Len @LenPayne@cybre.space

Hey folks. I'm a CTO, Professor and Code Slinger in a small town on the border between Canada and the US. We use a bit of PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Linux and other tools. We're doing some cool stuff with ML and I'm constantly learning new things.

I like to help people, and build communities. Check out https://sarniatech.ca or https://sllug.ca to find out about a couple of them.

I've lived and breathed tech for over thirty years and love to connect with fellow techs and nerds.

This guy built a functional ARM-based computer, cheap enough to give away as a business card, and functional enough to run Linux.
https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-card-runs-linux/

Local MSP got hit by a nightmare: #ransomware used their remote support agent as an attack vector. Spread to all clients, servers and desktops.

I guess it's going around in a couple of the management tools.

Keep your systems updated, team, and check your backups.

Just had the weirdest error in production. When you run on top of a PaaS, you give the keys to someone else, and trust them to drive your app where it needs to go.

Today, one of our Heroku dynos decided it was a good day to drive off a cliff, and started stripping parameters and tokens out of URLs. This caused some pretty interesting side-effects for our app.

Having things break when we did nothing wrong just leaves us looking over our shoulders for ghosts and goblins. Time for more monitoring I guess.

Helping out at the 2nd Annual Sarnia-Lambton #Linux Users Group #InstallFest #SLLUG

This week I spoke to a local tech group about how we use #deeplearning and #ai to make insights that help people break the cycle of poverty.

Biggest discussions were around ethical training of any system. It's definitely a challenge. What do you leave out to avoid bias?

Got some great insights about grading input reliability, though. Overall, a good time. I'm glad we're able to have these discussions in a small town.

Tim Horton's has apparently started blocking non-standard ports (eg- anything except 80 and 443.)

I always knew I should have been running through a VPN in a coffee shop, but I just never had the NEED, you know?

Welp, now I had the need. So I spent the last half hour setting up a VPN Bounce box from inside a Tim's.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-setup-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-linux-14-04-or-16-04-lts/

Used a cool Mastodon Widget (and the associated Mastodon Widget Wizard) to generate a small mastofeed on my website. Worked great, even with half the documentation being in Japanese.

Thanks Azet.jp: http://www.azet.jp/mastodon.wizard/wizard_en.html

There is a link on the front page of Hacker News right now labelled "How to write code in modern Fortran (2011) [pdf]" and it amuses the hell out of me that this is from 8 years ago and I have ZERO doubt that it's still super-relevant to anyone dealing with "Modern" Fortran.

(Link is https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/documents/13601/162125/fortran_class.pdf)

What do you do when the reason you're in pain is because of pain medication?

Bodies are such a silly thing.

About an hour ago, I wasn't sure I was going to make it through the workday. Headache, nausea, the whole shooting match.

Now I'm fine and dandy, ready to face the rest of the day.

We'll see how I feel in an hour!

Happy New Year, Fediverse!

I don't usually do resolutions, but some shit needs to change. So here's what I'm going to do differently in 2019:

1. Not just setting SMART goals, but monitoring my goal progress more closely, so that I achieve things of importance in a timely manner.
2. Spending more time with family and friends (at least once a week with my dad while he's still here.)
3. Producing more content, whether it be technical/education, or fiction, I want to make more words and videos.

Merry Christmas fediverse! Been a busy week, but things are finally calming down. Looking forward to some personal project time.

Caught the Christmas Plague while out and about this week. I haven't felt this bad in years. Hope it doesn't last too long.

Trying out the Vivaldi browser. It's a spiritual successor to Opera.

Funny how the MySQL->MariaDB play is getting redone here. MySQL's support company was sold. After a time, the original dev team was upset with what Oracle did with their baby, and forked MySQL into MariaDB.

With Opera, the support company was sold. After the sale, creative differences happened, and parts of the original team built a new company and a new browser.

I wonder how many times this play will get pulled before buyers grow wary.