Alan's Lair

Latest — Mar 13, 2023

How to do a bad comparison of cloud vs colocation

There's this post by Ahrefs , a SEO company from Singapore, which is getting quite a lot of shares recently. While nobody ever said that the cloud was cheap, it's a terrible comparison. Basically, the article enumerates what they have bought (a number of Dell servers + network equipment and colocation costs)

More issues

Password requirements: myths and madness

Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?

Ransomware-resistant backups with duplicity and AWS S3

Why you should care about ransomware attacks even for irrelevant internet-connected systems, and how to use duplicity with AWS S3 to create ransomware-resistant backups.

Log4j haters: just STFU

I think the behaviour of many people towards log4j developers and towards the project is simply ridiculous. I understand the memes; it's the internet, after all. But I can read posts and tweets by many IT professionals - developers, managers, security engineers - that treat the log4j project and the

Consistent Hashing for Dummies

Today I'll discuss about an interesting concept: consistent hashing. It's a widely employed technique to properly perform sharding in distributed storage systems. I'm not aiming at a rigorous explanation (please don't use the raw snippets I provide in production code!), but I hope I can make the concept simple enough.

The curse of the downvote

I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've read yesterday that an engineer was fired from Facebook for having a YouTube channel, but that's beyond the scope of

Machine Learning: a sound primer

How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.

Standalone, single-file, editable Python scripts WITH DEPENDENCIES

How badly I wanted something like that? The problem: Python for scripting Beside programming and data science, I find Python to be a very useful glue language; I think it's great for shell replacement when bash/zsh scripts get too complex, but there's one caveat: as long as you can

Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details

This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not need to understand how to use the language or its packaging ecosystem. Delivery and distribution is a relevant part of

Misaligned Expectations: investigating the expectations gap

As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to investigate the expectations gap between the higher education and the industry sectors; why does the university teach students this way?