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bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦
@bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
180 followers 6 following 320 posts
Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist. https://berthub.eu/

[bridged from https://fosstodon.org/@bert_hubert on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
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bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
@gnss_changes The status display on https://galmon.eu/ is none too happy. Every row with an IOD > 127 means a satellite is broadcasting 'vintage' orbital data. As in, old.
May 14, 2025 at 8:48 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
@gnss_changes Here is what the Galileo agency mailed round last week. Not easy to understand what they mean, and I guess this is by design:
NOTICE ADVISORY TO GALILEO USERS (NAGU) 2025016 DATE GENERATED (UTC): 2025-05-07 13:15 NAGU TYPE: GENERAL (NOTICE) NAGU NUMBER: 2025016 NAGU SUBJECT: TESTING ACTIVITIES NAGU REFERENCED TO: N/A START DATE EVENT (UTC): 2025-05-12 06:00 END DATE EVENT (UTC): 2025-05-19 16:00 SATELLITE AFFECTED: ALL EVENT DESCRIPTION: USERS ARE INFORMED THAT DUE TO TESTING ACTIVITIES, THE OPEN SERVICE AND THE HIGH ACCURACY SERVICE WILL EXPERIENCE DEGRADATIONS UP TO TEMPORARY DISRUPTION OF SERVICE FROM 2025-05-12 AT 06:00 UTC. THE COMPLETION OF THE TESTING ACTIVITIES IS ESTIMATED TO BE ON 2025-05-19 16:00 UTC. DURING THIS PERIOD THE SIGNAL IN SPACE IS EXPECTED TO DEVIATE FROM THE MINIMUM PERFORMANCE LEVELS DEFINED IN THE PUBLISHED OS AND HAS SERVICE DEFINITION DOCUMENTS AND SIGNAL IN SPACE INTERFACE CONTROL DOCUMENTS.
May 14, 2025 at 8:22 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
As I type away into the void, hoping to achieve something, I sometimes wonder if it is worth it. Do people read this stuff? There are now 222 articles on https://berthub.eu/articles/ and sometimes one of these gets read really well. But what about the "back […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]
0 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-g... 6614 1 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/maar-hoe-bou... 2292 2 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-coherent-n... 1797 3 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european... 1723 4 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting... 1604 5 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/beware-cloud... 1461 6 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-kootwi... 882 7 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-securi... 864 8 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/out-of-offic... 855 9 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-l... 742 10 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/manifest-big... 658 11 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-in-soo... 582 12 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-ju... 556 13 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-overview/ 543 14 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/taking-the-a... 516 15 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-los... 460 16 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/beste-hoster... 446 17 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/servers-in-d... 438 18 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engi... 424 19 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/on-long-term... 411
May 13, 2025 at 8:48 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
I too have an important announcement tomorrow! It is good news, so no worries.
"My next TRUTH will be one of the most important and impactful I have ever issued. ENJOY!"
May 11, 2025 at 8:06 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
I have improved the cloud overview article with headlines that should make things somewhat clearer. Previously it was a bit of a wall of text. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cloud-overview/
However, you can still deliver services without US clouds There are governments and companies that have concluded that it is no longer possible to do anything IT or computer related without using one of the big three US cloud providers. This conclusion comes from some circular reasoning however. There are indeed software developers that no longer function without US cloud support. And these developers will indeed tell you there is no life outside of Microsoft/Google/AWS. Europe however still has a lot of capacity to build software based on servers instead of on specific cloud services. I outlined this in Cloud Naïve: Europe and the ‘Bijenkorf’ Megascaler. Massive outsourcing has made organizations somewhat helpless Many organizations have over the years outsourced a lot of their IT. Even very information heavy things like banks have decided that IT and computing are not their core competence. They are now realizing they were wrong about this. However, it is very common to first outsource non-core competences, and then not know when to stop. It is extremely difficult to stop doing 80% of what you did while remaining good at the 20% you must retain. If you have no native IT skills left, you end up depending 100% on someone else’s skills, most likely from the cloud. I expand on this hard problem in Your tech or my tech: make up your mind quickly.
May 9, 2025 at 9:28 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
With some luck, I'll be presenting tomorrow. And I'll again be talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures "So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]
Cover of the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures - old bald man with glasses called C.P. Snow. "The two cultures and the scientific revolution".
April 23, 2025 at 10:31 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Thank you everyone. The answer to 'does the Microsoft Customer Lockbox protect your data against the US government' is a resounding NO. According to Microsoft that is […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]
Does Customer Lockbox protect against data requests from law enforcement agencies or other third parties? No. Microsoft takes third-party requests for customer data seriously. As a cloud service provider, Microsoft always advocates for the privacy of customer data. In the event we get a subpoena, Microsoft always attempts to redirect the third party to the customer to obtain the information. (Read Brad Smith's blog: Protecting customer data from government snooping). We periodically publish detailed information about the law enforcement requests that Microsoft receives.
April 23, 2025 at 8:19 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Relevant for parent post.
"Bringing you up to speed is like trying to explain Norway to a dog"
April 18, 2025 at 12:59 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
From an upcoming blog post, in which I argue that cloud providers are actually more like proprietary software providers: "These days under the guise of ‘cloud as a commodity’ we are gluing ourselves to specific suppliers, without realizing that they are not in fact supplying commodity services."
Schematic that shows how software depends on services, many of which are so integrated with what we do that they constitute an integral part of our software.
April 6, 2025 at 3:20 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
It is time to repost this (and I know Asimov was a terrible person).
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
April 5, 2025 at 9:41 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
As @Sustainable2050 likes to say, CO₂ PPM still speeding up in the wrong direction:
Graph showing the change on CO2 concentration compared to the previous year. Goes up from 1.5ppm/year to 3.5ppm for 2024. Smoothed a bit, it goes up from 1.5 to 2.5. The PPM concentration of CO2 goes up and down according to a regular schedule. This graph shows the CO2 concentration with that regular pattern taken out, which turns it into a 'nowcast'. Clearly over 425 PPM now, but might show somewhat of a slowdown in the past year. If you want to see it and squint.
April 2, 2025 at 1:01 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
#berlin looking pretty this morning!
April 1, 2025 at 4:43 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
The good news is: we made it out of winter without depleting European gas storage sites! The bad news, we'll need to refill ~twice as much gas as past years to refill to healthy levels. Every new heat pump, solar panel and wind turbine will help us reach that goal more easily:
Graph showing how much energy is stored in European gas storage sites. Usually goes down until mid-April & then increases.
March 30, 2025 at 3:55 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Even the pretty partial solar eclipse caused a (fully expected and planned for) **2GW** decrease in electricity exports from The Netherlands today. Data via ENTSO-E, TenneT, processing by me. Graphs: https://berthub.eu/nlelec/
Graph showing a 2GW decrease in electricity exports during the partial solar eclipse
March 29, 2025 at 5:06 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Added some reassurance beyond the cheery 🥳 telling you there are no alerts:
Happy emoji telling us there are no alerts followed by lots of green boxes showing you what was checked
March 29, 2025 at 2:37 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Doing some work on my unreleased yet widely used availability & performance monitoring thing Simplomon. https://codeberg.org/berthubert/simplomon
Page that says 'Simplomon, alerts, NONE! and then a party emoji'. Plus some statistics Contents of https://codeberg.org/berthubert/simplomon
March 29, 2025 at 9:11 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
This presentation is going to be *lit*
Reagan, Trump, Musk, Bush, various staffers laughing uproariously. Below "And now they're busy convincing THEMSELVES we wouldn't be spying on their cloud data!"
March 25, 2025 at 7:39 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Me, being subtle.
A slanted table on which are perched logos for Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. The documents slide towards the Microsoft cloud, under which hides an NSA logo. There is a European Flag in the top right corner.
March 25, 2025 at 7:03 AM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
@GossiTheDog I see something similar but wonder if they maybe aren't passing referrer information anymore.
March 16, 2025 at 1:49 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Sometimes a graph tells a story. Every month I convert the laborious and huge XML version of the Dutch Buildings & Addresses Database, and convert it to ready to use SQLite and CSV. The big peak on the left is the download of the compressed XML. On the right […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]
Bandwidth graph showing a big 250Mbit/s download, followed some time later by a tiny upload.
March 9, 2025 at 10:51 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Due to popular demand (really) I've had a newsletter for a little while now. Due to slightly smaller but still appreciable popular demand, the various newsletter channels now have #rss feeds. https://berthub.eu/ckmailer/channel.html?channelId=qXN2Hp8xLw4zggLTYlB71E
Bert Hubert Nerd Stuff "Technical, computer, technology updates from Bert Hubert" This list has 964 subscribers. To also subscribe, head to this page. Archive of messages 2/16/2025, 9:05:42 PM: First post! On SQLITE_BUSY errors, despite setting a timeout Questions or tips → bert@hubertnet.nl - Problems → Open a ticket on GitHub, or email me - follow us on Mastodon
March 9, 2025 at 9:49 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Happy to announce I'll be speaking over at Webdevcon 2025. As a non-web person I had a great time there last year, and I presented on software quality and issues. Apparently they want more of this pain. https://webdevcon.nl/session/small-is-beautiful-microstacks-or-megadependencies/
Small is beautiful: microstacks or megadependencies
March 4, 2025 at 5:00 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
It works for some people, but it fails for (many) others:
March 1, 2025 at 10:52 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
@rbairwell
March 1, 2025 at 10:52 PM
bert-hubert.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ #pubmed is down, the world's database of (bio)medical research. "PubMed® comprises more than 37 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books" - it is a LIFELINE for research and medical practice.
Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site. We can’t connect to the server at pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. If you entered the right address, you can: Try again later Check your network connection Check that Firefox has permission to access the web (you might be connected but behind a firewall)
March 1, 2025 at 10:47 PM