PeerAuth, Pwsh, Teams, IdP, Subinterpreters, btrfs-heatmap, CS-3

1. Nice, someone bothered to create a page about this simple concept of using zero knowledge proof using TOTP aka PeerAuth (@ GitHub) - It's so trivial concept that it's nice that someone bothered to create a project about it.

2. Wrote a PowerShell script which checks that specific binaries are running, if not, it restarts the services which should be linked to the binaries. And if this won't fix the situation in a specified time frame then it sends alert messages to the active monitoring staff. Of course it also updates logs and monitoring about the start.

3. Pwsh (aka PowerShell 7) - I'm truly shocked. They've fixed this!!! Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://hil-speed.hetzner.com/100MB.bin" -OutFile "$env:temp\100MB.bin" - Earlier, I often used this as an example of an extreme manifestation of inefficiency and stupidity. But now they have fixed it and ruined my daily example. - Honestly, now it's just like it should always been.

4. Teams - Once again tried their bleeping bleep API for integrations and it's still broken - Yeah. No Teams for me, just as I've said so many times earlier. Maybe it'll work some day. - I personally prefer platforms which provide sane and working integration endpoints. - Teams presents great example of classic over engineering. Making simple things so complex that those are inherently broken. They changed (again) with breaking change to the new API end-points. Yet that doesn't matter, because it was broken before that already. 

5. LinkedIn allows identity verification using NFC Passport? - Technically a nice feature. But bit spooky.

6. What is an IdP? - An Identity Provider (IdP) is a system that creates, maintains, and manages digital identity information while providing authentication services to applications. It's essentially a trusted service that helps you sign into other applications.

7. I love it when things are broken: PS> cmdkey /generic:$target /user:$username /pass:$password. CMDKEY: This command requires either the /U switch and a username or else the /smartcard switch with a smartcard.

8. LOL of the day. PowerShell allows you to set passwords using ConvertTo-SecureString that you can't actually input into the system. Well, not really surprising, but you can create some fun tricks with that. Could make a nice challenge to test a user's competency. Btw. Can you input a password that has a space at the beginning and a line break at the end?
   The problem is that the cmdkey doesn't support special characters like spaces, linefeeds or tabulators in the password, even if properly escaped / quoted.
   Another neat trick is that you can store credentials with passwords including any special charters (UTF-16) using New-StoredCredential and if those match the secure string set on the other side, whatever it contains, it's good.
   Fun times, this is actually a great n00b test. Login to system server, user, password: "<tab><space><tab>u-are-n00b<lf><cr>", if you can't follow the instructions, you'll fail.

9. Studied Python 3.14 improvements, Subinterpreters and Channels. And made some tests with those. Testing Channels vs Shared Memory for IPC. Oops, I did mean Inter-Interpreter Communication (IIC)  of course.  - It's important to remember that the Channels are uh oh, like pipes (not queues). Using receive and send both block, if the sender / receiver isn't both ready. Makes me automatically think that using some automatic POOL for this is good idea, where objects / tasks, whatever you're working with, is passed from shared queue / source to pool of workers. And as expected of course there's one, it's too logical for the type tasks I'm mostly working on (ETL / batch processing) - concurrent.futures / InterpreterPoolExecutor (InterpreterPool) which does provide map for simple usage. Well, not that different after all. As mentioned, I've previously very flexibly used threading / multiprocessing, and this just adds new sweet spot between those options.

10. btrfs-heatmap (@ GitHub) - A good old disk map for btrfs systems, how data is stored and allocated on the media? Rarely userful, but well, why not? Everyone loved defrag's disk map anyway, right? 

11. Checked the Cerebras (@ Wikipedia) CS-3 system specifications. Whoa, those are serious systems. No wonder AI needs such an huge investments. And if single one seems hardcore, after reading bit further you'll realize that a cluster size up to 2048 units is supported. I'm sure they've had some fun as well as very bad moments, when engineering and testing the cooling system for that platform. 

2025-09-21