Extremely informative, well-written, very depressing. The "great powers" are much more evil and incompetent than anyone could imagine. 4/5 stars.
Saturday, February 8, 2020
Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Interesting horror / sci-fi cross-over story, well-written. 4/5 stars.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark
Max Shapiro (Tegmark) writes better for a popular science audience than Roger Penrose. But having just read Cycles of Time, I am wondering how Tegmark's very odd theory at the end accounts for the second law of Thermodynamics. The end of Tegmark's book is slightly off-topic & very depressing but the entire book is very well-written, worthwhile, and approachable by a lay audience (like me) 4/5 Stars.
Breakaway by Joel Shepherd
I am starting to like this series as much as the Spiral Wars series. Loved the politics, 5/5 stars.
Sunday, February 2, 2020
What's Next with Containers?
Chris Hickman speculates about the future of containers in his blog this week with a nominal and partial tour of virtualization directions. He touches on my favorite concept of unikernels in containers. I have a different point of view from Chris' but I think his ideas are more mainstream.
Why Unikernels? (The application is the container!)
I am very passionate about elegance and simplicity in Software Design and in software service security, I believe there is no attack surface like no attack surface. That is, If you remove everything from your container that can be attacked, you are more likely to be secure than if you bring all of the attack surfaces of a full-blown kernel and operating system. And even if you are compromised, other microservices should be protecting themselves from you (authentication, parameter checking). Further, there is almost nothing in your unikernel the attacker can use to attack the rest of your microservices ecosystem.
Obviously it is more difficult to debug complex microservices to discover why they are failing in production if there are no helper tools and capabilities in the container. But an instrumented services mesh can enable "playback" payloads and traffic for a non-production version of your microservice to diagnose your problem. And, removing complex components can prevent these useless resource wasting elements from interfering with your service; so bugs frequently become shallower (all of the bugs are yours).
However, coders are lazy and will prefer to have convenient shell access to their containers running in production so that they can debug under live traffic circumstances. And, most developers prefer to bolt on convenient tools, libraries, deep stacks, and monolithic resource hogging pieces to their run-time environment because they perceive it is faster and easier to copy/paste a few annotations or changes into a larger software monolith. Therefore I am pessimistic we shall see a rise in Unikernels outside of environments where security is important and leadership understands the value of simplicity.
Heart of Vengeance by Glynn Stuart and Terry Mixon
Rebel with too many causes, interesting universe with "The Expanse" like solar system factions competing and fighting. 3/5 Stars.
Friday, January 31, 2020
The Compass of Pleasure by David J Linden and Sean Pratt
Fascinating, and approachable. Very informative. 5/5 Stars.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Foundation's Resolve by Stephan Collings
I loved most of Asimov's books until he got too old and wrote bad prequels and worse sequels about Gaea and Galaxia, and I liked some of the newer "second Foundation" trilogy (first and third ones). But I had not explored any of the fanfics because I don't read fanfic. However David Brinn, author of Foundation's Triumph (author of third book in the modern trilogy), recommended "Resolve" so I picked this one up and it was ok, until the stupid god-like characters (Jean of Arc and Voltaire) appeared and then it got bad. 3/5 stars. Worth reading if you have read all the others.
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