roguelazer's website

I've kept a server in The Cloud¹ for the past 14 years or so, hosted with Tornado VPS (formerly prgmr²). Well, I suppose I've been running anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of servers during that time, but this one was always a pet that I used to run whatever miscellaneous nonsense I needed in my personal life. For what it's worth, let me say that I have had a very satisfactory experience with prgmr/tornadovps; there has been maybe six hours of downtime over that period, and support has been super-helpful³.

sietchtabr.roguelazer.net started out way back on November 30, 2009 as a 512MB RAM, 12 GB spinning disk VM costing $11/mo and running Debian lenny. When I was experimenting with dnsextd in 2009, it was on this server. When I was hacking on a sed to x86 compiler in 2011, it was on this server. When I got married in 2015, I built the web-app for managing RSVPs on this server⁴. When my former classmate Michael Vrable needed someone to host a replica of a DNS zone for him? This server. Every once in a while, pgrmr would bump up the RAM and disk and CPU, and every time a Debian release came out, I would do the upgrade. I even rebooted from time to time.

When Debian bookworm came out this June, I initially planned to upgrade again. After all, why not? Well, for one thing, every time my disk had been expanded, I'd just made new partitions and put big pieces of data on them, so the filesystem was a mess — LVM2 had existed by 2009, but I hadn't used it. It was also an untidy mixture of ext4 and unconverted old ext3 volumes. If nothing else, I probably ought to have fixed all that. I also wanted to try out btrfs as a root volume; I've been avoiding it after seeing some nasty data loss issues around 2015, but probably eight years is enough maturation time.

That all seemed annoying, so instead I've replaced the server entirely. Still with TornadoVPS, just a fresh clean install of Debian. I went through and wrote Puppet manifests for every service I care about, and dropped everything I no longer need. Some key services:

• tailscale for talking to other machines
• bind9 to host some DNS zones
• apache with some CGIs and web pages
• postfix for outbound mail⁵
• synapse as a matrix homeserver
• znc as an IRC bouncer
• duplicity running offsite backups
• prometheus to collect metrics both about this machine and other machines on my tailnet, and to alert about them
• a motley collection of OCI containers used to test things in docker/podman

I also took a bunch of stuff I use that doesn't have usable/up-to-date Debian packages (like neovim and zellij) and packaged them so I'm no longer running a bunch of un-managed binaries out of ~/bin like an animal.

Anyhow, I'm glad to report that after a couple of hairy days, everything's moved over. The new instance has 8GB of RAM, two vCPUs of AMD EPYC 7402P, and 90GB of reasonably-fast SSD storage; something like an m5a.large in AWS terms. You'd think that in these days where you can run a Kubernetes cluster on the free tier of GCP and we all have an infinite number of Raspberry Pis sitting in shelves, there'd be less need for a "junk-drawer" server in a datacenter, but it really is quite handy. Hopefully this new instance will go another 14 years without requiring any major intervention!

Well, it's that time of year again! The CDC and FDA both approved the new COVID-19 vaccine last week, and I started looking for shots immediately. I managed to find a booking for today at a local Walgreens, and was perhaps a little worried when the fact-sheet they sent me was for the 2022 BA.4/BA.5 bivalent shot. Thankfully, after a bit over an hour waiting in line, I successfully got the latest XBB.1.5 Pfizer vaccine.

So far (as usual) no side effects except fatigue.

I know that a lot of folks are recommending waiting until a bit later in the year, but pretty much everyone I know with school-aged children has COVID right now, so it doesn't hurt to get in a little bit of extra protection. Stay safe out there.

Some recent relevant reading:

• The ‘Brain Fog’ of Long COVID Is a Serious Medical Issue That Needs More Attention
• COVID patients breathe large amounts of virus early on
• Biobot's Covid-19 Wastewater Monitoring
• More than half of Americans plan to get updated COVID shot

I think... there are too many social media platforms right now. A couple of years ago, the only thing I used was Twitter, and I was pretty happy with it? Now:

• Mastodon is where I mostly consume short-form social media postings... and is pretty frustrating a lot of the time. I think there are a total of three people I know in the real world who are still on Mastodon; everyone else bounced off. There's no coverage of any local news or politics. The Discourse is absolutely exhausting¹. I saw a post² last week that said something to the effect of "Mastodon isn't a social network, it's a leftist social engineering project and if you don't like that you should fuck off" which feels right. Mastodon does have by far the most usable iOS apps of all the social networks, and is also the only option that has Mac apps at all. I think Mastodon³ could certainly be a place where people talk with other people about interesting things, but it's mostly a place right now you can go to get scolded for not being an ideologically-pure gay space communist. The only exception from this is the "iOS indie app dev" network, which decamped whole hog from Twitter to Mastodon and mostly just talks about the same things they ever talked about. They're cool.
• Threads is Facebook's⁴ entry into the "Twitter clone" space. It is a clone of the parts of Twitter I never used or cared for; in particular, it only has an "algorithmic timeline". As far as I can tell, the people you Follow on the app has no bearing on what posts you're shown; it's a constant barrage of Brands™ and B-list celebrities. I open it once in a while to follow back all the people I know IRL who follow me there, but none of them post anything and the main timeline is boring as sin. There's no iPad or Mac app for Threads, nor even a website⁵.
• Bluesky was originally some kind of proposal for a decentralized future Twitter, and has a bunch of funding from Bad People⁶. However, there are a lot of people whose writing I used to enjoy on Twitter who are only found on Bluesky. The iOS app is deeply mediocre⁷, there's no iPad or Mac app, and the website is just the iOS app in a browser⁸. At the end of the day, though, Bluesky is still an invite-only social media network with <100k people on it, so it can't really solve for the general case. I do think ATProto has some things that it does a lot better than ActivityPub.
• Nostr is legitimately a neat protocol concept that has a roughly 0% chance of ever being used by anyone outside of a vanishingly small set of cryptography nerds. Also, somehow it's been captured by cryptocurrency nuts, goldbugs, and doomsday preppers. I don't think I've ever seen a post on the network that interested me. My public key is npub1g86srua47gncah0l2aalwxlt8mhvnwgq3860240aa0zm3nqem3wq49lrwk if you happen to want to look for me.
• Lemmy is a Reddit alternative built on ActivityPub. I was hopeful that it would have a big growth spurt after Reddit killed off all the decent mobile apps and moderator tools, but it didn't. There's some interesting stuff on there, but the server software is incredibly buggy and the community is very small.
• Twitter is still around, but given the eager embrace of Nazis by the new owner, it feels like anyone who still chooses to spend time there is being willfully ignorant. Without decent applications, I can't imagine using it even if it weren't a right-wing hotspot; nobody gives a shit about your "For You" timeline, Twitter. Also, apparently Elon Musk is going to throw away the name Twitter and rename it "X" and maybe turn it into an unregulated bank soon. What a winner.
• Facebook is still around as long as you only want to see pictures of the kids of your gen x friends, and intermittently report your crazy relatives for posting super-racist conspiracy theories.

I don't know what the point of all this is. Twitter was a lot of fun — a social network that almost everyone was on, where you could use great native applications and see the posts from only the people you wanted to see, or if you prefer, use the terrible first-party application and see a constant feed of celebrity click-bait.

Maybe I should just stick to IRC.

Welcome to Version 6 of this website. As promised a few months ago, I decided to take this website, which has been using the Pelican static site generator since 2014, and rewrite it to use the Zola static site generator. This was a pretty painless process; I wrote some Python scripts to take all the Pelican markdown and convert it to Zola format¹ and to generate redirects for all the old URLs.

Some notable changes:

• I've removed commenting functionality; Commento's spam filtering has gotten really lousy the last few months and I'm tired of having to translate and delete a bunch of Hindi spam posts every morning.
• Building the site from scratch now takes ~1s instead of ~3s. (woo)
• A bunch of the repetitive inline HTML in posts has been rewritten as shortcodes
• There's now only an Atom feed (no RSS 2.0), at least until this item gets resolved upstream
• I removed the tag cloud from the sidebar because it seemed too noisy
• All the pages have new permalinks, but there are redirects at the old URLs, so hopefully I'm still in compliance with the "Cool URLs Don't Change" rule.

A few months ago, Cory Doctorow wrote a very memorable blog post about the enshittification of social-media platforms, focused on TikTok. I've been thinking since then about how prevalent this trend is and how much it makes me worry for our future.

It's mentioned in Doctorow's piece, but I really want to emphasize how deleterious this effect has been on Google Search. I remember when Google was introduced! By the time I first had access to the Internet in school (perhaps 1998 or 1999), there were two options for finding things you didn't already have a link to: Yahoo (which had terrible free-form search but a passable directory you could click through like the index to some giant poorly-edited encyclopedia), and Ask Jeeves (which was pretty good at letting you type a query into a box and get results). Then, some time around 2000 or 2001, Google entered into the public consciousness, and it was like crack. Anything you wanted to know about, you could just put into the box and get real, high-quality results from legitimate sources! Unbelievable!

My two-year-old's current Favorite Thing is the PBS television show Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, which is a latter-day spinoff of the excellent Mister Roger's Neighborhood. It's a cartoon about the eponymous Daniel Tiger (who was a puppet on Mister Roger's Neighborhood) and his family, where various small children/animals learn important lessons about sharing and whatnot; standard fare for TV aimed at a two-year-olds.

My son has been home sick¹ for the last week or so, so I've watched a lot of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, and there are some things that annoy and/or confuse me:

1. Why do Daniel and his father² never wear pants? Everyone else in this universe wears pants. The Tiger men clearly understand pants, because when they go to the sleep-over at school, Daniel brings special pajama bottoms for the occasion. Mom Tiger always wears pants, so it's not a species thing. What's going on here?
2. Speaking of Dad Tiger: he's a clockmaker, but none of his clocks or watches have hands. Is this a deep statement about how childhood is free of deadlines, or is it just that it would be too much work to animate hands?
3. The magical land of this show is populated by a mix of humans and anthropomorphic animals; however, there are also some animals that are kept as pets.³ Are the pets also sentient, and this is some kind of slavery situation, or are there some animals that are sentient and some that are not? If so --- where's the boundary? I notice that all the sentient animal characters are obligate carnivores, so is this a universe where all carnivores are sentient and all herbivores aren't?
4. Does anyone other than Prince Tuesday actually have a paying job in this town? He's the waiter, the grocer, the crossing guard, the lifeguard at the pool, and probably some other jobs. Plus he's also next in line for the hereditary monarchy and lives in a literal castle. Some of the other adults have vocations (such as Dad Tiger making useless clocks, and Stan the Music Man... playing music?) but none of them seem to have actual jobs. I guess Teacher Harriet has a job.
5. Speaking of the pool: where does this show take place? It snows regularly, but also has a seaside beach with palm trees.

I know, I know, it's just a kids' show, and I'm reading too much into it. It just... bugs me!

Anyhow, my kid isn't sick any more, so he's going back to school and maybe I can watch less of this nonsense.

I know I just moved mastodon servers three months ago, but unfortunately tenforward.social just wasn't working out for me. I do like Star Trek, but my initial impression had been that the community would be a little more general interest, and unfortunately the Local Timeline ended up looking a bit more like a 90's era single-subject forum than I'd like. So, anyhow, I've moved to hachyderm.io (specifically, to @roguelazer@hachyderm.io), which is a tech-focused instance and where a lot of folks from mastodon.technology ended up going.

Beyond that, the fact that it was a small instance with a single moderator meant that there were some things I disagreed with (like the total defederation with mastodon.cloud, journa.host, and fosstodon.org)¹ and sometimes it just felt like a little more friction than I want in my life right now.

Hopefully this will be my last move for a while and there will not be any more metaposting about Mastodon on here.

While I was fixing things, I also got my keyoxide profile all fixed up. Hooray green checkmarks!

In unrelated news, I've been playing with Zola as a static generator to replace Pelican, which this blog uses right now. So maybe, if I can find a few free hours to convert over the minor syntax differences, y'all will get a metapost about that some time soon.

Cheers!

I decided that this website looked a little too much like a product of the early aughts, and decided to redo the theme. Key changes since the last revision:

• No more Bootstrap
• No more JavaScript (except for Commento and GoatCounter, neither of which impacts any important functionality)
• Simpler layout that looks more like Web 1.0 and works better with browser-default stylesheets.
• Some more-modern CSS features (all flexbox all the time, variables for all colors, a less-janky dark mode than before, using the ch unit for some text width things)

Hopefully it's a little less visually-distracting. 🤷

If you want to talk about it, you can leave a comment below, or come find me on Mastodon.

Unfortunately, the Mastodon server I've been on for the last few years (mastodon.technology; since 2018) is shutting down next month. Thankfully, the decentralized nature of Mastodon means that it's pretty easy to jump ship to another server¹, and there are even semi-automated migration tools. Since Twitter seems to be about to dive back into being the hosting platform of choice for neo-nazis, I don't want there to be any gap in my Fediverse access; I've set up a new Mastodon account at @roguelazer@tenforward.social². Hopefully it'll be another great community, like mastodon.technology was.

Today was my last day at EasyPost. At a bit over seven years¹ this was the longest-running job I've ever had, which is very odd to think about. In those seven years, the company's grown from 10 people sitting around a scavenged table in another company's lobby on 2^nd St in San Francisco to a large enterprise with a veritable hydra of subsidiaries and hundreds of employees; from one transaction per second to thousands; from 50,000 SLoC in one monolithic application to several million SLoC in hundreds of microservices. While I was at EasyPost, I seem to have done 19,752 commits (1,226,816 +, 995,640 -), which is about 25% of the total commits across the codebases. Those commits led to 11,096 deploys, so I guess I didn't quite nail the continuous integration thing. I also built a few teams, ran hundreds of trainings on various topics, and attended somewhere in the vicinity of 4,000 meetings. Oh yeah, and I also wrote a bunch of blog posts².

In retrospect, seven years is probably too long to stay at a startup... We built a bunch of neat stuff, but at some point every startup either fails or lives to see itself become an enterprise. Anyhow, I'm off to another very small company where I can learn some new things and build some new products. I'm sure you'll hear about it here soon.