I read a lot of books, mostly fiction. That said, occassionally I come across a non-fiction book that genuinely changes how I think about something. In general I can tell those books a while later, because they’re the ones I keep referring people to over and over. So here’s a list of the non-fiction books…
Author: mikal
Providing stable EBS volume device files
So I had a little adventure at work today and I am sure this is going to come up again. Imagine that you have an AWS instance with more than one EBS volume attached. On modern instance types, the EBS volumes appear as NVMe device files, but the naming of the device files is not…
Issues building Kolla images with recent versions of Python requests
If you find yourself having issues building Kolla docker container images with errors like this: INFO:kolla.common.utils:Using engine: docker INFO:kolla.common.utils:Found the container image folder at /home/mikal/src/kerbside-patches/venv-stable/2023.1-patches/share/kolla/docker ERROR:kolla.common.utils:Unable to connect to container engine daemon, exiting INFO:kolla.common.utils:Exception caught: Error while fetching server API version: Not supported URL scheme http+docker It is likely that you’re running a recent version…
The Innovator’s Dilemma
So David at work has been talking about this book quite a lot recently, and that meant I had to read it despite the failure of Debugging to delight me. Interestingly, the book starts by telling the story of the hard disk industry, which aligns well with Chip War’s approach of telling the story of…
Chip War
I think it was Hugh who recommended this book. I’m greatful as it was an excellent read and definitely didn’t make me duck over to eBay to buy an Intel 4004 chip set to play with. The book uses the backdrop of our current struggles to retain supremacy in high tech manufacturing versus an ambitious…
Dust
Hugh Howey is a master of suspense and as a result I found this book hard to read — it’s clear things are off the rails and characters I care about are going to get harmed (another Howey trademark it seems), but you just have to keep on marching through. As a result I found…
Should SRE management hold blameless retrospectives for mistakes?
One of the core tenets of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is that blameless postmortems / retrospectives should be held for oncall incidents. Its part of the continuous improvement process where we learn from what went wrong and try and create processes to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Very explicitly it is not about blaming anyone…
Do you want the apocalypse, because this is how you get it
So I read this paper over the weekend. Naively, its a resonably interesting piece of research around using a generative AI to use descriptions of CVEs from their responsible disclosures to exploit unpatched systems autonomously. Now read that sentence again — these people prompted Chat GPT4 with CVES which didn’t have fixes yet, and had it…
A gotcha with the Walrus operator
In New python syntax I was previously unaware of, I discussed some new operators I’d recently discovered. One of them is called the Walrus operator, which lets you write code like this: list = ['a', 'b', 'c'] def get_one(): if not list: return None return list.pop() while one := get_one(): print(one) See where we do the…
Debugging
One of the other architects at work was running a reading group for our North American comrades, and I felt left out so I figured I may as well just pick up the book to see what the deal was. This book is a bit old, and was written at the time to try and…