The wind station has gone through its
third and hopefully final R&D iteration, and I think now it's alright - but
it was a bit of an odyssey to get to this point.
click here for the rest of the story...
fail2ban is meant as a comprehensive tool for reacting to bad stuff showing up in various logs. things like 'if more than 3 bad passwords in the last 10 minutes, block the user/ip for a while'.
but somehow i don't like it. at all. i think it's an obese beast, with overcomplicated rules and not a lot of flexibility.
but the basic idea is quite sensible. so i wrote a variation of fail2ban for my own purposes: banban. it's tiny, it reacts fast and it does just enough to make it worthwhile.
banban has just hit github, and the single-page documentation is there too.
Even its original perpetrator agrees.
I don't like my browser running code provided by strangers (who are very unlikely to have my best interests at heart).
On the other hand, having a site that works reasonably well with dinky screens is nice.
Combine those two sentiments with my love of tinkering, and it won't
come as a big surprise that I eventually did find a way to have both
responsive layout with a popup navigation menu, but without any JS (or
server-side magic).
click here for the rest of the story...
The Windows 10 announcement: certified hardware can lock out competing OSes means that it would become much easier and more common that the computer you've just bought does not boot anything but MS shiteware.
i find it hilarious that Linus
named git
(version control system) after git (british term of endearment).
being an argumentative bastard myself, i do like git.
being an argumentative bastard who believes in sharing, i've started putting up some of my shareables on github: https://github.com/az143
many ages ago i was using mrtg (more or less happily)
to collect service and performance data for my personal infrastructure,
and created a collector script then called bigstat which worked both
locally on the box with mrtg and remotely on clients. naturally that's all
ancient non-news: mrtg is dead, all hail rrdtool.
click here for the rest of the story...
This site was changed over to markdown-based authoring almost two years ago, but the back end always was a bit sluggish. Naturally I cache the converted data, so this wasn't a big issue until now.
Yesterday I reworked everything with a new css base (purecss.io, quite nice, and a few silly glyphicons from fontawesome.io, just because I can). Now the site should almost work properly for mobile kit, and it's still all pure CSS and no Eczemascript whatsoever.
While experimenting and hacking that stuff up I saw that some pages really really took time to prime. As it turns out, good old standard Text::Markdown is horribly slow. A number of my source articles took 5+ seconds to convert, each, and these are mostly very simple files. Can't have that.
So, today I completely reworked the back end with redis as an optional cache across processes /and/ a better markdown renderer.
markdown is not exactly strictly "standardized", and there's only discount as a practical alternative (for me), but that's primarily a C library and a command line tool. There's a perl wrapper for the library, Text::Markdown::Discount, but that thing is utter garbage (no access to the options, internal gotchas in the code etc.).
And discount is weird; it's got all those 'useful extensions' snort to
the markdown syntax, most of which suck and many of which are on
by default. yay!
So, in the end I resorted to fork+execing a discount process for every conversion, but that still takes only 4 milliseconds on average...not 5+ seconds
as before.
Anyway, long story short, now it works properly. Still, I have to say it: ASS. A_NonStandardStandards_S, too - but then most of the Standard Standards are no much better.
(And should you be unfamiliar with the phrase "down, not across" - that's the ASR motto, being the effective way to slit your wrists.)
Beim Herumstöbern bin ich über diesen ÖBB-Unfallbericht gestolpert, und hab den sehr lustig gefunden.
(Den Italienern ist eine unbemannte ÖBB-Lok Richtung Villach "ausgekommen" und dem Bericht nach sind daraufhin alle kurz wie die kopflosen Hendln herumgelaufen.)
Der Bericht selbst ist wunderbar. Die Formulierungen sind eine wilde Mischung aus Altösterreichischem Amtsdeutsch, elendigen Abkz. u.dgl. - und sehr witzigen Nacherzählungen bzw. Übersetzungen der Zeugenaussagen.
Auf Seite 13 lässt sich da der Italienische Chef gscheit aus, und auf Seite 17 wird klargemacht dass zum "Energischen Auffordern" das mit den Armen wacheln ganz klar dazugehört.
Insgesamt sehr Österreichisch, das Ganze.
