Databases, :=, H3/CF/DOH, gRPC, SMR, Ubuntu, OVH

1. One (single) project is using nicely mixed database solution(s). I'm accessing and updating inside the same project (and process) data from MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server 2019, SQLite and one proprietary SQL database and JSON, XML and INI files. No problem, but it becomes evident, that all of these got slightly separate isolation, transactions, query syntaxes and so on. Yet the RESTful JSON API in the project is only outbound, I'm eagerly waiting how long it'll take before it needs to be bidirectional too. Yet, even that supports push & pull. So it's not a big step from get to post.

2. Python 3.8 walrus operator note: It can't be used in single line statement, which would have been handy afaik. As example if data_object := get_object( obj_reference ) and data_object.updated_needed: .... That's not possible, you'll need terminate the if statement and create new one after it. Not a big deal, but i some cases that would have been nice way of dealing situations where the call could return None.

3. Speeding up HTTPS and HTTP/3 negotiation with... DNS @ Cloudflare (@ Cloudflare) - Cloudflare sent me an email about a 'new' HTTP/3, I've been using that for years already. Yet I haven't had SVCB / HTTPS record specified with ALPN information letting users know that I'm supporting h3 and h2. kw: SVCB records, echconfig, SNI, Encrypted ClientHello or ECH, Nginx 1.19, No, no RFC but draft = draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https-01 (@ tools.ietf.org).

4. gRPC  (@ Wikipedia) - Yet another RPC option. Uhh. HTTP/2 (@ Wikipedia) & protocol buffers (@ Wikipedia) .

5. Studied SMR (@ Wikipedia) new ATA commands Zoned Block Commands (ZBC) and Zoned-device ATA Commands (ZAC) for Host Aware (HA) and Host Managed (HM) devices, which improve performance over Drive Managed (DM).

6. Finally updated my primary desktop to Ubuntu 20.04 version. Phew, as usual something went wrong. Everything was fine, until I tried to install bluefish editor, which uses gvfs, which depends on samba, which depends on Python 3.8.(2!) but I had installed 3.8.6 version, which was too new. It wasn't trivial to resolve. I tried to uninstall that Python version and haha, it cascaded removing all libraries dependent on that, which is almost everything. Ouch! Even after that the same problem persisted. When I finally removed the 3.8.6 (for bionic) and installed 3.8.5 for (focal) the problem got resolved. Then I just had to re-install xubuntu-desktop package to get many of the "lost libraries" back. I also had to re-install the proprietary display drives, which wasn't a bad deal, because I had Nvidia 390 drive, and now I've got Nvidia 450 version. I did remember that the uninstalling some popular packages is highly dangerous so that's why I used remove instead of purge because I was afraid to lost the configs. Of course I did full disk image before starting this process. But it's not great either to restart everything. Actually I were thinking if I should reinstall everything, and just reconfigure all stuff. So I would get clean new version to work with. But why the Python 3.8.6 version was such a problem? Well, Ubuntu doesn't provide it as official version nor interestingly it's available from deadsnakes PPA either for 20.04, that's why the libs got stuck.

7. OVH (OVHcloud) and customer hostile processes. First, they forced us to open OVH Ireland account (without that they would have shutdown the servers), and just two months after that they migrated our old account under OVH Ireland. The process of migration was horrible mess every time, and it's obvious that their organization is big steaming pile of ss-tool? Currently the account statements, which is of course needed for accounting, is broken. Great work! Pretty much perfect example, how to mess up everything, and make everyone really sick'n'tired. Disinformation, big mess and inconclusive operation. Probably their helldesk didn't even know what they were doing. And in some bleeping organizations that's unfortunately pretty normal. Can't blame the people working there, they're probably as pssd off too. I guess I've spent probably around 50 hours with this mess they've created. - I don't think they'll coordinate their operations very well. Which leads to very bad user experience. 

8. Just a note, I got some questions: Yes, these posts are still delayed for 1 - 2 years.

2021-12-12