sohail.tech

I swung by my neighborhood Apple Store this morning to pick up an iPad. That alone was a novel experience; picking up an Apple iDevice on launch day without having to wait in line or preorder was… unusual. Nonetheless, off I went to see what the hulabaloo was about.

First, context. I’ve been using an iPad Pro 12.9” as part of a test at my day job and I’ve got some very definite observations about this device and what it can do, is good for, etc. Peppered in this review are many of those thoughts and notions, both good and bad. That’s the lens through which I looked at what the Baby Pro (props to the folks at iMore for coming up with that) can do.

A while back, I talked about changing my blog over to Github Pages. At the time, I started using the redcarpet Markdown engine so I could get prettier GFM markup instead of Jekyll’s standard syntax.

Then this came in the mail.

Starting May 1st, 2016, GitHub Pages will only support kramdown, Jekyll’s default Markdown engine.

Blargh! No!

But good news followed in the next line.

If you are currently using Rdiscount or Redcarpet we’ve enabled kramdown’s GitHub-flavored Markdown support by default, meaning kramdown should have all the features of the two deprecated Markdown engines, so the transition should be as simple as updating the Markdown setting to kramdown in your site’s configuration (or removing it entirely) over the course of the next three months.

I made the changes to config.yml and sure enough, GFM-style code snippets work.

```javascript
var s = "JavaScript syntax highlighting";
alert(s);
```

This renders as

var s = "JavaScript syntax highlighting";
alert(s);

So, you know, yay!

UPDATE: IFTTT responded to all their Pinboard customers (at the bottom)

I’m browsing through emails this morning, and this little gem pops up from IFTTT.

Well that sucks. I pipe all my “Saved for Later” items from Feedly into Pinboard, and I have Pocket send links to all saved articles to Pinboard via IFTTT too.

WTF. The email from IFTTT made it clear that Pinboard was to blame for this.

So I sent off an angry tweet to Pinboard.

.@Pinboard How come you guys aren’t moving to @IFTTT’s new platform? I use the Pinboard channel regularly and depend on it.

— Sohail Mamdani (@sohail) March 28, 2016

Then I went looking for a solution and came across a few tweets from Pinboard that shone some light on the issue.

Saw this beaut today when installing the latest version of Java.

Looks like Yahoo! has replaced Ask.com as the default adware for Java installs.

This is not what we meant when we asked you to get rid of Ask.com, Oracle.

Yeesh.

Working on fixing an issue with an ELK stack today and I realized that the folks at Elastic have some pretty interesting names for the shards in the database.

So far I’ve seen:

• Peregrine
• Obliterator
• Amiko Kobayashi
• Cassie Lang
• Vakume
• Mist Mistress
• Arides
• Roughhouse
• Omega the Unknown
• Martinex

There were a few more; Elasticsearch generates a new shard name every time the service is restarted. I’m almost tempted to restart the service a few more times, just to see what it’ll come up with.

Also, it’d be great if the commands to check the integrity of an index were, you know, simpler.