Talk about Technologies, Software Architecture and Management

Lightroom Classic hangs during import

For a few weeks, I have experienced an interesting issue in Adobe Lightroom – during import application will become unresponsive and no files would be processed. Please note that photos are stored on NAS and there is some heavy traffic involved while images are being manipulated and rearranged. Much research did not reveal anything useful. In forums, there will be suggestions about turning off antivirus and firewalls, changing registry settings, etc. with no cure. Lightroom does not show any errors, there is no trace in the event log, yet there is something very wrong deep inside. Normally NAS can be accessed without any issues and there is no indication of any problems. As a next step I tried to simulate Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

DevOps in the Era of Agile

Development and IT in the Era of Agile need to evolve. I am reading LinkedIn, following up on various companies, and often come across the term DevOps in various flavors. The term is popular but there is a great difference in what it means for different people as goals are changing. For many years we knew very well the role of the IT department and of its important responsibilities. On the other side of the “fence”, we had software development teams. Time of Agile Software development went through drastic changes in recent years – waterfall, XP, and now Agile. The main goal of these changes was to improve the effectiveness of the software development teams. It involved the proactive discovery Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Database as a Service, High Availability, Horizontal Scalability, and Multi-master Architecture

DISCLAIMER: This post intended to aggregate research performed while evaluating various DB solution fitting specific requirements. While it may be a bit lengthy, I hope it would give the reader good starting point while deciding which path to take. SkySQL was reviewed in more details, and this article presents in-depth review of “last-mile” considerations. The intent is not to force reader into particular solution, but to share all accumulated information. Introduction While deciding about changes to the database layer at the core of your system many questions and concerns are being raised. Will my system perform as expected after migration? How much effort is required to migrate existing solution? Will it require serious code refactoring? How a new DB solution Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Death of CentOS? NOT… Think “rebirth” instead

I am active user of CentOS in production for many years and counting. While Windows was and still is my OS of choice on desktop, actively using WordPress and LAMP stack in general lead me to CentOS as a base platform to host our web applications and solutions. We are now equally using Debian in our deployments. When RedHat announced shift of focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream in December of last year it caused a stir in Linux/CentOS community. It was still acknowledged that announcement was botched and misleading. For me bells started to ring when IBM first acquired RedHat. Usually such changes lead to more “enterprisy” approach. And year later we now see it happening. How can Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Making your network connected HP ENVY Photo 7855 print again

HP printers seems to always being stop-and-go solution. Anything from upgrading to new version of Windows, switching local to network or Wi-Fi can throw them off. Over years I had number of HP and Canon printers and latest device is HP ENVY Photo 7855. It started all great – new printer arrived in good condition. Installation went well, Windows 10 recognized it and Store has proper apps to use. It appeared we have had a winner. Note: Printer was connected over Wi-Fi with dedicated IP provisioned on secured locked down network. After a while I started to notice that printer will not always register properly on restart/wake up and would become unresponsive to print requests. As a scanner it would Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Firefox 77 and Awesome expanding address bar

Awesome design decisions I do not have much time to write these days, but this situation made enough annoyance for me to warrant this content. First, kudos to Firefox team for well maintained browser. Then… In general, I am one of the stubborn one, who do not like fluidity of Chrome and its ever changing behaviour. In the past, IE and Microsoft was the one breaking standards. Now it appears that these great minds moved to Google and every new version of Chrome will give you something new and unexpected from great wisdom of all-knowing and all-seeing company. 🙂 Firefox team seems to feel the pressure and joined the party of making users happier by delivering surprising features. In last Read more…

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago