Range wars of the Net
Sunday 25 April 2021, 08:06The beginning of the 2020s has seen a great acceleration in creeping attempts to co-opt the online world for the service of the USA's political tribes. The overriding principle seems to be that no space can be allowed to remain free of political charge. Neutrality is claimed to be impossible. Every community has to choose a side, any attempt to avoid taking a side is pointed at as supposedly a "dog whistle" of taking the wrong side, and which side everybody is on is more important than any other purpose the space could serve.
Notes on the plague year
Sunday 7 March 2021, 14:39I don't remember exactly when I made a specific decision to start serious anti-COVID precautions, but it was very close to one year ago today. I work from home and I don't take all that many trips elsewhere anyway, so it's hard to say that a given day is exactly when I started "staying home" if I normally wouldn't have gone out the day before or after it anyway. I started keeping a near-daily journal on March 10. Here are some notes, going month by month.
qrcodeのパッケージもスゴイ
Sunday 20 December 2020, 07:01毎年日本語の練習のためにTeX & LaTeXのブログを書きます。 今年に#texadvent2020のテーマは「このパッケージもスゴイ！」とです。 さて、僕はqrcodeのパッケージがそれものです。 なぜと思いましょう。
It's so hard to find good help
Saturday 21 November 2020, 08:51Your friend Andy tells you that he's planning to move to a new apartment next Saturday, and asks you to help. How do you help Andy? Maybe you'll show up at the old place on Saturday, help him load boxes onto the truck, and unload them at the new place. Helping Andy means participating in the achievement of his goal - actually doing some of the work yourself so that he doesn't have to.
The bridge across Avon Gorge
Thursday 12 November 2020, 10:45The question has come up of building a bridge across the Avon Gorge. Davies, who manages the funds, says the project must be abandoned because it is technically impossible. Isambard, the engineer, says it can be done.
The painting of Boyarynya Morozova
Monday 2 November 2020, 19:13Since about 2016 I've been using this image as the banner on most of my social media profiles. It is a painting called Boyarynya Morozova by Vasily Surikov, depicting Feodosia Prokopiyevna Morozova (the term Boyarynya is a title of nobility similar to "Duchess") being dragged away in chains in 1671 at the order of Tsar Alexis I. She was tortured and imprisoned until dying of starvation on November 2, 1675; 345 years ago to the day, as I'm writing this. These events were part of an upheaval called the Raskol in the Russian Orthodox Church during the mid-17th Century, which led to Morozova's faction splitting off to become the group known as the Old Believers, who still exist, but are rather few and obscure, today.
Pandemic: the reckoning
Sunday 2 August 2020, 18:33The word "reckoning" came up a lot in discussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially early on as the world just started to realize the scale of the problem. I've seen a lot of people grimly commenting that "there will be a reckoning for this" in response to things like media dismissal of early warnings, followed by later media endorsement of exactly the positions they had earlier mocked. I've made such comments myself. It's human nature to hope for a reckoning, but at this point I don't think it's rational to expect one.
Shining Path
Saturday 14 March 2020, 12:44I finished the manuscript for my first professional-grade novel in 2011, spent a few years trying to find an agent to represent it to publishers, and then shelved it as the demands of other parts of my life took priority. Now, I've posted it online at https://shiningpathbook.com/ . Please share that link widely.
It's a 100,000-word book in a genre I would describe as dark anime science fiction. Drugs, sex, religion, gangsters, catgirls.
Take it to Zdrabko
Sunday 23 February 2020, 12:16Many years ago, when I was less than half my current age, I worked at a software company where they had a unique engineering process I haven't seen anywhere else. It was called something like "taking it to Strafco"; it wasn't a written-down process and when I first heard about it I wasn't sure of the spelling, but that was what it sounded like.
Apache, PHP-FPM, chroot jails, MediaWiki, MySQL, and so on
Wednesday 22 January 2020, 12:12These are some notes on configuring Apache httpd to run large PHP applications via PHP-FPM in separate chroot jails. I recently had occasion to do that, and I had to find bits and pieces of information about it in many different places around the Net, so I'm compiling these notes both for my own future use and for anyone who's contemplating a similar project. There are a number of subtle details needed to do things like get TeX working (needed for MediaWiki math), configure process-pool policy, and so on. I'm not going to go into much detail on why someone would want to do this, nor background systems administration concepts like "What is a chroot jail?".
