Easier Certificate Access in Chrome

One of the rare reasons I have for occasionally using Internet Explorer is actually to view HTTPS certificate. In Internet Explorer accessing certificate is as easy as clicking on the lock icon. It used to be like that in Chrome too. And then some smartass decided to move setting in Developer Tools behind zillion mouse clicks.

However, since Chrome 60, Google has silently returned option to view certificate under its lock icon. To enable it, one has to navigate to chrome://flags/#show-cert-link and enable Show certificate link option. Quick restart later and option to view certificate is present at its natural place once again.

Why the heck is this not default, I have no idea.

ReFS No Longer in Windows 10 Pro

I love copy-on-write file systems and ZFS always loved me back. With ReFS story was a bit more tangled as something always stood between us. Be it requirement for registry hacks, be it idiotic decision that integrity streams are not supported for virtual disks, be it lack of boot support (even when using it only for data), or be it just general slowness and opaqueness of its development. Despite all those issues, I have used it for all data on my Windows computers since 2015.

Well, I guess that is history now. With the advent of Windows Pro for Workstations, ReFS is gone from all lower editions - including Windows 10 Pro.

I’ll shed a tear while formatting my disk to NTFS; and dream of ZFS…

PS: No, even more than 5 years of its creation, ReFS is still not bootable. PPS: Yes, I am aware that read/write will still be supported even in Windows 10 Home. Not good enough for me.

Bimil 2.10

For this version the main focus was on improving auto-type - both interface and discoverability. Hopefully, this will get more people to use and abuse this feature for login automation.

One surely controversial change is that entries are now editable by default. The most common complaint by new users was about the extra step needed to actually change anything. For those who prefer it that way (e.g. me), option to have entries in read-only mode until Edit button is pressed is still there in Options dialog.

Additionally, some minor bug fixes and interface adjustments were made but nothing to write home about. :)

You can download the new version either from application itself, from web page, or, for the first time ever, from Windows Store.

PS: Windows Store version doesn’t allow for credit-card information storage due to Microsoft’s policies.

Amazon's Meow

One day I was going over HTML elements on Amazon’s page and noticed one interesting comment. It was ASCII picture of a duck saying MEOW. Putting aside whether duck has capacity to produce that sound, I got curious why is that there? Is there a reason?

A bit of googling found me that MEOW is nothing new - it has been in code for at least 7 years now. However, duck seems to be appearing only since 2016. Despite all my searching I couldn’t really find what MEOW refers too nor why is duck now saying it.

My personal guess is that somebody was troubleshooting page loading and placed MEOW so it could automate it using grep command. Whether that troubleshooting happened in production (remember that Amazon wasn’t huge in 2007) or somebody accidentally pushed it live, we ended with the same result. I could bet Amazon developers noticed extra code quite quickly but nobody had heart to remove it. It was simply too funny. It became internal joke, an Easter egg.

Years later somebody working on that code portion saw it and though an update was in order. And how else would engineer express his love for fun other than in ASCII drawing?

PS: And it isn’t the first Easter egg coming from Amazon - who could forget “Thank You, David Risher” pun from 2007.

My Backup ZFS Machine (Correction)

Before going on vacation I finished setting up my new ZFS backup machine, initialized first replication, and happily gone to see the big hole.

When I remotely connected to my main machine a few days later, I’ve found my sync command has failed before finishing. Also I couldn’t connect to my backup server. Well, that was unfortunate but I had enough foresight to get it connected via smart plug so I did power-off/power-on dance. My system booted and I restarted replication. I checked on it a few days later, to find it stuck again. Rinse-repeat. And the next day too. And the one after that…

Why? I have not idea as I was connected only remotely and I literally came home on the last day when I could return it to Amazon. Since I did raise a case with Supermicro in regards to video card error (5 beeps) which seemed hardware related my suspicions were definitely pointing only in direction of motherboard issue. I know memory was fine as I tested it thoroughly in another machine and power supply is happily working even now.

For my peace of mind I needed something that would allow me not only to reboot machine but to also access its screen and keyboard directly without any OS involvement. Variants are known under different names and slightly different execution. Whether it is KVM, iLO, AMT, or IPMI.

So I decided to upgrade to more manageable Supermicro A1SRi-2558F. With its C2558 processor (4 cores) and quad LAN it was definitely an overkill for my purpose but it was the cheapest IPMI-capable board I could find at $225 (compared to $150 for X10SBA-L). Unfortunately for my budget its ECC requirement meant adding another $35 for ECC RAM. And of course, different layout made my 6" right-angle SATA cable useless so now they decorate my drawer.

Board itself is really full of stuff with total of six USB ports (four are USB 3.0), one of which was even soldered on motherboard for internal USB needs. Having four gigabit ports is probably useless as Atom is unlikely to be able to drive them all at full speed but I guess it does allow for more relaxed network configuration. Moreover two SATA3 and four SATA2 just scream NAS. And rear bracket on my 1U case fits rear IO perfectly. Frankly, the only thing missing is HDMI albeit IPMI greatly reduces chance of ever needing it.

Total difference in system cost was $100 and it gave me a rock-solid experience (hasn’t crashed a single time in more than a month). Here is updated shopping list: