WILTW (What I Learned This Week) is a (hopefully) never-ending series of mini-posts, once a week, until the end of time. Terms and holidays apply.
UKNOF32
A couple of weeks ago I attended my second UKNOF meeting, this time located in Sheffield over 2 days (you can read about my first experience in London at UKNOF30 here).
It was an interesting format, with the first UK & Ireland Peering forum on the day-1 AM and UKNOF presentations taking up the PM and day-2 AM. It all ended with a pilot of a training workshop (paid workshop mind you), which I didn't attend but I hope went well.
As usual, slides and video recordings are up on the UKNOF website and on their YouTube channel. There's a lot of good stuff to be found, from impressive speeds in the An Update on the Openreach G.fast proof of Concept presentation, to a dizzying ride through Google's Datacentre Networking and a very interesting idea in Using BGP for realtime import and export of spam whitelist/blacklist entries.
There's good work being done by Matthew Walster on best practices for peering, all in one place and in a modern and easy to read format. He's looking for contributors and the source is on github, so if you know a thing or two about peering go take a look!
Last but not least, massive thanks to all the UKNOF chaps who were very supportive of our NOG initiative here in Ireland - I got the opportunity to talk to many people, get advice and even say a few words in front of the whole audience about it!
Updating my Xperia Z3C to 5.1.1
I wrote in the past about Sony's bumpy privacy ride and how to clean up a few dodgy bits from the phone - well that applied to the KitKat flavor of Android. With the upgrade to Lollipop, a few things have changed and the list of blocked apps has grown a bit.
What changed is that instead of using the pm block command to disable some apps via the adb shell you now have to use the pm hide command. It's a weird change as it doesn't seem to be doing as much as the old one did, but nevertheless it works.
I published my full list in a gist on GitHub because it's a bit too long to include in this article. It's taken from multiple posts on the XDA forum and if anything breaks because of this, don't come crying to me, OK? :)
An interview with a pioneer of computing in Romania
This article's in Romanian I'm afraid, but if you can get over that hurdle it's a very good read: about Vasile Baltac, a man who's seen the first computer built in Romania (apparently it was the 8th worldwide, around 1957) and, as a result, the evolution of computing through some very difficult times.
Until next week
Did you learn anything interesting this week? Let me know or share it with everybody else in the comments below!
And, as always, thanks for reading.