Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries

2023-04-18 · open the original ↗

• The Azure Marketplace is where third-party software is bought. Falgout, a Microsoft cloud solution architect who helps partners onto the marketplace, contrasts it with the portal's "plus" button for Microsoft's own services. The partners are mainly independent software vendors, who write software, and system integrators, who implement solutions and may themselves use an ISV's product.
• Publishing starts with becoming a Microsoft partner. Falgout says a company creates a Partner Center account at partner.microsoft.com and publishes an "offer" there, which then appears in the marketplace. For technical guides and labs on building a SaaS offer he recommends "Mastering the Marketplace" on GitHub, and he points to his own slide deck.
• Kubernetes apps put partner software into customers' clusters. The partner packages its offer as a Helm chart, Microsoft runs security checks, and the customer installs it with a click; any charge appears as a line item on the customer's Azure bill, so the vendor avoids purchase orders and procurement. At recording this was in public preview, which Falgout says to treat like a beta, with general availability coming "very soon" at an unstated date.
• Vetted marketplace spend counts against customers' Azure commitments. Falgout says large enterprises sign a Microsoft Azure commitment contract (a "MAC") to spend millions on Azure. For transactable containers and Kubernetes apps that Microsoft has validated, which is part of his and Giard's job, the customer's payments to the partner decrement that commitment, which he calls a big draw for expensive software.

2023-04-14 · open the original ↗

• Put Home Assistant and all IoT devices on an isolated VLAN. The host argues IoT devices phone home to unknown cloud services and are attractive hacking targets, so the IoT network should have internet access only, with secure networks able to see into it but not the reverse. He also recommends network-wide DNS filtering such as Pi-hole or AdGuard Home to block malware, ads and data reporting.
• A Raspberry Pi works, but he distrusts its microSD card long-term. He ran Home Assistant on a Pi for over two years; installation uses Raspberry Pi Imager's built-in Home Assistant image (Pi 4, Pi 3, or CM4/Home Assistant Yellow options) onto a class 10 or better card, 32 GB being plenty. The web interface is at the device's IP on port 8123.
• The host runs his own instance as a VM on a Synology NAS. RAID 5 storage removes the SD-card risk and weekly snapshots allow rollback, though he stresses snapshots are not backups. He uses the VirtualBox VDI image with the recommended minimum of two CPUs, 2 GB RAM and 32 GB disk, switches legacy BIOS to UEFI, and gives the VM the NAS's second NIC, cabled to an untagged IoT-VLAN port.
• Docker is easiest but broke device discovery on his dual-homed NAS. He pulls the official image's "stable" tag (about 2 GB), mounts a NAS folder at /config, sets a TZ variable and uses host networking. With the NAS on both secure LAN and IoT VLAN, the GUI answers on both but discovery only happened on the secure LAN, so he does not use Docker himself.
• Automations are built from triggers, optional conditions and actions. His example turns the Lutron outdoor lights on at sunset (an offset like -01:00:00 fires an hour earlier) and a duplicated second automation turns them off at 10:30 pm. Devices found in the IoT network appear under notifications; Lutron and Philips Hue pairing requires pressing the bridge's physical button.

2023-04-14 · open the original ↗

• Borrow ChatGPT's ideas, but don't copy its text. Asked for a metaphor for a movie that starts poorly but ends well, it offered "a diamond in the rough". Giard says pasting that into a review and claiming it as his own raises ethical issues. Taking the concept and putting it in his own words is fine, the way you would paraphrase sources found through Bing or Google.
• One sentence or premise is enough for a whole story. An unprompted opening line (an enterprise architect asked to code a solution to world hunger), a line about two characters debugging code, and a premise about a politician who insults everyone who disagrees with him each produced a full story or dialogue. Asked to grade its own story for a 12th-grade writing class, it refused to give a grade but listed strengths and no weaknesses. Giard suggests that is probably because it wrote the story, and says you could give it your own writing instead.
• Everyday requests get usable starting points. He asked for movies like Tim Burton's Big Fish, an espresso machine within a stated budget, a birthday gift for a 15-year-old who loves basketball, and dinner from what is in the fridge. The recipe came with an ingredient list and step-by-step instructions. Giard calls the espresso list a good starting point for further research. He also ran a C# programming text adventure as "game master", which someone online suggested, and a movie trivia game that ended when he typed "stop".
• It returns structured output in a format you name. Asked for NCAA Division I men's Final Four results as a table with set columns (champion, runner-up, final score, other teams, location, MVP), it built the table. It also wrote Mermaid diagram code for a family tree from Abraham to Jacob that rendered in mermaid.live. The tree was incomplete: it left out the wives.
• Its bio of Giard mixed fact and error. It called him an independent consultant, though he is a Microsoft employee. It also said his bachelor's degree was in computer science from the University of Michigan, when it is in biochemistry from Michigan State. After he corrected it in the chat, it fixed some of the errors. Giard says he hopes the corrections will make their way into its knowledge base, which is his hope, not something the demo showed. Rewrites of the bio as a haiku and in the voice of Foghorn Leghorn worked, in his view.

2023-04-14 · open the original ↗

• ChatGPT understands and answers in natural language, with stated limits. Giard describes it as built on a large natural-language model that handles colloquialisms, idioms and slang, works in several languages (he tested only English), and remembers earlier questions so follow-ups work. As of the recording he says the free version is GPT version 3, trained on internet data through 2021, text only, and liable to carry the internet's biases and false information; about $20 a month buys version 4 and higher priority when demand is heavy. He starts at chat.openai.com.
• Generated code is a starting point even when it may be wrong. Asked how to delete a row in MongoDB using PHP, a stack Giard does not use, it returned connection and delete code with a copy button and a plain-language explanation of how the code works. He says he tested it and thinks it works, but argues that even flawed output beats starting from manuals, search results or books.
• The more specific the request, the closer the answer. Asking for sample baseball statistics as CSV returned PHP code that would write a CSV file rather than the data itself; "regenerate response" gave much the same, though he says an earlier run output the data directly. His lesson is that a more precise question gets the expected answer.
• Use its drafts as input, not as your own work. Giard calls pasting a generated blog post on the dangers of AI into your own blog unethical, and using it for homework clearly so, but treats a generated presentation outline as fair to expand and claim — the same mindset as combining search-engine results. A private email to a boss excusing a late project read as professional but invented a reason (a family member in hospital), and a job description for his own title, Cloud Solution Architect, needs proofreading since it knows only the title.
• It explains a concept at whatever length and level you ask. "Explain autoscaling" gave a few paragraphs; "in one sentence" gave a one-line definition; "like I am five years old" gave a simplified version built on metaphors. Giard pitches this for catching up on an unfamiliar term mid-meeting, and notes it can also answer "like a pirate" for fun.

2023-04-11 · open the original ↗

• Mexico can replace China as the world's manufacturing hub. The speaker says Mexican manufacturing is growing faster than ever, its skilled labour pool for one leading automaker now exceeds China's, and its minimum wage is lower than China's ("10 lower" in the captions, units unclear). Proximity to the US also sharply cuts shipping costs.
• Mexico's BRICS talk is leverage, not a real intention to join. The speaker calls the joining rumours unfounded and offers it as a personal theory that Mexico uses them to win deals. The speaker cites strong GDP and a peso that has held up well against the dollar, and wants the US to treat Mexico as a peer rather than a subordinate.

2023-04-11 · open the original ↗

• None of the BRICS currencies is strong enough to topple the dollar. The speaker says the real, rupee and rand have all fallen against the dollar since about 2012, and the ruble since the 2014 Crimea invasion, with ruble and rupee each at about 1.2 cents. The speaker gives inflation as about 5.6% for Brazil (US about 6%), over 11% for Russia, about 6% for India and about 7.9% for South Africa, and says China lost control of its long suppression of the yuan, which then crashed.

2023-04-11 · open the original ↗

• Neither Saudi Arabia nor Mexico has joined BRICS. Saudi Arabia has applied, but the speaker says the members have not approved it because of its petrodollar ties; Mexico has not applied. The speaker lists the members as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, all with inflation above the US except South Africa.
• Egypt's entry adds a weak economy to the bloc. The speaker reports that Egypt "just joined" and says it has poor economic growth, little oil, and currency inflation of about 31%.

2023-04-08 · open the original ↗

• Leading economists are not predicting the dollar's collapse. The speaker searched leading economists' names alongside "petrodollar", "collapse of the dollar" and "dedollarization"; only Nouriel Roubini has said something similar, and the speaker dismisses him as having said so every year since 2005. Some economists say the petrodollar is not currently under threat.
• Their silence is telling because many enjoy criticising American capitalism. The speaker reasons they would seize the chance to be proven right if the evidence existed, concludes there is no hard evidence the petrodollar is in danger, and notes most of them worry more about wealth inequality.

2023-04-08 · open the original ↗

• Trade settled in yuan does not threaten the dollar. If yuan demand were really rising, the speaker argues, its price against the dollar should rise, yet it is doing terribly and is now being used to prop up Russia's economy and a ruble the speaker says is near a 30-year low. India got 18 countries to accept the rupee, and its price is weak too.
• The dollar is outperforming because holders of rival currencies want dollars. The speaker points to the dollar index bouncing above 101.5 after a downtrend, noting anything above 100 means the dollar beats the basket. The speaker's reading: anyone receiving rupees, yuan or rubles immediately converts them to dollars.

2023-04-05 · open the original ↗

• Trump is wrong that the dollar is going down. The speaker responds to Trump's claim by noting he is no longer president and is not known for accurate predictions.
• The US is winning an economic war against China. Since the US cannot go after China as it did Libya and Iraq, the speaker says it wages economic war, chiefly through chip restrictions. The speaker describes China as only 65% food self-sufficient with rising food prices, suffering production deflation, and seeing its yuan-suppression policy backfire into a crash.
• China's debt is far larger than its economy. Citing the South China Morning Post for a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 273%, the speaker multiplies it by roughly $18 trillion of GDP and arrives at $52 trillion of debt.

2023-04-05 · open the original ↗

• PDX LAN detects torrenting from a mirrored port feeding Suricata. A 10 Gbps fiber connection enters a MikroTik CCR1072, fiber-linked to a Cisco Nexus 5020 whose uplink port is mirrored to a 2U server. Suricata on it inspects all internet-bound traffic and logs events to syslog, which PacketFence, an open-source network access control system, monitors.
• PacketFence holds each attendee in VLANs tied to MAC and switch port. New machines land in a detection VLAN with a captive portal of event rules (no hacking, no BitTorrent, no illegal downloads); accepting moves them to the authorized main VLAN, with PacketFence knowing their MAC address and switch port.
• Any peer-to-peer transfer, legal or not, sends a user to torrent jail. The host tested it with a Fedora torrent and lost connectivity almost immediately, landing on a quarantine portal; after stopping the torrent, access returned in roughly the 30 seconds the admins quoted. Per the admins, a third offence locks the user out until they see the network staff.
• The jail dates from a 2011 abuse of the event's bandwidth. The host relays that with a then-large 1 Gbps connection, an attendee downloaded a whole TV season, and since the event centre's connection receives the infringement letters, the admins built the block.

2023-04-04 · open the original ↗

• ngrok exposes a local app to the world, then layers controls. Casey, who has worked in ngrok's product marketing and developer advocacy for about a year and a half, says a local agent opens a tunnel via reverse proxy to ngrok's cloud and puts a URL in front of your port, handling TLS, DNS and NAT traversal. On top he lists identity providers, OAuth, basic auth, IP restrictions, mutual TLS, load balancing, circuit breaking and webhook verification, and says a Kubernetes ingress controller was launching the week after recording.
• Webhooks are message passing between systems over HTTP and JSON. Casey explains them as object-oriented state-change notification across the wire, such as a card payment moving from confirmed to paid, and says their unrealized power is that they work with any stack. He says ngrok gets about 4,500 sign-ups a day, most of them doing something with webhooks, because many providers' webhook guides start by telling you to create an ngrok account.
• Every webhook provider invented its own verification scheme. Casey says the first 50 providers they surveyed had 50 different methods, with duplicates appearing only around 120–130, often differing in small details such as parameter case or ordering. Of about 100 they collected, ngrok implemented 50, and he and a colleague published the research as webhooks.fyi, free on GitHub, lightly ngrok-branded and open to pull requests, with best practices for both providers and consumers.
• Match the verification method to the security you need. Casey calls a shared secret, like Twilio's auth token, sufficient for low-security cases and best when you control both endpoints. He puts HMAC at the higher end for broadcasting to endpoints you don't control, so you need not publish a secret, and warns that even internal webhooks need verification because success brings outside customers or partners onto the system.
• Providers routinely omit sample code and sample payloads. Casey says most providers give a bulleted list of steps instead of working verification code they surely wrote to test it, and that probably half of those surveyed had no sample payload. He says the site supplies field data to standardization efforts, naming an IETF working group and the OpenID Foundation's Shared Signals and Events work, which thanked them, though he does not know whether it uses the data.

2023-04-03 · open the original ↗

• Each US exit from the gold standard was the right call. The speaker counts three since 1870: 1914, when World War One sent gold prices haywire; 1933, at the depth of the Depression, which the speaker says saved the economy; and 1971, driven not only by inflation but by foreigners exchanging dollars for gold and draining US reserves.
• A gold-backed currency launched today would be bought up with dollars. The gold standard worked when gold was a boring asset whose price barely rose a dollar a decade. The speaker argues any new gold-backed currency would simply be bought with US dollars to obtain the gold.

2023-03-27 · open the original ↗

• Built-in commands can hide, encrypt and cloak your files. copy /b an image plus a zip folder into a new image to tuck the archive inside what looks like an ordinary photo; cipher /e on a folder encrypts every file so only your account can open them; attrib +h +s +r on a folder makes it vanish from view, and the same flags with minuses bring it back.
• Windows stores every saved Wi-Fi password, readable in plain text. netsh wlan show profile lists every network the machine has joined; adding the network name and key=clear shows its password. Chuck runs a one-liner that dumps all of them, redirects it to a text file, and saves it as wifi.bat so it runs by name; he says the command is in the description, not read out.
• Curl ships with modern Windows and does far more than downloads. Chuck uses it for weather (curl wttr.in/Dallas), unshortening a link by fetching headers and piping to findstr location, checking a site is up (curl -Is, which returned 200 OK), finding the public IP via checkip.amazonaws.com, drawing QR codes, dictionary lookups, latest-video and tweet lookups, and querying ChatGPT with a long command he leaves in the description.
• Small tweaks make Command Prompt faster to live in. Set the shortcut to run as administrator by default; type cmd in Explorer's address bar to open a prompt there, or explorer . the other way; subst S: "path" mounts a folder as a drive (subst /d S: undoes it). F3 repeats the last line, F7 lists past commands, doskey /history prints them all, and color, prompt … $G and title restyle the window. The video is sponsored by ITProTV, now ITPro from ACI Learning.
• Chuck's real advice is to leave Command Prompt for Terminal and PowerShell. Windows Terminal, built into Windows 11 and installable on Windows 10, adds tabs, drag-and-drop file paths and "open in terminal" from Explorer. He still uses Command Prompt out of career-long habit, but calls PowerShell more powerful and the thing to learn for anything deep.

2023-03-27 · open the original ↗

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2023-03-25 · open the original ↗

• The Dream Wall is a wall-mounted all-in-one UniFi OS console. It lists at $999 US and was in stock as of recording; the host's Early Access unit cost $799 in May 2022, and newer hardware replaces its 1.3-inch touchscreen with a 4.7-inch one. It carries a firewall, a 4x4 MIMO Wi-Fi 6 access point, four 802.3af, four 802.3at and four 802.3bt PoE ports, four non-PoE ports, a 10G SFP+ cage, plus a 2.5GbE WAN and a 10G SFP WAN.
• Its redundant power supplies share a single power cord. The host notes that true dual power, as in VoIP and PBX setups, needs a separate cord per supply so each can run to a different circuit in a data centre.
• The host finds the split cabling layout an odd design choice. Power and WAN enter through a channel at the bottom while the switch ports exit the top about an inch off the wall, with nowhere tidy to go; he notes the marketing photos never show top cables. Ports 16/17 or 19/20 can be set as WAN in UniFi, so all connectivity could come in from the top.
• Setup was quick, but the unit runs hot even idle. Mounting the roughly 20-pound unit took about 10 minutes (one side in a stud), adoption a minute, and updates about 20 minutes. The fan was whisper quiet at about 40%, yet the display read 149°F and his thermometer measured up to 120°F on the front, with no PoE load or traffic.
• The host will not recommend the Dream Wall to his customers. At $999 it adds little over the UDM SE beyond the top switch ports and redundant power; he would rather see the same components in a 2U rack-mount box with rear PSUs, a 16- or 24-port switch and room for redundant drives.

2023-03-21 · open the original ↗

• Switching to a privacy-focused browser is the easiest, biggest gain. The host, citing privacytest.org, recommends Brave or Firefox for blocking trackers and randomizing fingerprints; Brave is a drop-in Chrome replacement with the same extensions, and he uses DuckDuckGo on his iPhone. Stuck-on-Chrome users can add EFF's Privacy Badger or uBlock Origin; private windows are not anonymous, and Brave itself says to use the Tor Browser when personal safety depends on it.
• A privacy-focused search engine stops searches being tied to you. Google and Bing profit from targeted ads, so the host recommends Brave Search or DuckDuckGo as the browser's default search engine.
• Enable DNS over HTTPS, which browsers usually leave off. Even with HTTPS sites, plain DNS queries can be seen by anyone watching the traffic; in Brave or Chrome the "use secure DNS" setting under privacy and security turns it on with a chosen provider.
• The host calls a paid VPN a must, despite its rough edges. It masks the WAN IP and location, but Hulu, Disney+ and Netflix block known VPN IPs and it can break captive portals. He still uses Private Internet Access but stopped promoting it after Kape Technologies, which he calls an adware and malware company, bought it; he suggests Mullvad or Proton, saying he is not affiliated and the video is not sponsored.
• Network-wide DNS filtering covers devices you cannot configure. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, Quad9 and OpenDNS FamilyShield filter by a big company's rules, so the host prefers self-hosted Pi-hole or AdGuard Home. His main Pi-hole blocks over 50% of DNS requests on his network, with Roku devices phoning home tens of thousands of times a day.

2023-03-20 · open the original ↗

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2023-03-16 · open the original ↗

• REST's contribution was standardizing services within HTTP's own constraints. Woodruff traces web services from 1990s RPC through SOAP to sites like Facebook and Twitter making up their own HTTP calls, such as a GET carrying "insert" in its body; his point is that developers should build within the environment they are in, HTTP, rather than from the ground up.
• You need HTTP's working vocabulary, not the whole specification. He shows the HTTP 1.1 spec in his talk and says not to read it; what matters is that requests and responses each carry headers and a body, with headers for client type, content type and the format wanted back (JSON, XML, HTML, binary), plus the request's verb and the response's status code.
• Status codes are a language the API and consumer agree on. In his convention 200 means success with a response body and 204 success with none, as after a DELETE; the 400s blame the client and the 500s the server. He returns 405 for verbs his read-only APIs refuse, 410 for a resource no longer at that address, 429 for rate limiting on paid or abuse-prone APIs, and 503 when a client requests an API version that has been retired.
• REST, as he sees it, is resources, addresses and verbs. A resource is any digital thing, made unique by its URL even if identical copies exist elsewhere; GET, POST, PUT and DELETE change its state and map onto create-read-update-delete, with PATCH increasingly used for partial updates. He says others may disagree with this framing.
• Hypermedia lets responses tell clients where related resources live. Of Roy Fielding's constraints (client-server, stateless, caching, uniform interface, layered system, code on demand) he dwells on HATEOAS: a list of Beatles albums should carry a URL per track so a music-store client can buy one without knowing addresses in advance. He says he has never seen code on demand used and does not fully understand it; Giard notes it needs a lot of trust.

2023-03-16 · open the original ↗

• Azure's many messaging services each fit a different scenario. Grootenboer, Microsoft's program manager for Azure Service Bus, describes Storage Queues as simple, high-throughput queuing. Service Bus is advanced enterprise queuing in the line of IBM MQ, with sessions for in-order processing, auto-forwarding, dead-lettering and scheduled delivery. Event Hubs is for streaming and offers a Kafka protocol, and Event Grid is for events ("something happened"), as opposed to messages ("do something for me"). He says many customers use several side by side.
• Service Bus offers at-least-once or at-most-once delivery, not exactly-once. Peek-lock gives at-least-once and receive-and-delete gives at-most-once. Exactly-once needs client-side logic: a log of processed messages, and of the steps within each, so that work resumes at the right step. Transactions are limited to moving messages between queues in one namespace, never spanning a database. Poison messages go to a dead-letter queue after 10 retries by default, and duplicate detection drops repeats of an ID such as an order number within a time window.
• Tier sets message size, pricing model and scale. Basic and Standard run on shared infrastructure, priced per million messages, which he says suits bursty serverless loads. Premium gets dedicated CPU and memory, priced per hour, with no hard message limit. Messages can be up to 256 KB on Standard and 100 MB on Premium, and he says messages near 100 MB mean you are doing data transfer, not messaging. Premium scales to 16 messaging units per partition, a new partitions feature then allowed 4 partitions (64 units), and he says GA could allow, for example, 16 partitions of 16 units each (256 units).
• Geo-disaster recovery will replicate messages, not just metadata. As of the March 2023 recording, Geo-DR copied only entities such as queues and topics. A private preview "in the coming weeks" was to replicate the whole namespace, data included. Synchronous mode gives an RPO of zero at the cost of cross-region latency. Asynchronous mode lets you set an allowed RPO, such as 10 minutes, and throttles senders once replication lag reaches it. He gave no timeline beyond private preview.
• Durable terminus will keep message locks across dropped connections. Today a broken AMQP connection, from container churn, client faults or Microsoft's own infrastructure upgrades, loses the lock, so the message goes to another consumer and may be processed twice. A new lock mode, tentatively "durable lock", lets a reconnecting client get its message state back from the service. He says Service Bus will be the first broker to implement this part of the AMQP spec, and it too was headed to private preview soon.

2023-03-13 · open the original ↗

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2023-03-09 · open the original ↗

• Tooling and T-SQL habits are a SQL Server developer's main hurdles. Booz, after about 15 years on SQL Server and .NET, joined a company that had moved to Postgres in the month before he arrived. Postgres runs SQL closer to the ANSI standard, so things like variables mid-script need its procedural language, PL/pgSQL, inside a function. There is no single official IDE: he names pgAdmin and uses DBeaver, the closest he has found to SSMS. He says Postgres's protocol has become the standard for connecting, used even by databases such as CockroachDB and YugabyteDB.
• Extensibility is the feature Postgres has that SQL Server lacks. Booz says that over a decade ago Postgres added hooks letting extensions change query planning, on-disk storage, index types and backup. His examples are Timescale, his former employer, which adds compression and managed partitioning; Citus, bought by Microsoft for horizontal scaling; and HypoPG, which tests whether the planner would use a hypothetical index. Beyond B-tree, Postgres has hash indexes and the GIN and GiST types that grew out of PostGIS, which handle nearest-neighbour searches and overlapping ranges.
• Query tuning is weaker than in SQL Server. Booz says the complaint he hears most is that Postgres query plans are text-only, with fewer node types, and hard to parse next to SQL Server's graphical plans. Second is the lack of a built-in equivalent to Query Store for seeing how a query used to run. Third-party tools and startups are working on both, including his employer, Redgate.
• A permissive licence means no lock-in to a vendor's core. Booz says Postgres is entirely free under a very short licence, which is why AWS could fork it to build Redshift. Any vendor's Postgres must offer the full core, so vendors differ only in which extensions they allow. Some extensions carry their own licences, and procedural-language extensions without a "trusted" layer could break out onto the server, so not every provider supports them.
• AWS's Babelfish could start moving SQL Server shops to Postgres. AWS, which Booz calls the biggest provider of Postgres services through RDS and Aurora, announced Babelfish about three years before the recording. It is an open-source fork that translates T-SQL so SQL Server tools and .NET apps can connect, and he says AWS hopes to merge it into mainline Postgres. He says Redgate sees .NET and SQL Server shops of 15–20 years asking about Postgres, and he expects more developers to be asked to migrate, though he does not know how fast.