I have a rough idea of why Crowdstrike’s update bricked countless Windows devices around the world, but it’s more important to discuss some reasons why we collectively found ourselves in a situation where a vendor, that most people hadn’t heard of, was allowed to take down so many services people depend on. Surprisingly my organisation came out relatively unscathed, but not entirely. Restoring our servers and VMs is a trivial job in itself, but most things running on them can’t be taken offline without that quickly cascading into a much bigger problem.

Robby and I returned to Brighton for several days, and we managed to get the perfect choice of pitch at the CMC site, in a quiet area. We found more places to go drinking, besides the cluster of bars between the pier and Kemp Town. Between the CMC site and Legends, there are at least half a dozen independent pubs and bars a couple of streets uphill of the promenade.

After ensuring I didn’t misunderstand what I read, when I learned about Microsoft’s Co-Pilot Recall thing, I couldn’t help but ask myself the obvious question: ‘Just how the hell could anyone possibly believe it’s a smart idea?’. But I sort of know the answer: It’s because the obsession among corporations with pleasing investors by forcing ‘AI’ onto everything and everyone, whether we like it or not, and regardless of the ramifications.

We were exceptionally lucky to have nice weather again during this year’s stay at Carnon Downs. It remains our favourite site, and I think I’ve mentioned before that it could be likened to an immaculately-kept garden of an estate. There’s an absence of places to go drinking in the evenings, though, with the on-site bar closing at 21:00, and the Beefeater, just across the roundabout, not realy having the atmosphere of somewhere people go to socialise.

Recently I was asked to look into changing the authentication method to OAuth 2.0 for an integration service. It’s something I’d done enough times in Azure to know what’s involved: The service would need an app registration, which should provide a client ID and secret, an OAuth token request stage, and modifications to include the token in the Authorization header field of whatever was originally being sent. After a little digging, it turned out the integration was a simple batch script, running on a Windows server, and it used curl to send data to a third-party service.

On the rare occasion that I venture north of Brecon, I’m surprised at how vastly different it is to South Wales, being clean and uncongested in comparison, and almost pleasant when the sun is out. Robby and I had been staying at the Hendre Mynach caravan site, which is on the edge of a relatively obscure little town called ‘Barmouth’, on the coast of North Wales. Since the A470 runs pretty much 90% of the way there, Robby thought it would be quite a straightforward journey, and it was, until we entered North Wales, and the A470 became a single-lane road that took us up a couple of the taller mountains.

It took a while to get everything set up for the Mulesoft Development course, with the following being required: Anypoint Studio Anypoint Platform account (separate to the training account) Salesforce account Advanced REST Client (Probably wasn’t needed, because I already had Postman installed) There are a few things to be aware of: A considerable amount of disk space is required for Anypoint Studio and the training files. I reckon it’s somewhere around 4GB.

Something broke the default TLS/SSL certificate for my primary site (scarbrough.co.uk) the other week, and browsers started flagging it as unsafe, which really didn’t look good. I figure it had something to do with my inadvertently deleting the /wwwroot/.well-known directory and whatever it contained. Whatever the case, it was something I needed to fix myself, with a quick workaround until I had enough spare time to get a handle on how to generate a valid Let’s Encrypt certificate using Certbot.

The Hurne Lane Caravan and Motorhome Club site is just four miles south of Weston-Super-Mare, and very close to a village called ‘Berrow’. It is on the Somerset side of the Bristol Channel. Being only a 1.5 hour drive, it seemed an ideal location for our first trip with Bertha this year. I thought the Hurne Lane CMC site was very basic, maybe because, unlike the typical CMC site, it’s a large expanse of pitches without trees and bushes dividing them into sections.

Is there a compact digital camera that could work better than the camera on my smartphone? That’s the question I needed to ask before taking one on my travels. I’ve had a couple of budget compact cameras before. They were marketed as having 20MP resolution, or somesuch, but, unlike smartphones, they didn’t have processing hardware capable of handling that resolution, so the end result was usually crap. The Canon IXUS 285 HS, being a ~£300 dedicated camera device, should be somewhat better.