General Rambling

Stop Chrome Autoplay

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If you didn’t catch this on Twitter: If you use Google Chrome, go to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy and set it to “Document user activation is required.” Boom: no more auto-playing videos. You’re welcome. — Chris Meadows (@robotech_master) October 3, 2017 In short, go to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy and set it to “Document user activation required.” It’s funny how simple things can be so virally popular. While Chrome can sync settings between browsers where I am logged in, I have got to figure out if there’s an API to set Chrome configuration options automatically…

Let’s Prosecute Unlicensed Engineering in IT

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Have you been watching this whole dustup with the Equifax CISO, and how people are saying that she is unqualified because, instead of a Computer Science degree, she had an MFA in music composition? Not surprisingly, there’s a massive backlash from the IT community, much of which doesn’t have a computer science degree, either. That’s part of the appeal of technology for many — on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. I’m a mutt, too. I’ve always found computer science programs intentionally inaccessible, with the faculty actively eschewing any form of practical curricula because they’re not a technical college. Snobbish? Yeah. Not my style. What I find very interesting in all of this is the ignorance of some of the …

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Apple Lawsuit Over iOS Advertised Capacity

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In case you hadn’t seen it, Apple is being sued over the fact that a 16 GB iOS device does not have 16 GB of space usable on it. The Verge has a good story on it, link is below. In contrast, Macworld’s Susie Ochs has published a whiny, elitist article entitled “Apple faces dumb lawsuit over the size of iOS 8.” This link is also below if you’d like to witness the cesspool that Macworld has become. I don’t think the lawsuit is dumb, at all. On one hand computers have never included the space consumed by the OS when listing their storage capacities. Consider that an OS installed on a PC stays fairly static over the life of the …

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Apple Aperture Reminds Us That Apple Is a Media Company

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Late last week Apple disclosed to the folks over at The Loop that it would be ending development of another one of its professional products, Aperture. They committed to providing a round of compatibility updates so it would continue functioning on OS X Yosemite. Replacing it, and iPhoto, will be a new prosumer-geared “Photos” app which will be the gateway to the iCloud Photo Library. Overall, cloud apps make me jumpy about performance, pricing, and intellectual property rights, especially for those of us that make 30 MB RAW format files every time the shutter clicks, in places where we’re lucky to get a bar of EDGE cell data service. More importantly, as a Windows Lightroom user I valued Aperture as competition. Lightroom still lacks many …

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On Disabling Comments

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There has been some variably constructive criticism of my disabling comments on the “Two Big Vendor Takeaways from Storage Field Day 5” post. This isn’t the first time I’ve disabled comments, and it won’t be the last. In fact, I had my post ready to go 48 hours before I published it, postponing partly because I wanted to make a calm decision about whether to disable comments. I ultimately decided to disable them. Here’s what I thought about. Before I get into it, this is not a post about Storage Field Day 5. If you want to talk about that, this is not a good place! This is a post about why I chose to discourage conversation! Given what we’d already seen on …

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The Eternal Wait For Vendor Software Updates

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There’s been a fair amount of commentary & impatience from IT staff as we wait for vendors to patch their products for the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability. Why don’t they hurry up? They’ve had 10 days now, what’s taking so long? How big of a deal is it to change a few libraries? Perhaps, to understand this, we need to consider how software development works. The Software Development Life Cycle To understand why vendors take a while to do their thing we need to understand how they work. In short, there are a few different phases they work through when designing a new system or responding to bug reports. Requirement Analysis is where someone figures out precisely what the customer wants …

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Linux VM Performance Tuning, Take 3

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A couple years ago I started rewriting my venerable Linux VM Tuning Guide, as a series of posts throughout the month of December inspired by Sysadvent (which is running again, and always has good stuff). I called it “Tuningmas” like Christmas. Yeah, corny, I know, but hey. I got about three posts out, then some life stuff happened, and the rest of my draft posts never made it out. 2011 was a year of tremendous highs and tremendous lows. 2012 was a blur, and 2013 has been, uh, sporty, too, but things are settling down. So I’m trying again. I’m not much of a revisionist blogger but the new series will deprecate all my old work, so I’ll likely go …

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What Content Creators and Consumers Should Do Now That Google Reader Is Dead

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So the tech world is freaking out about the announcement that Google Reader will go offline on July 1, 2013. There’s been talk about this for a while now, along with talk that RSS is dead. This feels like the biggest blow to 141+ character social media in history. And why did it happen? I think Dave Winer and Bruce Schneier sum it up: Dave Winer: “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.” Bruce Schneier: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product,” Schneier said [at the RSA Conference]. “Its customers are the advertisers.” Google Reader’s biggest problem was its API. A good API leads to a …

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My Kind of March Madness

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I’m not much for basketball but I laughed when my friends at Solarwinds emailed me about their version of March Madness. They’ve got a Sci-Fi Bracket going on which is totally my style.

For the people that have voted already, I do believe you’re smoking crack in at least five instances:

Happy Mardi Gras!

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I just want to wish you all a happy & safe Mardi Gras. Thanks for reading & commenting, retweeting and #FFing, and all the fun. I look forward to a lot more. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

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