The Daily Parker

Just a quick note: I'm halfway to the "20 years from now" I mentioned in this post from 13 April 2011. And as I'm engaged in two software projects right now—one for work, one for me—that have me re-thinking all of the application design skills I learned in the 10 years leading up to that 2011 post, I can only hope that I'm not walking down a technological cul-de-sac the way Data General did in 1978.

Bit of a frustrating day, today. I spent 2½ hours trying to deploy an Azure function using the Az package in PowerShell, before giving up and going back to the AzureCLI. All of this to confirm a massive performance issue that I suspected but needed to see in a setting that eliminated network throughput as a possible factor. Yep: running everything completely within Azure sped it up by 11%, meaning an architecture choice I made a long time ago is definitely the problem. I factored the code well enough that I can replace the offending structure with a faster one in a couple of hours, but it's a springtime Sunday, so I don't really feel totally motivated right now to do so.

Lest you worry I have neglected other responsibilities, Cassie already got over an hour of walks and dog park time today, bringing her up to 10½ hours for the week. I plan to take her on another 45-minute walk in an hour or so. Last week she got almost 14 hours of walks, however. I blame the mid-week rain we got.

I also have a 30-minute task that will involve 15 minutes of setup, 10 minutes of tear-down, and 5 minutes of video recording. I will be so relieved next fall when all of our chorus work happens in person again.

Before I do that, however, I'm going to go hug my dog.

I've been coding most of the day because it has rained since 1pm. I'm getting very close to a series of posts on what I've been working on the past few months, so stay tuned.

Today's end-of-workweek stories:

• National Geographic details who needs to wear a mask outside, and who doesn't.
• New Yorker reviews a documentary on WeWork and the "decade of delusion" around it.
• Someone broke into the PHP master Git server and tried to put a backdoor in the most ubiquitous Web platform out there.

Finally, today is the 157th anniversary of the surrender of the traitors and the end of the white rebellion in America. (Sounds different these days, doesn't it?)

A few articles caught my attention this week:

• Jennifer Rubin says the GOP's opposition to literally everything President Biden has proposed is killing their popularity.
• The New Republic, in collaboration with the Chicago Reader, tells the story of the last remaining men's hotel in Chicago.
• NPR host Steve Inskeep describes his difficulties getting his adoption records from the State of Indiana.
• Writing in The New Yorker, Daniel Alcarón mourns the loss of Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory last December.
• In Illinois, March had above-normal temperatures 23 of 31 days, making the month the 13th warmest March on record.

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?

I've spent the last few weeks in my off-hours beavering away at a major software project, which I hope to launch this spring. Meanwhile, I continue to beaver at my paying job, with only one exciting deployment in the last six sprints, so things are good there. I also hope to talk more about that cool software before too long.

Meanwhile, things I need to read keep stacking up:

• The BBC's Peter Mwai examines "the fake UN diplomat and other misleading stories" coming from the Ethiopian government.
• Jill Lepore looks back to the Enlightenment, "when constitutions took over the world."
• Cullen Murphy looks back at his 2006 book and asks, again, "No, really, are we Rome?"
• Manny's Deli in Chicago had a 30-day mask challenge...that lasted two hours.
• A very cool 1964 model home in Michigan City, Ind., with all its original furniture can be yours for about $750,000.

Finally, check out the World Photography Organisation's 2021 photo contest results.

Even though my life for the past week has revolved around a happy, energetic ball of fur, the rest of the world has continued as if Cassie doesn't matter:

• US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken the lead in spewing right-wing conspiracy bullshit in the Senate.
• Retired US Army Lt Colonel Alexander Vindman joins Garry Kasparov in an op-ed that says it's not about the individual politicians; Russia's future is about authoritarianism against democracy.
• Deep waters 150 meters under the surface of Lake Michigan have gotten warmer over the past few decades, which is probably a bad thing.
• Oh, and summers have gotten longer too, and the rate of them getting longer is accelerating. 
• Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich takes us inside an Azure Data Center.
• The last-ever Airbus A380—one of only 251 built since the first one in 2007—has rolled off the assembly line in Toulouse, France.
• Software defects and $1,100-an-hour consulting fees may be keeping prisoners in Arizona from release on time.
• Usability expert Jakob Nielsen reviews how the NN Group created their iconic usability heuristics posters 26 years ago.
• Author John Scalzi reviews Zack Snyder's Justice League, a movie I watched over two days this week with about the same reactions as Scalzi's.

And if you still haven't seen our spring concert, you still can. Don't miss it!

I'm shaking my head at email service provider Postmark, who four weeks ago announced they would be phasing out support for TLS 1.0 (a network security protocol). I understood this when they announced it in February, 60 days ahead of their cutover to TLS 1.2, but didn't think it applied to anything of mine. This morning they sent a more focused email saying, "you're getting this email because we can see that this applies to you." Panic ensues.

Why panic? Because almost everything I've developed in the last 12 years depends on Postmark for email messaging, and the way they worded their notice, it seemed like all of those apps will fail on April 20th. And the only documentation they supplied relevant to me (and anyone else in the Microsoft universe) was a set of instructions on how to test TLS 1.2 support, not whether this would be a breaking change.

I immediately contacted their support group and said, as nicely as I can, "WTF dudes?" To which they replied, "oh yeah, bummer, dude." So I sent a lengthier reply just now and started digging into their source code. It turns out they're using an out-of-the-box Microsoft component that should transparently switch from TLS 1.0 to TLS 1.2 if asked to do so. I believe, therefore, the affected applications will be fine. In fact, fixing the problem may only require a simple, non-invasive change to Microsoft Azure settings for the affected applications. But I don't know that for sure. And I'm hoping their actual development team will respond with "yeah, no probs, dude, you're cool."

My other headache is literal, from staring at too many screens. So I'll do something else in a moment.

Chicago got up to 21°C yesterday, tying the record for March 9th set in 1974. It's already 20°C right now, close to the record 22°C set in 1955.

In other news:

• One chart shows the difference between the XPOTUS's 2017 tax cut for rich people and President Biden's pandemic-relief bill, which he will sign into law tomorrow.
• Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette tape, died at the age of 94.
• A survey of Windows computers found that 26% of them have not applied the WannaCry patch after four years of knowing about it.
• Nicholas Weaver explains the "Great Email Robbery" that will probably happen later this week. Great.

And now that I've finally gotten a .NET 5 application to deploy onto a Microsoft Azure Functions App, I will take a well-earned walk.