Another technical book, this time because my employer lets me buy random technical books as long as I pinky swear to read them and this one sounded interesting and got good reviews. First off, the book is a bit dated given its from 2011 — there are lots of references to Ubuntu 10.10 for example…
The BeyondCorp papers
Google’s BeyondCorp effort would probably be what we would now call Zero Trust, although I am surprised by how little name recognition BeyondCorp has when I talk to security people about Zero Trust. Perhaps there are subtle differences between the two, but if there are they aren’t obvious to me. I find myself reading the…
Cisco CyberOps Associate: Official Cert Guide
I don’t think I’ve really reviewed a technical book here before, but I read the thing so I guess I should. This book is the certification guide for a “Cisco CyberOps Associate” certification, which is what they now call the CCNA Security qualification. Its a relatively junior certification, qualifying you to be a level one…
Exploring more efficient remote large file storage
My primary personal project is a thing called Shaken Fist these days — it is an infrastructure as a service cloud akin to OpenStack Compute, but smaller and simpler. Shaken Fist doesn’t have an equivalent to the OpenStack Image service, instead letting your describe your instance images by a standard URL. One of the things…
This is going to hurt
This book is lots of things: honest, funny, and ultimately heart breaking. I don’t remember how I came across it, but its a good read for when travelling as the diary format means you can put it down whenever you need to do something else. I’m left wondering how the Australian medical system compares to…
Ansible 7.0 onwards requires blocking IO from stdin, stdout, and stderr
Shaken Fist CI started failing this afternoon with this message logged: ERROR: Ansible requires blocking IO on stdin/stdout/stderr. Non-blocking file handles detected: <stdout> Specifically this was happening when using ansible-galaxy to install some requirements, but the check is a more generic check than that was implemented by this ansible pull request, which appears to have…
Unix: a history and a memoir
It was a bit surprising to me that Brian Kernighan self-published a book about Unix history with Kindle Direct publishing, but given how many other books he’s published he must have his reasons for not using traditional channels for this one. The book is an engaging read, with quotes which still seem timely today popping…
The Kaiju Preservation Society
This is a classic Scalzi book — novel, fun, a little bit funny, and in sync with the time it was created in. A story set around a product manager laid off during the pandemic, and then presented with an… unusal employment option, the book moves quickly and in a way which keeps you engaged….
The Three-Body Problem
I’m torn about this book — the premise is interesting, the world is novel, and the book is well written. The book has a strong environmental theme, with a focus on the environmental impact of Chinese economic development during Mao’s cultural revolution. However, despite all that the book didn’t “grab” me. I think perhaps its…
All python packages require a pyproject.toml with modern pip
So last night Shaken Fist CI jobs started failing with errors like this (editted lightly for clarity): Building wheels for collected packages: shakenfist-ci Building wheel for shakenfist-ci (setup.py): started Building wheel for shakenfist-ci (setup.py): finished with status 'error' error: subprocess-exited-with-error × python setup.py bdist_wheel did not run successfully. │ exit code: 1 ╰─> [86 lines…