarter of hosting. The hosting facility costs look to be less than $10k per month. If you spread the capital costs over 2.5 years (10 quarters) it is 10x cheaper to host your own. (My emphasis)

This sounds about right but I don’t think this factors in head count for operating the physical infrastructure. Lets say that two extra FTEs at $15K per month are required, this still one third the cost of AWS. The reaility is $2.4MM is a substantial yearly budget for IT Infrastructure and for an application that already cloud-ready it would go a very long way

For a small company that is focussed on technology adding more headcount is good for capacity. In a team of ten people, adding 2 headcount increases diversity of thinking, ideas and approaches and can be important to spreading out the workload e. Continue reading

Iran Leaks Censorship via BGP Hijacks

Iran_map_new

Last week, we reported via Twitter that the Iranian state telecom TIC hijacked address space containing a number of pornographic websites.  The relevant BGP announcement was likely intended to stay within the borders of Iran, but had leaked out of the country in a manner reminiscent of Pakistan’s block of Youtube via BGP hijack in 2008.  Over the weekend, TIC performed BGP hijacks of additional IP address space hosting adult content as well as IP addresses associated with Apple’s iTunes service.

In addition, in 2015 on this blog we reported that a new DNS root server instance in Tehran was being leaked outside Iran, a situation that was quickly rectified at that time.  Despite the fact that the Tehran K-root is intended to only be accessible within Iran, as we will see below, it is currently being accessed by one of the largest US telecommunications companies.

Iranian BGP-based Censorship

Last week, Iranian state telecom announced a BGP hijack of address space (99.192.226.0/24) hosting numerous pornographic websites.  Continue reading

Microsoft is retiring the Blue Screen of Death for some users

Windows 10 beta testers who are used to the warm, familiar glow of Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death will start learning it’s not easy being green.Microsoft is tweaking its venerable error message that lets people know that something went wrong, and their computers need to be restarted. While everyday consumers will still see the same old BSOD that we love to hate, people who are using beta builds released as part of the Windows 10 Insider Program will now see a Green Screen of Death.The change is designed to help distinguish between crashes in the generally available branch of Windows 10 and the beta branch. Microsoft lets people know that they use Insider builds at their own risk, and the betas can contain bugs that crash programs or entire devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The quiet revolution of apprenticeships

Higher education is a popular target for reformers. For at least a decade there have been protests over student debt, which averages well into five figures per student (six figures is not uncommon). Blame is lobbed everywhere. Tuition has risen faster than any other good – more than 500% in the last few decades – fueled by growing demand fueled by subsidy and government-backed loans fueled by a belief that, without college credentials, everyone will be poor and have fewer career options. Ironically, credential-chasing is making people poorer and limiting their options. —Intellectual Takeout

The post Worth Reading: The quiet revolution of apprenticeships appeared first on 'net work.

Dell: Mainstream laptops with wireless charging are still years away

Back in 2014, Intel declared it wanted laptops to be free of wires, and a centerpiece of that plan was wireless charging. But the technology has been slow to mature, and it may be years before it takes off.At CES last week, Dell showed a wireless charging PC called the Latitude 7285, a 2-in-1 with a detachable screen attached to a keyboard base. It's the first wireless charging laptop based on the AirFuel Alliance's emerging wireless PC charging standard.But Dell doesn't have widespread plans to put wireless charging in a host of new devices. That's partly because the technology, with slow charging speeds, is limited to low-power devices and isn't mature enough to replace wired charging. The wireless charging Latitude 7285 has a low-power Intel Kaby Lake chip that draws just 4.5 watts of power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alibaba could generate 1 million new US jobs, Ma tells Trump

The billionaire head of China's biggest e-commerce retailer met with President-elect Donald Trump on Monday to promote his site by dangling the possibility of a million new U.S. jobs.Jack Ma met Trump in New York and the two talked U.S.-China trade and specifically small business. Ma promoted Alibaba as a platform through which U.S. small businesses could sell products to consumers in China and Southeast Asia.By doing that, up to a million new jobs could be created at a million small businesses, Alibaba said. Alibaba didn't commit to hiring new staff in the U.S. itself."We mainly talked about small business, and young people and selling American agricultural products to China," said Ma.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft will let some users take a time out on Windows 10 updates

Microsoft is giving users some more control over Windows 10 updates, with a new beta build of its operating system released Monday.The build allows folks with the Windows 10 Professional, Education, and Enterprise versions to defer new updates for up to 35 days. In addition, the company will allow those users to decide whether or not they want to include driver updates when they want to update Windows.It’s a move that helps respond to one of the key criticisms of Windows 10: that Microsoft’s regime of forced, cumulative updates has caused problems for users with some configurations. This way, users can steer clear of updates they don’t want to install yet and dodge problematic driver updates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix bolsters virtualization wares; integration with Microsoft Azure

Citrix and Microsoft are strengthening a long-standing partnership by making it easier for customers to use Citrix’s application and desktop virtualization products, as well as control a fleet of mobile devices, in the Microsoft Azure cloud.Citrix has kicked off its annual partner Summit in Anaheim this week with news of the expanded pact with Microsoft. The moves build on years worth of integration between the two companies, but analysts say there’s a new-found heft behind the partnership since Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov took over the company last year after having previously served as a Microsoft executive.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Citrix is building your workspace of the future | Introducing the New Citrix +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Response: The Orphaned Internet – Taking Over 120K Domains via a DNS Vulnerability in AWS, Google Cloud, Rackspace and Digital Ocean | The Hacker Blog

So obvious but I’m checking my unused domains to make sure they have no nameservers configured

The root of this vulnerability occurs when a managed DNS provider allows someone to add a domain to their account without any verification of ownership of the domain name itself. This is actually an incredibly common flow and is used in cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, Rackspace and of course, Digital Ocean. The issue occurs when a domain name is used with one of these cloud services and the zone is later deleted without also changing the domain’s nameservers. This means that the domain is still fully set up for use in the cloud service but has no account with a zone file to control it. In many cloud providers this means that anyone can create a DNS zone for that domain and take full control over the domain. This allows an attacker to take full control over the domain to set up a website, issue SSL/TLS certificates, host email, etc. Worse yet, after combining the results from the various providers affected by this problem over 120,000 domains were vulnerable (likely many more).

The Orphaned Internet – Taking Over 120K Domains via Continue reading

This year’s 25 geekiest 25th anniversaries

This is the eleventh year I’ve compiled this particular collection of trivia, which will come in handy someday if I’m ever on Jeopardy and the category is 1980s/1990s technology and related stuff.  A big year for such stuff, 1992 saw the release of Linux under GNU, the sending of the first SMS message, IBM trotting out the ThinkPad and Simon, which was the first mobile phone to include PDA features (smartphone). The year also saw the launch of iconic videogame franchises Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat. And, perhaps worst of all, Microsoft unleashed upon the world the scourge that is PowerPoint. Here’s the full list:IBM debuts ThinkPad Raymangold Known for its minimalist design, the ThinkPad laptop was launched by IBM in 1992 and became a  workplace staple for Big Blue before it sold the line to Lenovo in 2005. For years the ThinkPad was the only laptop allowed aboard the International Space Station and there are reportedly some still in use up there. I am typing on a practically new Earth-bound model right now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This year’s 25 geekiest 25th anniversaries

This is the eleventh year I’ve compiled this particular collection of trivia, which will come in handy someday if I’m ever on Jeopardy and the category is 1980s/1990s technology and related stuff.  A big year for such stuff, 1992 saw the release of Linux under GNU, the sending of the first SMS message, IBM trotting out the ThinkPad and Simon, which was the first mobile phone to include PDA features (smartphone). The year also saw the launch of iconic videogame franchises Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat. And, perhaps worst of all, Microsoft unleashed upon the world the scourge that is PowerPoint. Here’s the full list:IBM debuts ThinkPad Raymangold Known for its minimalist design, the ThinkPad laptop was launched by IBM in 1992 and became a  workplace staple for Big Blue before it sold the line to Lenovo in 2005. For years the ThinkPad was the only laptop allowed aboard the International Space Station and there are reportedly some still in use up there. I am typing on a practically new Earth-bound model right now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This year’s 25 geekiest 25th anniversaries

This is the eleventh year I’ve compiled this particular collection of trivia, which will come in handy someday if I’m ever on Jeopardy and the category is 1980s/1990s technology and related stuff.  A big year for such stuff, 1992 saw the release of Linux under GNU, the sending of the first SMS message, IBM trotting out the ThinkPad and Simon, which was the first mobile phone to include PDA features (smartphone). The year also saw the launch of iconic videogame franchises Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat. And, perhaps worst of all, Microsoft unleashed upon the world the scourge that is PowerPoint. Here’s the full list:IBM debuts ThinkPad Raymangold Known for its minimalist design, the ThinkPad laptop was launched by IBM in 1992 and became a  workplace staple for Big Blue before it sold the line to Lenovo in 2005. For years the ThinkPad was the only laptop allowed aboard the International Space Station and there are reportedly some still in use up there. I am typing on a practically new Earth-bound model right now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CES 2017: More hot gadgets and cool stuff

Even statues love CESImage by Keith Shaw / Network WorldHere are some more products and hot technologies that were showcased last week in Las Vegas during the International CES trade event. Even the MGM Grand lion statue was into VR.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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