[Aside] Interesting stuff to read/ listen/ watch

  • How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else | WIRED
    • How GitHub has taken over as the go to code repository for everyone, even Google, Microsoft, etc. So much so that Google shut down Google Code, and while Microsoft still has their Codeplex up and running as an alternative, they too post to GitHub as that’s where all the developers are.
    • The article is worth a read for how Git makes this possible. In the past, with Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCS) such as Subversion, the master copy of your code was with this central repository and so there was a fear of what would happen if that central repository went down. But with Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) there’s no fear of such a thing happening because your code lives locally on your machine too.
  • Channel 9 talks on DSC. A few weeks ago I had tried attending this Jeffrey Snover talk on PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) but I couldn’t because of bandwidth issues. Those talks are now online (been 5 days I think), here’s links to anyone interested:
  • Solve for X | NPR TED Radio Hour
  • Becoming Steve Jobs
    • A new book on Steve Jobs. Based on extensive interviews of people at Apple. Seems to offer a more “truthful” picture of Steve Jobs than that other book.
    • Discovered via Prismatic (I don’t have the original link, sorry).
    • Apparently Tim Cook even offered Steve Jobs his liver to help with his health. Nice!
  • Why you shouldn’t buy a NAS like Synology, Drobo, etc.
    • Came across this via Prismatic. Putting it here because this is something I was thinking of writing a blog post about myself.
    • Once upon a time I used to have Linux servers running Samba. Later I tried FreeBSD+ZFS and Samba. Lately I have been thinking of using FreeNAS. But each time I scrap all those attempts/ ideas and stick with running all my file shares over my Windows 8.1 desktop. Simply because they offer native NTFS support and that works best in my situation as all my clients are Windows and I have things set down the way I want with NTFS permissions etc.
    • Samba is great but if your clients are primarily Windows then it’s a hassle, I think. Better to stick with Windows on the server end too.
    • Another reason I wouldn’t go with a NAS solution is because I am then dependent on the NAS box. Sure it’s convenient and all, but if that box fails then I have to get a similar box just to read my data off the disks (assuming I can take out disks from one box and put into another). But with my current setup I have no such issues. I have a bunch of internal and external disks attached to my desktop PC; if that PC were to ever fail, I can easily plug these into any space PC/ laptop and everything’s accessible as before.
    • I don’t do anything fancy in terms of mirroring for redundancy either! I have a batch file that does a robocopy between the primary disk and its backup disk every night. This way if a disk fails I only lose the last 24 hours of data at most. And if I know I have added lots of data recently, I run the batch file manually just in case.
      • It’s good to keep an offsite backup too. For this reason I use CrashPlan to backup data offsite. That’s the backup to my backup. Just in case …
    • If I get a chance I want to convert some of my external disks to internal and/ or USB 3.0. That’s the only plan I currently have in mind for these.
  • EMET 5.2 is now available! (via)
    • I’ve been an EMET user for over a year now. Came across it via the Security Now! podcast.