My series on whining about macOS Catalina continues today as I tried to use AWS Cloud9 in Safari. It doesn’t work. You have to enable third-party cookies to make it work. Apple has apparently removed the ability to re-enable third party cookies in Safari 13.
Want to use it on iPadOS? Nope. Can’t enable third party cookies in iPadOS on Safari or Chrome. No more Cloud9 for me. Just deleted the environment.
I managed to get a fresh install of Google Chrome working under Catalina. But it wasn’t easy to unravel. Apparently, if you have spctl enabled on first launch, Chrome will create a jacked-up profile folder that it can no longer access. I discovered this by running the binary from inside Terminal, where the story was told.
To fix, here’s what I did:
WARNING: Unfortunately negative post.
This has been an interesting year in the Appleverse. iOS 13, iPadOS and macOS Catalina were all dropped on us. This new software “regime” has been quite the challenge for me.
iOS 13 and iPadOS haven’t been that troubling. They generally work and do what they promised to do. I did find it curious that iOS 13.1, 13.1.1 and 13.1.2 all dropped in pretty rapid succession. That’s usually a bad sign that things weren’t up to standards and had to go through some quick resolution. There were either fixes or outright removals to get things out the door. I don’t like it when that happens, but I get it. I’m glad they stay on top of things well enough.
Catalina and Apple TV on the other hand… have been a complete shitshow.
Update: I resolved the Google Chrome issue. If you’re just interested in the resolution, please go here.
There are two ways to progress your career in federal IT:
It’s the way it’s always been done. Why change?
The Starbucks cup.
If you’re paying attention to the Internet in any form or fashion, you know what Starbucks cup I’m referring to. It’s that Starbucks cup that snuck into a Game Of Thrones episode (S8, E4). There’s no need to rehash what really happened. That was just a silly mistake.
What’s interesting to me is how the industry responded. HBO actually removed the Starbucks cup within a day or two - and replaced the file on its streaming service with a corrected version of the episode. It didn’t take long for HBO to acknowledge the mistake and then repair it… “doing it live,” so to speak.
…and I think this sets an interesting precedent. I’ll call it DevOps for Film - or more specifically, FilmOps.
One of the things that plagues me in this business is the rampant ADHD. You spend a lot of time taking in tasks and trying to make mental notes, but very little time actually doing the work to catch up. When you do the work, it snowballs into other work that was unforseen.
I’ve struggled with this for my entire career. It’s exhausting. I don’t know what to do about it. The best recommendation I can give is that you should find a set of apps and workflows that make sense to you and help you keep your work life in sync across all of your devices. Use do-not-disturb often. Don’t feel bad about shutting people and things out so you can get code written or actions completed.
If you have any tips on how to get through your IT life every day, I’d love to hear them. Comment below.
I’m at the NAB show in Las Vegas, NV this week. I’m here to represent my project for my main customer, which is a federal agency that does space stuff. You can guess.
This is the first trip where I’ve had to accept and travel under the new DFARS requirements. I’m here to tell you, this shit is for the birds. I’m carrying two laptops. Two chargers. Two sets of cables. All because the feds thinks this somehow makes it all more secure.
The backpack is heavy. There’s maximum effort to “be secure” and minimal gain. As a matter of fact, I would warrant that this renders my setup even less secure. Now I have to keep up with two laptops - and what happens if I leave one somewhere? What happens if I leave my ID card somewhere? What happens if somehow, someone was able to take the federal laptop and my PIV card and get into the VPN?
They’d have full access to the enterprise, that’s what.
You people that think this is more secure - you’re really nuts. You’re not thinking clearly at all. On top of it, you’re making IT workers’ already-difficult lives even more difficult.
TLS 1.3 is here and ready to go. But a couple of jerks thought breaking it on purpose would be a prudent thing to do. Apparently, they even tried to get NIST to stifle TLS 1.3 to let this broken standard gain traction.
I guess we’ll never learn.
It seems to me…
If you’re a responsible gun owner, wouldn’t you be ok with justifying that you’re a responsible gun owner?
I think it would be just fine with me to go through a few hoops to demonstrate that I can be responsible. We require people to demonstrate they are responsible enough to drive a car - why can’t we do the same thing with firearms?
2018 has come to a close. It was an amazing year for me in so many ways. I don’t want to go into all of the details because I’m not (any longer) the kind of person to revisit the past. There’s no need.
But 2019 is going to be flat out amazing. I met a woman whom has, quite simply, been a dream to my life. I visited her in September of 2018 and, long story short… fell for her. Hard.
I’m going back to Philippines on January 25th to celebrate her birthday… and I’m going to make sure to do my best to give her the time of her life. :)
2019 is just going to be amazing. Simply amazing.
