So, I made a thing.
I’ve been meaning to host projects I’ve written on my own server, and it’s now available (and has been for a little while, but whatever). The tool I’ve made to do so is here, along with some of my rationale, but I figure I’ll talk about it a bit here.
The site itself exists for both practical and ideological reasons. On the practical side, I don’t have a particularly reliable network connection, so having hosting locally available is helpful.
I’ve talked before about the problems I’ve had with the current clone/fork situation, now it’s time to get into solutions.
I’ve recently mentioned my issues with clone(), though I stopped short of proposing something better. A big part of that is that if I were to propose something better, I’d have to address the other major issues with process creation on *nix.
After witnessing the last American general election and the furor around it, it’s become pretty obvious that American democracy is not really working. People are starting to see that, and lose faith in the democratic system. This is doubly unfortunate, as our system depends on the citizens having faith in the electoral process.
So what do we do? Ideally, we build a better democracy. Incrementally, that is. As much as angsty teenagers would disagree, it’s really not in anyone’s best interest to burn it down and start from scratch.
The clone system call needs a better wrapper, at least on Linux. See, you might have heard about this neat containers thing. Run processes with some actual separation and (the start of) security! Let yourself feel the freedom! And they’re great… as long as you’re not calling the libc functions yourself.
I’ve been playing a lot of Salt and Sanctuary, a game that takes the Dark Souls formula and translates it almost verbatim into 2D. It’s a good game, don’t get me wrong, but the list of things that aren’t straight-up copies of Dark Souls is short. So far the only differences I’ve noticed are the perspective (obviously), the character/weapon progression systems, some added generic NPCs.
Again, it’s not a bad game at all, but it did make me think about the effect Dark Souls has had on games.
A lot has been said about the ‘social media bubbles’ of the modern online world. For those not familiar, the ‘bubble’ is in reference to the effects of the algorithms that Facebook, Google, and the like use to determine what to show you when you use their sites.
The term usually refers to the political echo chambers that these algorithms create. You watch a video/like a comment/click on a search result with a certain percieved political viewpoint and these sites decide that you must want more of that same viewpoint, since they are ‘similar’.
There’s been a report about online voting, positing that it’s inherently at odds with the anonymous vote. As it currently stands, that’s correct.
But does it have to be? Or at least, can it be as well-secured from voting fraud and coercion as the paper ballot is today? I’m not sure. It would be difficult, perhaps unrealistically so, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s possible to build a system with secret sharing and PKI with a trusted third party handling authentication.
Just recently, Microsoft open-sourced PowerShell, and released a Linux version. As a long-time Linux user who gave up Windows for anything other than gaming long ago, this only holds vague interest. I’ve never used PowerShell intentionally, the limit of my experience was when flailing around trying to find something not cmd.exe.
I’ve had coworkers say good things about it, enough that I’ve decided to give it a look through now. I’ve really only given it a cursory glance so far, but it does seem to have interesting bits here and there.
One of the things I’ve been poking around with recently is a hosting solution for APIs on this site (AKA the reverse proxy I’ve mentioned before). I’ve seen things that I’ve liked (mostly sandstorm), and while I’m certainly going to take things from a bunch of other places, it looks like I’m gonna have to do my own. Again. Which I totally don’t regret at all.
But, that’s not what this post is about.