Kirsle.net
I blog about anything I find interesting, and since I have a lot of varied interests, my blog entries are kind of all over the place. You can browse my tags to sort them by topic and see which ones I frequently write about, or the archive has a complete history of my posts, dating back to 2008!
Besides my blog, I have pages for my creative projects, which are linked to on the navigation bar.
I write a lot about Linux and Android, Minecraft, and I like to rant about stuff. Generally anything that makes me curious. Also check out my Bookmarks for all sorts of cool websites about various topics I'm interested in.
For the geeks: this website respects your privacy and doesn't run any third party ads or analytics. This site speaks HTTP and doesn't require any JavaScript to work.
New Server LayoutIt's been on my to-do list for a while, and I've finally begun the process of rearranging my personal servers.
I've always treated my personal servers like pets rather than cattle, usually only having a single server hosted somewhere that runs all of my things. Most recently this took the form of a single Digital Ocean VPS that I named ocean.kirsle.net and that costs $40/mo. for 4GB RAM, and it ran all sorts of things:
kirsle.net and a lot of legacy sites that don't even point to my server anymore but that I still had the document roots for./dev/tap device).The various sources of pressure that got me to finally start doing something about this include:
ocean.kirsle.net was hosted in SFO-1 but Block Storage was only available in SFO-2, so I wanted to eventually migrate to one of the data centers that supports this feature.mail.kirsle.net VPS so that I'd only have to configure mail one more time, but it wasn't going very well so I decided to go back to Google Apps for my e-mail. I still have a grandfathered free account there, anyway.So, now I have a new server named web.kirsle.net that's only $10 for 1GB RAM and it hosts all my simple websites, including this one! It took about four hours to migrate all my websites over, and in the process I also stopped hosting many random things. Like I don't use Piwik Analytics anymore (a PHP app), nor do I host a Git server now. The new server is so much lighter than the old one for it. I don't even have PHP installed, or Apache either.
My Minecraft server will be moved to its own VPS shortly, before I finish decommissioning ocean.kirsle.net. I'll eventually add more servers when I need to in the future too, e.g. to have a dedicated server for databases.
I've made a few updates to how my web blog handles user comments:
The gory technical details are in the pull request.
This is Part 1 in a series of blog posts about my adventures programming chatterbots for instant messengers in the early 2000's. In this series of posts, I'll focus on one instant messenger at a time and dive into the interesting quirks and challenges we botmakers faced when programming bots for them.
The order of the posts will roughly start "from the beginning." This is Part One: AOL Instant Messenger.
A very long time ago, I stumbled upon this article "Use Java for Everything". While I disagree that you should use Java for everything (or any programming language, for that matter), the author mentions that he wrote a wrapper script that lets him use Java for shell scripts (ones where you execute the Java source file directly, without the "write, compile, run" steps).
I wanted to do something similar for Go, because I had a very simple Go program I wanted to be able to throw into my .dotfiles repo and run without needing to do too many things first: a simple static HTTP server.
Besides computers and technology, something else I'm really nerdy about is science (like physics, astronomy and quantum mechanics), and something really fascinating that I admittedly don't understand is quantum physics. But I'm not going to talk too much about that on this post; instead this post will consist of more philosophical and theoretical musings related to it and what it might all mean. Some of it is my own; some is inspired by others.
Manually managing a music collection of MP3 files on disk is such a pain in the ass that I felt like blogging about it.
First, you have cloud music services like Google Play Music which can't detect duplicates properly.
The next version of Fedora (24) is coming out soon, so I decided a couple weeks ago that I'd take a tour of all the different desktop environments and see if I like any of them enough to switch from Xfce. My original desktop environment of choice was GNOME 2, and I had jumped ship to Xfce after GNOME 3 was released because I was no fan of the tablet-focused, feature-stripped interface of the new desktop and GNOME 2.32 was, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the desktop metaphor for Linux.
...and I don't mean by writing this post. ;)
I run Kirsle.net on a custom Python CMS I wrote called Rophako and I just added a bunch of improvements to the blog platform in it.
I've been wanting to start working on some larger blog articles, things that could take me a few days to write, and my blog had no support for saving drafts. You had to write and publish your blog posts in one sitting. The only alternative was to make the posts "private," where only the site admin(s) can see them, but that would still cause them to "go live" and be listed along with normal public posts and was a messy workaround.
So now my blogging platform has proper support for saving drafts; they stay invisible (even for admins) on all of the normal blog pages, and can only be seen in bulk on a dedicated "drafts" page. While I was putting all that together, I added similar support for private posts, giving them their own index too where you can see only those posts rather than have to go hunting for them.
For visibility purposes, draft and private posts get little tags next to their author/date lines so an admin can tell at a glance what they're looking at. Normal end users won't see those, though. ;)
I've also finally implemented a feature I wanted to from the beginning: sticky posts. The blog database schema has always had a "sticky" field, but it was always set to false and the Create/Edit Post page gave no way to change that value. The back-end code did have logic to bucket sticky posts higher on the index list than normal ones, but there was no (easy) way to make a post sticky to begin with.
Sticky posts will also get a little "[Sticky]" tag next to their author/date lines, and those ones can be seen by normal end users.
I also fixed a handful of smaller bugs/problems. I've removed the ability to set a custom date/time when editing a blog post. This caused confusion between your web browser's local time and the time zone of the server. So instead, the server always picks the latest UTC Unix time on new entries. When editing an existing entry, there's a checkbox option to reset the time to latest when saving, if you want to bump an old post to the top.
In user interface and software design, the principle of least astonishment states that "if a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature." It means that your user interface should behave in a way that the user expects, based on their prior knowledge of how similar interfaces behave.
This is a rant about Mac OS X.
This is a cool tip I picked up from checking out other peoples' Go projects.
When you're new to Go, the documentation tells you about $GOPATH which tells Go where to install packages and where the source codes to your project and its dependencies live. A lot of people might set $GOPATH to be $HOME/go, and work on their projects out of ~/go/src/github.com/myname/myproject.
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