After a long bank holiday weekend (very relaxing, Monday was the first time in weeks that neither of us had had to get up for work or some event or other) I sat down at my computer on Tuesday morning, opened Slack, and was greeted by much wailing and gnashing of teeth, because the SSL certificate on a live service had expired.

This isn’t a thing that happens much these days, because services like Lets Encrypt have pushed the industry towards automated generation and rotation of certificates.

However, as I have previously observed, (last week, in fact!) Microsoft Azure is dogshit. When it says, “AFD managed certificate will be auto-rotate [sic] in [sic] 45 days ahead of expiry”, it’s telling you two things:

  • no one at Microsoft cares enough to proof-read anything; and
  • they are lying liars who lie.

Or is my mistake that I am using the conventional meaning of automatic (“Capable of operating without external control or intervention”) when they actually mean something else, derived from the ancient Greek αὐτός (“self”) as in “do it yourself, meatbag”?

No, Azure is unredeemably awful, and is going on my shitlist of Things I Will Never Work With Again. It’s quite a long list now. I’m probably almost completely unemployable.

It turns out that someone in the past had been aware of the fact that the automatic certificate rotation didn’t work, and had rigged up a GitHub action to prod Azure into actually performing the rotation, but Microsoft had changed something that stopped this from working, and the action merrily reported that it had succeeded even when it failed. I fixed that and got everything working again.

I bought a coach ticket for the Dunwich Dynamo in July. This will be the first time I’ve done it on a bike with gears. I hope that this will compensate for my being fifteen years older than my first time.

I started fixing a friend’s mandolin that he received from a family member for free but in a tragic state. It had a cracked heel (where the neck joins the body) that had been badly fixed with poorly applied glue and a prominent woodscrew, and in the process someone had clamped it in such a way that the frets were unplayably bent.

I sawed out the cracked section with a Japanese pull saw and a chisel, and glued in a carefully fitted replacement block. I reinforced the section with a concealed screw, and carved the heel. I removed the frets and levelled the fretboard. I still have to refret it, refinish the repaired heel, and make a new bridge. I’ll post some photos once it’s finished and, with luck, actually playable.

Links for the week: