UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

So last night a kid who honestly was probably too old to be trick-or-treating said, “thank you SO much” very sarcastically when I dropped one small piece of candy into his pillowcase and it stuck very conspicuously near the top, so it was obvious how little I gave him.

I immediately had negative thoughts about his reaction, but I had nothing to say because honestly, he was right. It was pretty stingy. But the problem was, we only bought one bag of candy this year, not knowing how many kids to expect, and it turned out to be a busier-than-usual year. (Most years we buy 2-3 bags and have 2+ bags’ worth left over at the end of the night.)

I started the night giving each kid 2 pieces, but I quickly realized that at that rate I was going to run out before 7 PM, so it was time to dial it back.

So yeah, I guess I deserved to get called out by a snotty 13-year-old for my less-than-copious candy offerings. Some people might say kids shouldn’t act so entitled but honestly, this is part of the social contract we agree to when we decorate the front of our house and turn on the porch light on October 31. Kids are going to come to our door for the express purpose of us putting a reasonable amount of candy into whatever receptacle they happen to be carrying, and one “fun size” Twix is not a reasonable amount.

On a more positive note, not only did it feel like a “normal” year last night, but SLP and I even managed to watch both Halloween and The Shining in their entirety, without falling asleep. (Well… she may have dozed off briefly around the time Dick Halloran was sensing the call to leave his Miami retreat.)

I don’t have much to say about all of this, other than that I would probably, yes, be posting this on Facebook if it were affecting literally anything else in my known realm of existence.

Today Facebook killed itself. But its undead corpse will surely rise again.

The problem is some kind of colossal DNS snafu, which has, for all intents and purposes, temporarily caused facebook.com to cease to exist.

Ah… the air somehow smells fresher today. The water tastes better. The sun shines brighter.

But I know it won’t last.

Anyway… today’s the day it happened. Here’s some more in-depth information from Ars Technica which hopefully will not disappear down the Memory Hole anytime soon.

Update: This Cloudflare blog post probably provides the definitive explanation of what happened.

I got up early this morning to do some server maintenance, but as I was sipping my coffee and absentmindedly glancing at Twitter, I noticed that Tears for Fears — one of my favorite bands from the ’80s — was trending.

Half the time, when someone’s trending, it means they just died. With a band, hard to say. But it’s definitely a coin toss between something tragic or something completely irrelevant outside the warped world of Twitter, and in this case, it was the latter, in the form of a tweet asking people to pick between them and Hall and Oates.

Hall and Oates or Tears For Fears? These are the only two choices… No ties… If you don't like either, keep scrolling!

— Official Account of "Bad" Brad Berkwitt (@BadBradRSR) October 1, 2021

Well, of course I had to get in on this. Below is a lightly edited version of the tweet thread I produced on the topic.

I have to guess from the fact that Tears for Fears are trending but Hall and Oates aren’t, that more people prefer Tears for Fears. Oh, where do I begin?

First, yes. Hall and Oates.

I love both, but they can’t really be compared.

Second, anyone who is even inclined to make the comparison is apparently unaware of a thing called “the ’70s”.

Hall and Oates had already accomplished more in the ’70s than Tears for Fears ever did, and they hadn’t even gotten to the stuff they’re best known for.

That said, Songs from the Big Chair is one of the absolute best albums of the ’80s, and is probably better than any album Hall and Oates produced in that decade. Probably. I mean, Private Eyes, H2O and Big Bam Boom are all amazing, but inconsistent. Big Chair is a cohesive work.

Still, if you compare by any criteria: number of big albums, number of hit songs, length of their “relevant” period, the wide range of their appeal (I didn’t even get into that), Hall and Oates have to come out on top.

Which group do I still listen to more now, though? It’s kind of a toss up. I have both Private Eyes and Songs from the Big Chair on vinyl and they are spinning frequently, but on Spotify I probably listen to Tears for Fears more.

Bottom line: two things.

1. Comparisons are stupid.
2. Both of these bands are amazing and if this stupid comparison gets more “young folks” to check them out, that is, as we said in the ’80s, awesome.

And in conclusion, please watch… this video of my favorite Tears for Fears song.

You should also watch Rick Beato’s awesome “What Makes This Song Great” video about it.

P.S. OK, yes I had forgotten initially that they actually toured together this year. I haven’t really been ready to go to a crowded concert venue yet, plus I didn’t hear about their stop here until about one hour after it started!

When I was first starting out in my career and I’d encounter a complicated system I couldn’t understand, I blamed my own inexperience.

Mid-career, I started to realize that, no, a lot of systems are just really poorly designed, and I was experiencing cognitive dissonance, trying to find a complex and subtle logic where there was none.

Now as I’m entering (eek) the late stages of my career, I’m experiencing those systems in a third way that I’m still trying to comprehend. It’s not specifically that they’re badly designed (though they may be). It’s that they’re necessarily convoluted because they’re trying to model an inherently convoluted human process.

No matter the skill of the developer, sometimes it’s just impossible to translate the messy, inconsistent, illogical, organically assembled, internally conflicted and occasionally politically-motivated* ways humans concoct to complete a task, into a simple, intuitive program.

Anyway… I just spent a half hour trying to make a little bit of sense of a system that had a clean and modern interface, but one that concealed an unbelievably arcane, niche-specific database model. Now my brain hurts.

*By “politically-motivated” I’m talking about internal politics within an organization, not government-level politics.

So, like me you’ve decided to procrastinate on the OS upgrade on your server running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Yes, support for it ended almost 6 months ago. Maybe you’ve even set up ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) to avoid the upgrade. But if you’re like me you may also have discovered that you can no longer access new PHP versions from the “ondrej” repository once LTS ends. So you reluctantly acknowledge that it would be a very good idea to do the OS upgrade.

But it doesn’t work.

That’s OK, I’m here to help. A few months ago I scraped together tips from a few different resources (which I regrettably did not make note of for citation here), and came up with a rough script for myself that seems to work. I’m running it again today on another server, so I thought I’d consolidate it into a blog post here while I’m at it. Let’s go.

Before the 16.04 to 18.04 update

First off, caveat emptor. This is what I did, and it worked. If you do the same and it breaks something, don’t blame me. Also note that I am brazen and always run sudo -s before I get started. If you don’t like to do that, you may need to prefix some of these commands with sudo in order for them to work.

It’s probably also a good idea first to do a full backup of your server that you can restore from if things go totally off the rails.

Yes, this is going to be a two-step upgrade. First we’ll upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS. Then we can do the 18.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS upgrade to get ourselves current. Then we won’t have to think about this for another 3 1/2 years! Whew!

There’s some stuff to do before you run that do-release-upgrade command. First, edit /etc/apt/sources.list in your text editor of choice (I like nano) and add these lines at the end:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial main universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-security main universe multiverse

Save that. Then if you’re running ufw, which you should be, do this to give yourself a back door in case something goes wrong (assuming you’re running this update over ssh, which of course Ubuntu will warn you is a Bad Idea).

ufw allow 1022

Hold on! Failure may be looming in the near future. Before doing anything else, try this:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

I almost always run apt-get dist-upgrade instead of just apt-get upgrade because I always assumed the former does everything the latter does, and more. Not so. I’ve run into a problem on some servers with messages that cloud-init was held back. My fix for that is to do this:

apt-mark unhold cloud-init
apt-get upgrade
reboot

When things come back, let’s do this:

apt-get dist-update
apt-get autoremove

Then proceed as normal…

Now we’re ready to get started. Run these commands:

apt update
do-release-upgrade

Don’t walk away at this point… you’re going to have to answer some prompts along the way. In general I would always recommend keeping your existing versions of any files it asks you about. Once all of that is over, your server will reboot, and you should be able to log back into a fully functioning Ubuntu 18.04 LTS install. I would recommend testing whatever services you have running on the server, just to be sure everything is working properly, before you continue to the 20.04 LTS upgrade.

After the 16.04 to 18.04 update, before the 18.04 to 20.04 update

Run all of the regular updates, just to be sure you’re fully current. If you’re brazen like me you’ll tackle that with one command:

apt update; apt -y dist-upgrade; apt -y autoremove; reboot

Once you’re back up and running, throw this in. I don’t recall why I needed it now, and if you’re not using cURL you may not need it at all, but anyway, I did this here:

apt install libcurl4

Now, just to be safe, let’s back up the existing /etc/apt/sources.list file, because we’re going to replace its entire contents with this:

deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal-updates main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal-security main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal-backports main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu focal partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu focal partner

(Looking just now at that in.archive.ubuntu.com domain, I’m not sure if that’s a mirror in India and you could just use archive.ubuntu.com, or what. Just an observation. Do as you will.)

Once you’ve saved those changes, run these commands:

apt update
apt install –reinstall ubuntu-keyring
do-release-upgrade

Again with the do-release-upgrade command you’ll need to follow the prompts, keeping your existing copies of config files when asked.

I’ve found that after running this, the server might not come back up on its own. I had to log into my Digital Ocean account after a few minutes and do a hard reboot, but once I did that, everything came back fine and I was on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS!

One additional note: one server I ran this on needed all of the PHP 7.4 libraries reinstalled for a reason I could not determine. Your exact setup may vary, but this is what I ran to resolve that issue:

apt install php7.4 php7.4-cgi php7.4-cli php7.4-common php7.4-curl php7.4-dev php7.4-gd php7.4-gmp php7.4-json php7.4-mysql php7.4-odbc php7.4-bcmath php7.4-bz2 php7.4-mbstring php7.4-soap php7.4-zip

And then I needed to edit the corresponding php.ini file with my preferred settings.