Thought Bricks

I pulled the server out of storage, put it in my office, plugged it in and connected a network cable to the iDRAC port. Based on the work yesterday, I was able to get connected and was able to start the server up. It’s running Ubuntu 20.04 now and i ran apt update && apt upgrade to patch it and make sure the network connection is stable to the Internet. The throughput isn’t great, but it worked.

My principal browser is still Firefox. In some ways, it’s just because it’s different but it also seems to have fewer security and privacy issues than the Chromium Industrial Complex. It’s far from perfect though and a nasty use after free bug was found and fixed this week. It’s somewhat amazing that bugs like this are still found in mature pieces of software, but that is par for the course. It’s easy to forget to set a pointer to NULL after you are done with it and, in a huge codebase, easy to overlook.

As I wrote yesterday, I want to install BSD on a unused Dell server that I’ve got. Before I could get started with that, I had a problem. That problem was getting the server onto my network. It doesn’t have a WiFi card and I’m not sure how well BSD would work with a USB network interface. Since the eero is upstairs, that meant setting up a WiFi to Ethernet bridge.

An article about the boring reliability of BSD in The Register has me intrigued. I don’t have experience working with BSD but I like the concept of an operating system that limits the drama. A quiet backwater where things actually work sounds great. This is not a knock on Linux. Linux is popular for good reason and there are flavors of Linux that appeal to the “move slowly and don’t break things” philosophy in BSD with other distros aiming towards the bleeding edge.

I’ve continued to work on my create server script from time to time. The latest update was checking that we could connect to the Hetzner API using the key that is given and bailing out if we cannot. curl is a interesting and useful tool. curl has been around since 1996 and it is ubiquitous. curl is simple to use: curl https://l10systems will download this website. It’s also very powerful with many, many options.

I got an email from a service that I used to use on a daily basis but had completely forgotten about: OBItalk. This hardware device allowed free use of Google Voice from a homephone. I think we got it about ten years ago and used it as our primary home voice number for at least five or six years. After that, our home line fell into disuse. I think the service still worked until we sold our house and moved a few years ago, but nobody was using it.

I’ve recently read and thought about The Brutalist Programming Manifesto. I love the directness: Keep it simple. Solve problems. Nobody is smarter. Do everything yourself. Strive for robustness. Security is an illusion. Use input devices sensibly. Avoid eye-candy. Don’t depend on tools. Be humble. Don’t work for free unless you like it. Don’t listen to others. Some of it is unrealistic in a professional environment where you have to go along to get along sometimes.

My old MacBook Pro had a serious case of screen mange. The anti-reflective coating had started to peel off, leaving the screen sort of mottled. They called it staining, but I thought it looked more mangey than stained. Anyway, after I got the battery replaced and started to use the MacBook again, the screen started to bother me. I found a couple of articles online about how to fix it and this one seemed to be pretty comprehensive, so I went ahead, got some baking soda and started scrubbing.

I love this AI rant from Ludicity. It’s over the top, but captures the essence of the nonsense that surrounds AI at present. I’m not going to piledrive anyone, but it does seem that the case for AI has been overstated as the technology currently stands. ChatGPT is a very impressive chatbot. If you need a very impressive chatbot, then it’s just the ticket. It will impact certain use cases in business dramatically (e.

I’ve written a couple of scripts to create servers on Hetzner over the years to facilitate small projects and experiementation. My older scripts used the Hetzner CLI which was fine but I wanted a version without that dependency or any other dependencies. So, I rewrote it in bash without the CLI by using curl to call the webservices. Initially, I had used jq to work with the returned JSON but since the requirements were pretty simple, I refactored that out.