HSTS applied

Now that I’ve had a few months’ experience with Let’s Encrypt, and I have cert renewals completely automated, bobcopeland.com is now fully https and serving HSTS headers. I’m now using acme-tiny to renew the certs, thanks to their dedication to making the code easily auditable.

Now (mostly) encrypted

I signed up for the let’s encrypt beta and got my cert setup today. I let my old CA-purchased cert lapse when it came for re-up a couple of years ago, so happy there’s soon to be a free alternative.

Enjoy the HTTPS! (Except for some stray mixed content I need to kill — sorry for that.)

On Reddit

My lowly internet outpost wound up at the top of /r/programming on Reddit over Easter weekend due to my silly goto-in-bash hack. It turns out that that one page is probably the most searched-for out of anything on my website. There are a lot of frustrated shell programmers out there.

Regarding the critiques from the discussion, comments of the form “you’ve an X/Y problem” were least interesting to me. Yes, I know about Makefiles. Sometimes it is fun to do something different, which is known to be far from a best practice, just because one can.

Comments that improved my sed syntax, or provided a historical context, were most interesting. For the record: no, I didn’t intend to use branching in sed as a self-referential nod to the topic du jour, but I like pretending that I was that clever instead of the reality, which is that I just didn’t know the right sed magic. So, I’ll keep the branching.

See if you can spot the traffic spike:

website rebuilt

Until recently, my vhost was running some ancient Ubuntu that was probably vulnerable to all manner of things, so I’ve finally upgraded it to a recent Debian release. A few things are still offline (including the blog theme) so there may be some broken links here and there for a few days until I get around to restoring everything.

I believe I’m going to leave comments off permanently going forward, there’s just too much spam even with it moderated, to the extent that I almost never bother to go through them. Comments out-of-band are always welcome, of course.

IP level up

I’ve changed hosting providers this week, and my new host provisions IPv6 addresses.  Thus, I’ve published an AAAA record today.  The world’s most boring website will survive the IPv4 apocalypse.

WordPress also gained an update, but the importer forgot all settings, tags and categories.  I’ll go back and fix those someday.

Update: someday is now.  I’ve also picked last year’s theme and otherwise modernized the place.  Resume party.  Also, the header image is a pic I snapped of a piece of Eniac.  It’s partially full of tubes.

No comment.

Despite comments requiring moderation before posting, I’ve had a flood of thousands of spam comments over the last few days in the queue and I’m tired of pressing the delete button. Thus, they are disabled for the time being until I can set up something more automated.

Sorry spammers, none of those posts ever made it to any web crawler.

Update: or not. Of course WP makes this hard. Well you can’t comment on this one post at least!

Updates

So the blog mysteriously committed suicide recently, so I took the opportunity to update to the latest WordPress. Everything now seems to be in order. Perhaps I should also upgrade the theme one of these days.

Also committing suicide this weekend was the two year old Ubuntu installation on my laptop. The automatic upgrade to 10.04 resulted in a non-bootable mess (it turns out this was merely foreshadowing), so I took a backup and then dropped the F15 alpha on it to see what the Gnome3 Shell hubbub is all about. It does make my computer feel like a giant cell phone, but I do actually hate it less than I thought I would. We’ll see if that faint praise holds up after I use it a bit. The actual F15 installation took four tries, all due to my Macbook’s quirky half-EFI, half-BIOS firmware. No manner of coercion would convince Fedora to make a hybrid GPT/MBR partition table that actually booted, so I eventually gave up and just created a plain MBR with fdisk and that was that. A full day of reloading the backup and updating packages later, and I am back to a functional desktop, sans all those pesky minimize buttons.

We’re back

A little bit of technical difficulty today while updating the blog software, but all seems to be in order now. Did I mention how non-awesome the wordpress codebase is?

Re-opening

Welcome old and new readers to my blog’s new home. This used to be hosted elsewhere on the net, but I eventually grew annoyed with that provider. Most of the old content survived the move (by the way, a rather fearsome and annoying task. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the wordpress codebase last weekend. Oh, don’t turn on threaded comments, it’s borked.)

So why the title? This blog began without any real theme, just random observations, trivialities of my life, and so on. Lately however it has also been a useful place to discourse on my technical projects and other computer age detritus. So insignificant bits, both the minutia of the day to day, and the rightmost digits in a binary number. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anyway, here’s hoping that I at least maintain the same level of awesome that you’ve come to expect from me (.002 milli-awesomes per post).

Ads

Anyone in the interweb know why my LJ now has an ad sidebar, when I’ve explicitly opted out of the ad-supported-for-useless-goodies account? May it be time to move/shutter this thing?

Update:
Oh. 🙁