It's the warmest day of 2021 so far, up to 21°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, so basically I'm just in between Cassie walks. (She's gotten two hours already today, including half an hour at the dog park.) Tomorrow it may be cooler, but still 16°C by mid-afternoon.
So, posting may be light this weekend.
A few articles caught my attention this week:
Also, I'm just making a note to myself of Yuriy Ivon's rundown on Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, because I'm using it a lot more than I have in the past.
Microsoft Azure and Office 365 suffered an outage yesterday that affected just about everything in their cloud:
Microsoft Corp. was hit by a massive cloud outage today that took most of its internet services offline.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and Bing were all inaccessible due to the outage. Even the Azure Status page was reportedly taken offline.
The first reports of the outage emerged from users on Twitter, and were confirmed by the website DownDetector which showed that reports began flooding in at around 5 p.m. ET. It says it received thousands of notices from Xbox Live, Teams and Office users.
Microsoft 365’s Twitter status account posted another update at 6.35 p.m. ET saying that traffic was being rerouted to resilient DNS capabilities and that it was already “seeing an improvement in service availability.”
Today, Microsoft reported as a preliminary root cause "We are continuing to investigate the underlying cause for the DNS outage but we have observed that Microsoft DNS servers saw a spike in DNS traffic." In other words, it looks like they suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on their internal name servers. The final analysis will come out next Thursday.
This outage was like the familiar "collective amnesia" trope in sci-fi where suddenly none of the characters recognizes any of the others, though they retain their normal personalities and abilities. (See, e.g., Dollhouse and Buffy. Joss Whedon lurves this trope.) For example, The Daily Parker was still running, but no one could get to it because the mapping from www.thedailparker.com to the Microsoft App Service hosting it has to go through Microsoft's internal name servers.
I wonder if this was a DDOS attack from inside the house?
Amtrak has big plans—especially for Chicago—if it gets a piece of President Biden's $2-trillon infrastructure bill:
Chicago passenger-rail riders ought to thrilled. A proposed map released by Amtrak shows rail service out of the Windy City absolutely exploding, with enhanced service to Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and other locales, plus new service to cities including Minneapolis/St. Paul, Green Bay, Iowa City, Rockford, Cleveland and Louisville.
According to spokesman Marc Magliari, the “vision statement” fact sheet is an idea of what the long financially challenged passenger rail agency could do if Washington fully climbs aboard.
“It’s our vision of what can be ahead, given that the president has set the table,” Magliari said. “We hope to have more details soon.”
Key details about Amtrak's expansion proposal are not yet available. Such as timing – Magliari says the “vision plan” runs 15 years into the future – or whether states would have to at all match capital or operating subsidies.
Amtrak has already made some improvements. After upgrading rights of way in Illinois, the carrier has begun testing 175 km/h service between Chicago and St Louis—a big improvement over today's 145 km/h speeds.
Someone has lost her unsupervised time for a while:
I have no idea why she attacked the table. When I last saw the room, all the pillows were on the couch and the table had straight edges. That was an hour ago.
Cassie is now confined to my office until further notice.