Blog - 2

Every summer I tend to do some construction work. By construction, I don't mean writing software or fiddling around with computers. By this I actually mean the act of building something from timber and bricks by attaching stuff together with screws and nails to form something new. Any person who owns property knows there is always something needing fixing, facelift or demolition. Also, anybody who has taken such a venture will also know how you can sink your time and money while at it. In case you didn't get the hint: what I'm trying to do here is explain my absence of blogging.

This year, I tore down the back terrace and re-built it. While at it (btw. its not completed yet), I found number of analogies with software engineering. Initially I had a perfectly good back terrace which (almost) served its purpose. It wasn't perfectly architected nor implemented, it was kinda thrown together like your basic PHP-website. It kinda worked, but there were a few kinks here and there. And to be absolutely clear: I didn't architect nor implement the original one. I just happened to be there, use it and eventually alter the original spec.

On moving in, I ordered really nice glassing to the terrace. Everything worked fine for many years and I was happy. This same thing happens with your really cheap hosting provider, years pass by and eventually it will the hit the fan. When it happens, you're left alone without any kind of support wondering what happened and how you're going to fix the site. I found out that by adding the terrace glassing, I had altered the requirements. Now there existed an implicit requirement for the terrace to stay level, as in not move. At all. Any minuscule movement will be ... well ... not good for your glassing making the glasses not slide in their assigned rails as well as originally intended. Exactly like your cheap website, I had no idea how the entire thing was architected. And any new requirements would de-rail the implementation (in this case: literally) making reality hit me into forehead (in this case: literally). During those years of successful living the terrace had moved and sunk a bit into soft sand. Not much, but enough for the glassings to mis-fit.

Upon realizing this, there was no real alternative. Old design had to go and new one needed to be made. Like in a software project, I begun by investigating what was implemented. In construction you would read this as: removing already constructed materials enough to be able to determine how the terrace was founded and how it was put together. In software engineering investigation is always easier and less intrusive leaving no gaping holes to structure. In this project I simply took a crowbar and let it rip. Also, during re-thinking period I came up with completely new requirements. Obviously I didn't want the thing to be sinking nor moving, I also wanted to have the bottom rails of the glassing on top of something hard instead of wood. Any organic material, like wood, has the tendency to twist, warp, shrink, expand and rot. When talking about millimeter accuracy of a glassing, that's not an optimal attribute in a construction material. Experience has shown, that when wood does all of the mentioned things, it does it in the wrong way making your life miserable. So, no more wood. More bricks.

This is what it nearly looked like in the beginning and how it looks like now (I'm skipping the in-between pics simply because they're boring):

Now everything is back and my new spec has been implemented. During the process of demolition, I yanked out couple of kilos of rusty nails:

Personally, I don't use much nails, not even with a nail gun. My prefenrece, when it makes sense, is always to attach everything with a screw and I think equal amount of screws have been put into appropriate places to hold the thing tightly together.

Moving foward, I obviously want to complete the new terrace extension. Also, I'd love to get back to computer. Blogging, Snowrunner and such.

Summer. Always lots of things to do. Building new deck to backyard. Finally got the motorcycle back to road. Some Snowrunner. Some coding. Lots of reading.

While reading, I bumped into something.

I'll second Mr. Hawkes' opinion. This is my message to all of us during these times of polarization. World leaders all over the Globe are boosting their own popularity by dividing nations to "us" and "them". Not cool. There is no us nor them, there is only we. Everybody needs to burst their own bubble and LISTEN to what others are saying. It's ok to disagree.

22nd June 2020 letters to Editor courtesy of The Times.

Credits to Annamari Sipilä for bringing this up in her column.

Today I'm celebrating. A number of reasons to pop the cork from a bottle of champagne.

1. I cut my corporate AmEx half
2. I'm having a sip from this "open source of water"
3. I'm having number of sips from from the bubbly one and wait for next Tuesday!

Since the inception of this blog back in January 2013, my weapon-of-choice has been CentOS Linux. When looking at the release chart @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#Latest_version_information it becomes obvious this is the 3rd major version of CentOS I'm running my blog on. In 2013 only version 6 was available, I must have upgraded into version 7 during 2014, and now 2019 I'm running on version 8. Given how RedHat and their organization(s) operate, the base Linux for my system is Fedora 28. See Fedora Project releases from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases.

The only motivation for me to upgrade is technology. RHEL/CentOS almost never upgrade their component versions. They do back-port any security patches even if authors of the original ones give up on their obsoleted stuff. RedHat does not. For people loving things how they are, that's a good thing. For people like me, its not that good.

Absolutely necessary things I had earlier, but lost and again have:

• HTTP/2
  • For how and why this differs from HTTP/1.1 everybody else is still using, dive into Mr. Curl's book http2 explained. Its freely available @ https://http2-explained.haxx.se/content/en/
• TLS 1.3
  • TLS versions 1 and 1.1 have been obsoleted. That leaves TLS 1.2 as the almost-only viable secure protocol.
  • Obvious disclaimer for TLS 1.3: As of writing, it is still experimental. In reality not so much. Chrome and Firefox (among other platforms) support TLS 1.3 fully.
  • Cloudflare's Head of Research Nick Sullivan is a known 1.3 enthusiast. Read his thoughts @ https://blog.cloudflare.com/rfc-8446-aka-tls-1-3/.

Other highlights:

• PHP 7.3
  • My blog software runs on PHP. I upgraded 7.2, but am too scared to go for 7.4 yet.
• Native dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 networking. This is courtesy of my service provider.
• TLS 1.2 configured to not support any CBC-ciphers, for details see Why did TLS 1.3 drop AES-CBC? as an example
  • Inspiration for this taken from Cipherli.st and Security/Server Side TLS on Mozilla wiki.
  • Apologies for anybody using IE 11 on Windows Phone 8.1, or Safari versions 6-8 on iOS 6-9/OS X 10.9 or 10.10. You won't see this text as your devices/operating systems won't support my reasonably secure settings.
  • For everybody else: Congratulations on having a decently secure device to do your Internet browsing with.
• tmux
  • Terminal multiplexer, https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki
  • Most of you just SSH into a server and be happy with it. I almost always run my sessions trough something that will keep my work safe if a disconnection occurs. To my surprise I keep bumping into sysadmins who don't either know about this or don't see this as a necessary approach.
  • I've ran GNU Screen for over 25 years now. Not anymore. Uff!
• nftables (https://wiki.nftables.org/), courtesy of RHEL 8 / CentOS 8
  • the new packet classification framework that replaces the existing {ip,ip6,arp,eb}_tables infrastructure
  • I've ran IPchains / IPtables for 21 years now. Not anymore. Arf!

Qualsys report on my blog now:

Nice!

Next up: CentOS Stream.
A new attempt to allow change of software versions. This will effectively detach CentOS from RHEL and gear it towards Fedora. This enables CentOS to get newer software as a rolling release Linux-distro, but keep the changes not-so-aggressive.
I won't run this yet on my blog server. This is so new at this point, but I'll have it running on a devel-box.
 

Two years ago I was forced to move my blog out of my own co-located server due to hardware failure. At the time moving to Microsoft Azure cloud made all the sense. Today, I'm not running from Azure anymore.

At the point, I had been working closely with AWS for serveral years, so going there didn't make any sense from learning perspective. As I wanted to properly learn Azure, I went there with my hobby.

Regret is a strong word. I don't regret that decision, but almost do. For those two years I was struggling with performance. PostgreSQL DB was running as a service (Azure Database for PostgreSQL), so it didn't eat those precious resources from my virtual machine. My VM was a DS1 v2, so it was the obvious bottleneck. Going for a bigger one for a hobby in Azure didn't make any sense costwise.

Personally those years helped a lot. I've been working with Azure projects over the recent year and even gained certification for that. The previous experience gained from running my blog, obviously, was beneficial. All that being said, it's time to move on.

My new hosting provider is a small Finnish one providing affordable VMs packing reasonable punch for buck. I still have IPv6 and all the fancy stuff. At the time of writing, I don't have HTTP/2, but I'm working with that. The most important thing is: there is more power. The blog response times are much better now.

If you feel something is off, please drop me a comment!

Yup.

Passed that one yesterday. For those intersted, it was a AZ-203: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure exam.

Previous one was 21 years ago:

Notice how they misspelled my name. Argh!
I bet many of you haven't used Windows NT4.0 Workstation for a while (or ever).

Also notice how the certification was issued by Mr. Bill Gates himself!

Going back in the memory lane, back in 2009 Mr. Wroblewski coined up a term "mobile first". At the time pocket computers, or not-so smart phones where a new thing, but booming heavily. First iPad wasn't out there and tablet computing was merely a curiosity. Still Mr. Wroblewski envisioned a future, where most of the web browsing would be done with a mobile device.

To state the obvious: Mr. Wroblewski was not wrong in his statement. His future vision started becoming a reality in April 2015 when Google as the #1 authority on website content, announced they would be demoting pages not being mobile user friendly. In November 2016 Google announced Mobile-first Indexing initiative. In March 2018 they followed up on that and started rolling out mobile-first indexing.

Rougly past 4-5 years this blog of mine has been suffering from this demotion and I really started taking the hit in 2018. Originally I chose this paper-style theme for this blog when I first created it in 2013, and it has been unchanged ever since. Not doing anything about it was an obvious mistake on my part. However, it took a while for Serendipity theme repository to even have properly implemented responsive design themes, so it was impossible for me to change the theme. Still, why would I even want to change the way my blog looks like!

Finally: I chose to improve the theme by making it responsive. In practice, I bootstrapped it with Bootstrap. This is a super-cool project originally created by few guys at Twitter. Read the Wikipedia article about that at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_(front-end_framework). Getting to understand the 12 column grid system takes a while, but when you do the groundwork of arranging page content to rows and columns and realize that you can get six different chunks of display real estate by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 columns depending on user's screen size, the results will be amazing! Most of this trickery doesn't even require any JavaScript to run. Adding floating navigation bars and such will require JS, but majority of the goodies work fully on bare HTML/CSS.

So, this is where I stared my journey with:

Google Mobile-Friendly Test spits out a lot of grievance from my blog.

This is the result with this new theme applied:

Oh yeah! Now GoogleBot should be much happier with this one. For those of you who want to play around with this, just go make the browser window very narrow and see the point where screen breaks and drops the right side menu off. To access the goodies on right side menu, a hamburger menu will be added to the top of the page.

GoogleBot tester isn't completely happy about my page, there are some load errors. However, I'm not sure exactly what the load errors are as they're labeled "other". Tons of people in The Net are suffering the same. Warning says:

Page partially loaded
Not all page resources could be loaded. This can affect how Google sees and understands your page. Fix availability problems for any resources that can affect how Google understands your page.

Based on lot of other people's comments found in web, the "errors" are merely warnings and they may or may not reduce the page rank. I'm agreeing with some people commenting, that the test Googlebot smartphone client is using super-short timeouts forcing people to optimize their websites to do as little loading as fast as possible.

The standard disclaimer applies:
If any of you think, that this theme doesn't work properly or I did something wrong. Drop me a comment or go to my Github fork at https://github.com/HQJaTu/additional_themes/tree/brownpaper-r2 and create a new pull request. I'm more than interested in keeping this new theme running optimally.

Some of you may have noticed I've been busy doing everything else but blogging.

There were number of reasons:

1. No shoes -phenomenon
   • What I do for living (and past-time) is build/maintain/hack systems. Some of them running web applications such as this cloud Azure VM Nginx/PHP/PostgreSQL -thingie.
   • Sometimes just starting a tedious task of fixing/updating/repairing a server instead of playing The Division or Far Cry doesn't do the trick for me. I choose to play for entertainment and not update the server.
   • Ref.: The Cobbler's children have no shoes
2. PHP 5.6 support EOL
   • See https://secure.php.net/supported-versions.php for details
   • This blog has been running on 5.6 for years and to get that updated, I had to re-asses configurations to get 7.2 running. Not an easy task, but had to be done to go forward.
3. Serendipity 2.1 upgrade
   • Most of you have never realized, I wouldn't touch Wordpress with a 9 foot pole. This blog runs on Serendipity (aka s9y).
   • Previous version of S9y 2.0 wouldn't run correctly with PHP 7.2, so I had to go for this upgrade too.
   • See https://docs.s9y.org/ for details.
4. Mobile template
   • This blog gets reasonable Page Rank from Google, but it really suffers from not being very good when displayed on a mobile device.
   • See #1 above. This is what I do for living. It should be not a complicated task to strap Bootstrap boot on top of the theme.
   • See http://blog.s9y.org/index.php?user_template=additional_themes/brownpaper

What hasn't changed: I'm still in Microsoft Azure, running CentOS 7.

The mobile version of Brown Paper is still under work in my lab VM, but it will be out soon. I promise!

Next Saturday, on 6th October, I'll be joining (again) with Larpdog on his Twitch-channel https://www.twitch.tv/larpdog to assemble my new PC. The stream language will be Finnish and we will start on 17 Finnish summer time, making it 14 UTC.

This is something similar we did last year (see the post about it).
Unfortunately Twitch-videos are kept only for 14 days, so that recording link has gone sour.

Update:

Link to the stream is https://www.twitch.tv/videos/319110553

The summer here in Finland has been extremely warm. Given that, I've mostly not been inside doing computer-things, but outside doing outdoorsy things. Here we get couple good months per year, if we're lucky, so I decided to enjoy them fully.

Besides SUPping around the Lake Saimaa, I got a DJI Phantom 3 quadcopter to test out. At the time of writing, I already returned the loaner.

The thing looks like this, when the controller has my iPad attached to it:

Here is some sample footage:

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/w-ISgv08ad0

Just getting the thing flying is pretty easy, but controlling it in a sensible fashion so that the 4K-camera would actually capture a beautiful video is very hard. The above video is a first run and it has tons of camera operator mistakes in it. Some of my un-published videos I did do 3-4 runs to get it right. Still, flying the thing was tons of fun.

Again, bit of a pause from blogging. I dragged my ass back to Finland. See my post from last year about moving to Sweden for further info.

I served my contract at King and chose not to continue there. The reasoning was actually very simple: my entire life has always been and is in Finland. Taking a brief side-step and living abroad was fun and all, but quite soon it become obvious, that I cannot sustain that for very long time.

So, I started a new job and am trying to continue my projects here. That does include some hacking and blogging about that.

Today, I had my last day at King. Right now I'm toasting this fine drink to my wonderful ex-colleagues.

Next I'm taking a breather and next week starting something new back in Finland!

Ok. It's dead! It won't live long.

That seems to suprise few people. I know it did surprise me.
Google has had this info in their website for couple years already:

What happens to reCAPTCHA v1?

    Any calls to the v1 API will not work after March 31, 2018.
    Starting in November 2017, a percentage of reCAPTCHA v1 traffic will begin to
    show a notice informing users that the old API will soon be retired.

Yup. This blog showed information like this on comments:

Now that the above deadline is gone, I had to upgrade S9y ReCaptcha plugin from git-repo https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugins/tree/master/serendipity_event_recaptcha. There is no released version having that plugin yet.

Now comments display the v2-style:

To get that running, I simply got the subdirectory of plugins/serendipity_event_recaptcha with the content from Github and went for settings:

I just filled in the new API-keys from https://www.google.com/recaptcha and done! Working! Easy as pie.

Update 5th April 2018:
Today, I found out that Spartacus has ReCaptcha v2 plugin available to S9y users. No need to go the manual installation path.

Today, 6th of December 2017, Finland celebrates its 100 years of independency. That's very convenient, as I'm not there to celebrate with my fellow Finns!

Since somebody lured lot of other states to celebrate with them, lot of the world-known objects were light Finnish-blue. One location from the list is Globen ("-95 nevö föget!"), which is conveniently a brief tunnelbana ride away from my home. For some reason, there are no published pictures of Globen in it's celebratory lighting. So, here goes:

Ok. In reality, the place is called Ericsson Globe, but nobody calls it that. It's just Globen.

Given, that I work in Activision/Blizzard/King -corporation, every once in a while the job has nice perks.

Today, I got to go to CoD WWII launch party in Stockholm!

It was the first time I've been to a launch party of a game ever! Of course a corpo party is a corpo party. Lot of jada-jada, blah-blah and free booze. But a game launch party of course is about the game. There was an option for every party guest to play the game on PS4. Then they had invited couple of Swedish semi-celebs to play in a friendly competition eSports-style 6-vs-6. Btw, the winners went home with brand new CoD WWII special edition PS4s. Insiders told me that all of the celeb-gamers had an option to practice playing the non-released game at the Activision office in Stockholm.

And of course, nobody went home with empty hands. Everybody was given a goodie-bag with a CoD WWII T-shirt and a PS4 store code for the game.

I'm not a huge fan of FPSs on console, so, I think I'm not going to play much that one. I'll wait for some PC Steam-codes to float around the office (eventually they will) and then start playing.