Simplicity

Simplicity is the art of hiding complexity

Rob Pike, "Simplicity is Complicated", dotGo 2015
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFejpH_tAHM)

Disabling the Group Policy Client Service in Windows

Scenario:

• You are an administrator on your machine.
• Your machine is either:
• In a Windows Domain, and you don't want the domain admins messing with it.
• Not in a Windows Domain, and you just don't want useless services running.

In this case, what you probably want to do is prevent the Group Policy Client Service from running on your machine.  Unfortunately, that's not a straightforward task to accomplish, because if you go to "services" and try to stop or disable this service, Windows doesn't let you.

Here is how to do it.

These instructions have worked for me on Windows 7; they might also work on other versions of windows.  If there is anything in these instructions that you don't quite understand, what it means is that these instructions are not for you;  don't try to follow them, you are going to wreck things.  Ignore this post, move on.

1. Using regedit go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\gpsvc and:
1. Change the owner to yourself.
2. Grant Administrators (not just you) full control.
3. Change the value of “Start” from “2” to “4”.
2. Now go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Winlogon\Notifications\Components\GPClient and:
1. Change the owner to yourself.
2. Grant Administrators (not just you) full control.
3. Delete the entire key. (Possibly after exporting it so as to have a backup.)
3. Restart your machine.

My notes on "Greg Young - The Long Sad History of Microservices"

Greg Young - The Long Sad History of Microservices
From the "Build Stuff" event of April 2017.

Talk begins at 9:45.

Highlights of the talk:

27:00 Placing a network between modules simply to enforce programmer discipline 

29:05 There is other levels of isolation I can go to. I can run a docker container per service. That's the coolest stuff right? What that means is I can make it work on my machine so I send my machine to production. 

29:52 Now, one thing that's very useful is I don't necessarily want to make this decision up front. And I don't necessarily want to make the same decision in dev as in production. I may want in dev to have a different way that we run things, why? because bringing up 19 docker containers on your laptop is not very much fun. I may prefer to host everything inside a single process to make debugging and such a lot easier when I am running on dev in my laptop. Whereas in production we may go off to multiple nodes. 

34:16 If you have maintenance windows, why are you working towards getting rid of your maintenance windows? Is this a business drive or is this you just being like C.V. driven development? 

My notes:

Unfortunately his shrieky voice makes him sound like he is bitching about things, which in a sense he is, but it would help his cause to deliver his criticism in a more palatable tone. Also, in order to make his point about microservices being nothing new he seems to disregard statelessness.

Resources referenced in the talk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/π-calculus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

Leslie Lamport - Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
(available on the interwebz)

C.A.R. Hoare - Communicating Sequential Processes
(available on the interwebz)

Dear recruiter...

If you are a recruiter wishing to contact me with regards to some job opportunity, please read this.