Long Strange Trip

  • One letter ~= 700K. The taxpayers of DC are sad

    One letter ~= 700K. The taxpayers of DC are sad

    This is a common tale. A scammer gets a bit of inside information. Perhaps the name of a supplier. In the case of this Alberta University, $12M was siphoned (details here). In the case at hand, the city government of Washington DC wired $700K to a fake supplier. An email comes in, it looks right.…

  • The case of the nosy neighbour: Azure is poking me!

    The case of the nosy neighbour: Azure is poking me!

    We’ve all been there. Working to a deadline trying to get our e-commerce site going to make sure cats don’t get cold feet for the winter. And because its a microservices cloud jwt polyglot kubernetes istio [insert jargon here] world, well, its not as easy to debug. So many moving pieces. Remember when I said…

  • Cat eating pigeon related packet loss in SMS? Banking in the 21st century

    Cat eating pigeon related packet loss in SMS? Banking in the 21st century

    So I had the honour and privilege of doing an international wire transfer today to Hungary. After some decoding of Hungarian addresses, accents, etc., I managed to fill that in to the web interface provided by my Canadian bank (you know, the web page where the ‘wireframe’ given to the ‘designer’ was a faxed copy…

  • The quest for minimalism

    The quest for minimalism

    Earlier I wrote about the ‘elastic-prune‘ a simple cron-job that lived in Kubernetes to clean up an Elasticsearch database. When I wrote it, I decided to give ‘distroless‘ a whirl. Why distroless? Some will say its because of size, they are searching for the last byte of free space (and thus speed of launching). But,…

  • Pruning elastics with Kubernetes CronJobs

    Pruning elastics with Kubernetes CronJobs

    There was a time you just ran ‘crontab -e’ to make this happen. But, progress, are you still on my lawn? Lets discuss how to solve the specific issue of ‘my database fills up my disk’ in a Cloud Native way. So the situation. I’m using ElasticSearch and fluent-bit for some logging in a Kubernetes cluster.…