I've had this iMac 12,1 sitting around for a few years unused. The iMac was released in 2011 with a Sandy Bridge i5, a big, beautiful monitor, 12 GB of RAM or so, and an integrated, laptop-grade Radeon 6750M graphics card. I thought it might make a good web browsing appliance but I didn't realistically see it getting much use in this household. At the same time, though, I don't play games released in the past decade. So maybe I can throw Windows 7 on it, have a stable Windows machine around for once, and have an actual gaming PC? I went for it.

This is archived from the original post still on the Internet Archive. I was bowled over by the lack of awareness here so I just had to archive it. There are several images in the original blog post that I haven't backed up. However, I did pull down the real whopper - an excerpt from the termination letter - and put that up.

Preface

Hello,

I was employed by Hudson River Trading (HRT).

Zappa and Mangum^[1] are Python libraries that parse events from Amazon's API Gateway and feed them into a Python WSGI or ASGI application. This allows you to put API Gateway in front of a Lambda runtime, have Lambda execute the service requests that come in through API Gateway, and code your service logic in any Python web framework.

Here's the list of what I read to catch myself up to speed with Zanzibar, a service designed by Google to centrally manage object ACLs.

UPDATE: nginx support for brotli is now in Debian!. I've removed my fork as I am no longer maintaining it, please move onto Debian's official package.

Debian does not yet ship ngx_brotli (libnginx-mod-brotli) so I've compiled Ondřej Surý's work so it can be used by everyone on Debian bullseye (Debian 11) and buster (Debian 10).

I'm putting my prediction hat on again, let's come back in a year and see how well I've done.

If, for whatever reason, you need a spreadsheet with all of the mailing addresses of every sheriff's office in North Carolina (that's 100 sheriff's offices for all 100 counties in North Carolina), I have put together a spreadsheet of mailing addresses for every North Carolina sheriff.

In the previous blog post I went over the design of storage systems and how they protect themselves from data loss in the face of disk failure or unclean shutdowns. If you’re putting together the hardware yourself modern Linux systems and modern hardware give you endless cost, performance and durability tradeoffs for whatever system you want. But 2020 also gives us the cloud, and storage systems in the cloud whose durability far exceeds whatever you could build yourself.

It is the year 2020 and we still don’t have great answers to data durability in the face of unclean shutdowns. Unclean shutdowns are things like power outages, system faults and unlucky kernel panics and preventing data loss when they happen is a hard problem. I’m going to talk through a few ways these can cause data loss in this blog post but you can probably come up with new ones on your own - exotic failures that no system will ever handle correctly. In the year 2020, the conventional wisdom is still true. Always take backups, and RAID is no substitute for backups.