In 2023 UniSuper, an Australian retirement fund, decided to migrate part of its operations to Google Cloud. As port of the migration, they needed to create virtual machines provisioned with limits higher than what Google’s user interface allowed to set. To achieve their goals, UniSuper contacted Google support. Having access to internal tools, Google engineer was able to create requested instances.

Fast forward to May 2024. UniSuper members lose access to their accounts. The fund blames Google. Some people are sceptical, but eventually UniSuper and Google Cloud publish a joint statement which points at ‘a misconfiguration during provisioning’ as cause of the outage. Later, a postmortem of the incident sheds even more light on events which have transpired.

Turns out that back in 2023, Google engineer used a command line tool to manually create cloud instances according to UniSuper’s requirements. Among various options, said tool had a switch setting cloud instance’s term. The engineer omitted it leading to the instance being created with a fixed term which triggered automatic deletion a year later.

So, human error. Scold the engineer and case closed. Or is it?

So far I have been lucky in my professional life. I have never had any conflicts with my employers and for the most part maintained good rapport with coworkers and managers alike. Alas, my luck has finally run out.

Long story short, I left Composable Foundation in October and I am still waiting for my final paycheck. TL;DR: If you are doing business with them make sure you are paid in advance.

cd is a straightforward command. As per the name, it changes the directory and does its job perfectly well. But what if it could do more? One scenario is wanting to execute a command inside a specific location without affecting the current working directory (CWD). This article introduces a cd replacement which offers that feature as well as provides more ways to specify the target directory.

It is important to note that it’s not intended for scripting. Rather, it’s only meant for interactive use where it streamlines some operations.

Some people struggle to understand the distinctions between ‘free software’ and ‘open source software.’ Let’s clear up the confusion with an analogy.

Imagine a world without vegetarianism. One day, someone proposes a new diet called ‘moral eating,’ which excludes meat for ethical reasons. Some people embrace it, and discover additional benefits like reduced environmental impact. However, advocates observe that implying people not adhering to the diet are immoral isn’t the best recruitment strategy. They coin the term ‘sustainable eating’ to focus on the environmental advantages.

But now people get bogged down in philosophical debates. If one uses the term ‘moral eating’ some assume they don’t care about the environment; on the other hand, if one says ‘sustainable eating’ some assume they don’t care about animals. To avoid this an all-encompassing acronym MSE (Moral and Sustainable Eating) is created. It signifies the same thing — no meat — but avoids getting entangled in justifications.

And so we end up with three distinct terms — moral eating, sustainable eating and MSE — which all refer to the same diat. What we call vegetarianism.

TL;DR: When implementing Display trait for a wrapper type, use self.0.fmt(fmtr) rather than invoking write! macro. See The proper way section below.

In a recent Computerphile video, Ian Knight talked about RAII idiom and it’s application in C++ and Rust. While the video described the general concepts, I felt different examples could be more clearly convey essence of the topic.

I’ve decided to give my own explanation to hopefully better illustrate what RAII is and how it relates to Rust’s ownership. Then again, for whatever reason I’ve decided to write it as a play with dialogue in faux Old English so it may well be even more confusing instead.

No, I haven’t gone completely mad yet and still, I write this as an appeal to stop using monospaced fonts for code (conditions may apply). While fixed-width fonts have undeniable benefits when authoring software, their use is excessive and even detrimental in certain contexts. Specifically, when displaying inline code within a paragraph of text, proportional fonts are a better choice.

• Updated in November 2024 to include Crossroads of Ravens.
• Updated in May 2024 to include journey stories from GWENT game.

Ever since Witcher games took off the franchise skyrocketed in popularity. Books, comics, TV show, games, more comics, another TV show… The story of Geralt and his marry company has been told in so many ways that it’s becoming a wee bit hard to keep track of chronology of all the events; especially across different forms of media.

In this article I’ve collected all official Witcher works ordering them in chronological order. To avoid any confusion, let me state up front that if you’re new to the franchise or haven’t read the books yet this list might not be for you. If you’re looking for the order to read the books in, I’ve prepared a separate article which describes that.

Skip right to the chronology

Or: How to change language of Google website.

If you’ve travelled abroad, you may have noticed that Google tries to be helpful and uses the language of the region you’re in on its websites. It doesn’t matter if your operating system is set to Spanish, for example; Google Search will still use Portuguese if you happen to be in Brazil.

Fortunately, there’s a simple way to force Google to use a specific language. All you need to do is append ?hl=lang to the website’s address, replacing lang with a two-letter code for the desired language. For instance, ?hl=es for Spanish, ?hl=ht for Haitian, or ?hl=uk for Ukrainian.

If the URL already contains a question mark, you need to append &hl=lang instead. Additionally, if it contains a hash symbol, you need to insert the string immediately before the hash symbol. For example:

• https://www.google.com/?hl=es
• https://www.google.com/search?q=bread+sandwich&hl=es
• https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=es#/report-home/

By the way, as a legacy of Facebook having hired many ex-Google employees, the parameter also work on some of the Facebook properties.