We have a bunch of services which orchestrate long running workflows so temporal is quite interesting to me. I've been lurking in the temporal slack for a while (and before that in the cadence slack).
Would be interested to know what kinds of things you're using it for/what scale/which language client?
I work for an accounting company with a few hundred workers, who every month had to submit a lot of files, and collect a lot of documents from human-only websites.
About two years ago I built a custom workflow engine in python where I had a few primitives (filesystem, database access, browser (puppeteer scripts), etc), and would define a workflow using those primitives using a YAML DSL.
In a couple weeks I ported the whole thing to Temporal (Java client), where each of those primitive groups is a different activity, which runs in a separate worker. I have a browser worker, which runs in the only servers that have internet access, a filesystem worker, which is on a Windows machine serving as an entrypoint to the company's windows filesystem, a database worker, etc.
This is all very scalable, and I can run as many of each worker and the engine itself as I like.
Currently the scale is not too big though. I launch a few "main" workflows in certain days of the month that will then spawn up to 4 thousand child workflows which run simultaneously with no problem.
I hate the fact that it requires you to install the client for it to work.
The client randomly spikes in cpu usage while running in the background. Multiple times I've also had this issue where I'll try to right click the zoom icon in the system tray and quit zoom, causing it to hang and reach 100% cpu usage on one core.
I also don't like that on clicking on a zoom video call link sometimes the browser to client redirect works but sometimes it doesn't and you need to then go back and click the link again.
I was planning on mentioning Zoom as well. The Linux client especially is insanely bad, iirc it also drew itself on top of everything.
My suggestion on Linux at least is to use the web client. Just get the url, do a 's#/j/#/wc/join/#' to it and open it in browser of your choice. You'll need to copy the password manually, sometimes it might require captcha etc, but at least it's somewhat usable.
But why would you use it when it has like 1 second latency. Google Meet is kind of meh but works. Or pure audio calls like Telegram or something like Mumble (which has rooms, you can host a server yourself, is open source and doesn't suck).
I can see why salespeople prefer video calls but for technical topics it just doesn't make sense.
Same here (ububtu, dwm). I can use every other web-based video conference platform with no problem (jit.si, google meet, and others) but zoom eats all memory and crashes the browser. The app refuses to run, complaining that I don’t have ibus installed (I removed ibus, because it’s one of a hundred unnecessary layers of crap added by distro maintainers).
As someone who studied in the US on an F1 visa, I can tell you that this rule has always been in place. The F1 visa was always extremely restrictive whether it was regarding minimum number of in person credits or regarding allowing students to work part time.
It seems especially cruel that they'd choose to enforce the rule at a time like this.
They previously removed the restriction. Stolen from another comment:
> See this guidance from March: "Given the extraordinary nature of the COVID-19 emergency, SEVP will allow F-1 and/or M-1 students to temporarily count online classes towards a full course of study in excess of the limits... This temporary provision is only in effect for the duration of the emergency" Absolutely nothing substantive has changed since then, but ICE has apparently changed its mind.
The rule makes sense and is there to prevent an exploit on using student visas to move to the US.
However, enforcing it during a pandemic is cruel and really reinforces how Trump and his administration are aggressive towards international people - even if we are coming to elite schools and would bring value to the US economy.
I'm happy to report that I was able to download the zip file and run the executable on my Ubuntu box with Wine. It was quite surreal to see Netscape installer running on my 4k monitor. I was even able to open the browser and navigate to Google.
You have to run the old browsers through a local proxy you configure yourself a lot of times these days if you're really interested in surfing the web with it.
I'm about to go to sleep but there's ones that forward https as http, convert webp and png to gif, strip JavaScript to prevent the browser from locking up, etc.
There's a real world use for this in crazy companies where people are forced on some old browser. This makes them not go down in glorious flames at every site.
There's also a nice (though under-documented) scripting interface, so you could probably write a script that does this for all sites in regular proxy mode. I found an example of this here, though I didn't test it: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mitmproxy/IAJ0-MHVC0...
back in the day I used RabbIT which handled both the https/http and the png problem but it looks like it hasn't been updated in years. It looks like squid can do the https problem (https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/HTTPS).
This actually doesn't looks as easy to do in 2020 as it was in 2009. I also had luck at chaining proxies that did different features as well so one would do a certain transformation and pass it off to another etc.
I've also done partial implementations just using php ... you can preg_replace most things and it more or less works.
But yes I had assumed things had gotten easier but apparently they've actually become more difficult.
While this is useful for people with out of date browsers, a slightly more sophisticated use-case is where you render the entire web page remotely in a sandbox for certain classes of links, eg email links. This prevents a whole class of phishing attacks.
There are companies who will sell this to you but essentially it’s really headless Chrome running in the cloud somewhere.
It stops a man-in-the-middle attacker from trying to exploit your browser/extensions/password manager by injecting code into that site (once the cert is pinned).
It might also help with SEO? Google's been pushing for https everywhere.
This is very close to our experience of working with Kubernetes and istio for over an year. You get so many things seemingly for free that when things work as expected the whole thing is actually quite nice.
It is when things don't work as expected that it's really hard to find help. We had this issue happen a couple of weeks ago where we were trying to connect from one of our clusters to an Elasticache instance. We could connect to it from a namespace with istio sidecars disabled but not from a namespace with it enabled. We could also connect to it from a namespace in a different cluster which did have istio enabled. It took nearly a week to figure that out because there is so little prior art (in terms of stackoverflow questions, github issues etc). This comes with the territory of using something relatively new I suppose.
