A brief and tasty respite from the sugar-free life.

From Alexa, stop! 3 ways to make Amazon’s voice assistant kid-proof:

Some parenting experts are warning that overusing the device could make some children feel that Alexa is a servant to be commanded, which is behavior that could potentially be carried over to the schoolyard.

There are many reasons to fear our digital future; this is not one of them. Some parenting experts are idiots.

Menu planning by Oliver. Execution by Catherine.

Monday and Tuesday brought a lot of snow to 100 Prince Street. And our new snow plowing contractor, from Kinkora, proved their worth by doing a thorough clean-out (with a follow-up after I managed to extricate the car).

Who among us has not spent time on the telephone with a friend or family member experiencing audio issues with their Mac.

The sound isn’t coming out of the headphones. Or it is coming out of the headphones and they don’t want it to. Or they can hear a Skype call, but the person on the other end can’t hear them.

Most of the solutions to problems like this on a Mac require the mysteriously-named application called Audio MIDI Setup, something that should have been replaced (and renamed) by Apple years ago. It’s got a cryptic user interface and all sorts of controls that are of practical utility to almost nobody.

Enter the new app SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba, with utility that should have been baked right into macOS from the beginning.

Now what you used to need Audio MIDI Setup for, you can now do right from your menu bar:

SoundSource is only $10, and if you’ve got another licensed Rogue Amoeba product–and you should probably own at least Audio Hijack–you can get a SoundSource license for free (I was so impressed by that offer that I paid $25 to update my Audio Hijack to the latest version just so I could do that; it’s a great idea).

I like the fact that Environment Canada weather alerts are obviously written by humans. Witness the one that was just issued, which begins like this:

The reprieve is short lived as the next weather system is expected to impact Prince Edward Island Wednesday night into Thursday.

They clearly realize their responsibility to capture something of the weather zeitgeist in their prose.

Back in 2003 there were a series of “blogger meetups,” held in the back room at the old Formosa Tea House on University Avenue, and organized by Will Pate. I brought Rob Paterson along to one of these, and Will captured the moment and posted it to his erstwhile web gallery (that’s me, in my green-cardigan-wearing phase, on the far right; Rob’s across the table, in the middle):

I believe it was that same meetup where Will boldly proclaimed that “blogging is dead,” a notion that was greeted as a great joke by all present, as at that time blogging was in full voice and the notion that bloggers would stop blogging was absurd as suggesting we’d stop breathing.

Down at the end of the table in that photo is Young Dan James, and Dan’s CEO Blues blog was then, and for a long time thereafter, a welcome and compelling slice of the local blogosphere.

Indeed, they of silverorange were, collectively, a good chunk thereof: Steven Garrity’s Acts of Volition, Daniel Burka’s Delta Tango Bravo, Stephen DesRoches’s New Recruit, and silverorange labs’ blog itself, to choose just a few.

And then a decade passed. Bloggers got married. Bloggers had children. Bloggers changed jobs. Bloggers moved away. Bloggers started writing on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Medium.

And today my feed reader reported to me that Dan’s blog’s RSS feed couldn’t be reached. I emailed Dan, and he let me know that he’d let his blog wither on the vine during a server retirement. It’s 404. Done.

Blogging’s not dead–Steven’s just migrated to WordPress, Stephen’s Focused on Light now. And I’m still here.

But the death of Dan’s blog is a watershed moment, I think. I will miss his words.

There have been two high-profile technical meltdowns in the last while, one at GitLab and another at Instapaper.

In both cases the underlying issues causing the problems were database related, and in both cases there were significant issues with both the backup regime and the emergency response routine.

Fortunately for the rest of us, in both cases the companies involved have responded, once the dust cleared, with detailed postmortems.

GitLab posted Postmortem of database outage of January 31:

On January 31st 2017, we experienced a major service outage for one of our products, the online service GitLab.com. The outage was caused by an accidental removal of data from our primary database server.

And Instapaper posted Instapaper Outage Cause & Recovery:

The critical system that failed was our MySQL database, which we run as a hosted solution on Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). Here we’ll cover what went wrong, how we resolved the issue and what we’re doing to improve reliability moving forward.

This is a laudable trend, and one that’s of tremendous utility to the broader digital community. All digital systems fail. All disks fail. All DNS setups go wrong. Having procedures in place to deal with this is all you can do; and because it’s hard to imagine, in advance, how and why things will go wrong, gaining insight from the real world failures of others with a similar setup is some of the best education you can get.

I learned actionable things from both GitLab’s issue and Instapaper’s.

For example, I’ve added more redundancy to regular MySQL backups and, following the example of Marco Arment, have added an automatic process that, every day, launches a new EC2 instance, installs MySQL, imports the data dumped from Amazon RDS, and performs tests to check data integrity.

And, from Instapaper’s issue, I’ve learned about a hard limited of 2TB for older Amazon RDS instances, and about some of the challenges of migrating from legacy MySQL setups into Amazon’s Aurora.

Being open about failure, especially when the failures are as much human as technical, isn’t easy, and it goes against our natural impulses to try to contain and control information. So GitLab and Instapaper’s engineering teams and management deserve our thanks for realizing that being open is ultimately not only good for their business, but it’s good for the wider web.

It snowed and snowed. It’s only just now stopped. Because there was a lot of wind, we ended up with a lot of snow in the front yard and relatively little in the back yard. So I spent 30 minutes raking snow off the front roof and 2 minutes raking snow off the back roof. But we are happy and warm and well-fed and having nothing to complain about.

After a late start, today’s blizzard has started in earnest now.

And, says Darksky.net, it’s going to snow and snow, then take a day off on Wednesday, and then snow and snow some more.