Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 22, 2023

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Duelin' Boots

    I tried dual-booting back in the very late 1990s, Mac OS and I think it was Yellow Dog Linux. Since then, not so much. Problems include the installers or updators elbowing one another, which may result in one or more systems that cannot boot, and do you have the time and skill to debug and fix that? Or how many on IRC or a forum will be dragged along when the waters turn out to be a bit too swift and deep? There is also generally a lack of security updates until the other operating system(s) can be booted, which means frequent reboots, or a virtual mandate that urgent security updates be installed before the long-since-rebooted OS can more safely be used. Also dual-booting may not mix well with configuration management, in particular the kind that is push based. Or maybe the different OS do different things to set the clock on the motherboard, and now you have unexpected time sync problems? Dual booting is more complicated and time consuming than any benefit provided, in my view: you have not only multiple operating systems to maintain, but also the potential for bootloader and hardware level interactions between them, and various security and configuration management drawbacks. Do you have the time for that?

    "Mac OS" probably needs to be tagged with "Classic" these days; this was before Mac OS X 10.0.0 came out. Also I guess postings are supposed to have stock photos in them? I haven't used any modern AI, so here's something cropped with ImageMagick.

  • Advice about computers

    A few days ago, one of our patrons asked for advice about computers. And a good patron gave some recommendations. I checked them out.

    I won't go into the details now, but suffice it to say, that I'm not a tech guy. The limited knowledge I have about technology is purely out of interest.

    A brief background on why I'm making this post is that many years ago, I went to buy a computer, and I got ripped off. I didn't even realize that until I talked to my brother, and he got visibly upset.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • How wonderful to be able to count on two-fold Geminaut quality

      winter was one of the first I started reading courtesy of Antenna. And not once have I been let down by the quality of their writing and character. Grant it, that means I feel above average embarrassed, because by comparison I feel more a hack of a former, and impolite cretin in the latter. Oh, to able to write like that *and* not get involved in variations on the theme of participatory selfishness.

    • Reduced Site Functionality

      I somehow managed to introduce a bug into this site's configuration. It manifests as one of processes serving the site eating all the CPU resources. Every day there seems to be about zero to three of these.

      As I can't debug such rare events, I need to rely on logging but my efforts so far haven't been successful. So now what I'm doing is that I'm disabling part of this site's functionality, piece by piece. Let's see whether I can pare it down to a set that no longer runs into the problem.

    • Thinking about switching away from Oddmuse

      Oddmuse started out as a CGI script written in Perl. This is great for very small and dynamic sites: Most of the time, nobody is visiting and the process isn't running. As activity increases (and search engines and bots activity increases!) a CGI script is an increasingly bad idea. Every time, you load the Perl binary, it loads the script, parses the script, runs the script, loads the libraries, parses the libraries, and so on.

      These days, I run a Mojolicious server which keeps the script in memory and reruns it for every request. The webserver acts as a proxy server for all of this. And it's somewhat tricky: Every now and then there are processes that won't die, accumulating, see 2023-06-28 Reduced Site Functionality.

    • Bots crawling my sites

      I'm thinking about blocking all bots from my website. But where to start? How about this: Check the access.log file (I use Apache as my web server). If the User Agent Field contains the word "bot" that sounds like a candidate? Let's see!

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.