🦿 Lucian Marin I'm not giving up on Sublevel even if I'm the only user. I think it's gonna be great since web tech will evolve and I'll adopt everything that works. Let's see if I can bring editing...
Mark Dain The constant change *is what killed* Sublevel. Nobody could rely on features being available as they kept being pulled or changed so frequently -- messages, API, images. Even when I was away, there's posts about the "chat UI" being gone? If you want to retain users, perhaps do these experiments on a subdomain, and ask for people's feedback? Involve the community because *we care* about this product; changes affect us.
🦿 Lucian Marin Thanks for mentioning Sublevel. Good luck with the hosting issues!
Mark Dain Hosting issues?
6y, 10w 1 reply
👽 Paul Webb Hey everyone, the site for my social network is up! socii.network You can sign up for updates and read about the mission.
Mark Dain I've registered for updates as it sounds pretty good; own your data, don't store passwords, etc. If you have an HN account, go to /new as I just posted it; upvote from there!
6y, 10w 1 reply
👽 Paul Webb Oh now photos are gone. Okay.
Mark Dain s/photos/private messages/. 3 times by my count. Better also create an archive.is link incase this message gets deleted like the last one that was critical of Sublevel...
6y, 12w 1 reply
John Olinda Is there still a way to link Sublevel and Pushover? I'd like to set up notifications for replies especially.
Mark Dain No. I think that was a program I wrote (subpush) but Sublevel doesn't (and will probably never have) a stable API, so there's not much you can do aside from scraping HTML. It broke frequently and these days I no longer have the source code.
6y, 16w reply
🦿 Lucian Marin When you take a VR headset off, are you still in virtual reality or are you back to reality? Does it even matter?
Mark Dain Huh... Back to reality, right? (Is this a trick question, or a Matrix reference?)
6y, 21w reply
👽 Paul Webb I really want an Electron version of HolyJit. Slack is TERRIBLE on desktop and I suspect it's a mix of poor coding and Electron's Chromium overhead.
Mark Dain Before Electron we had XULRunner, so websites-as-an-application running on Mozilla code could make a comeback. I'd be willing to bet Servo+Stylo+HolyJit would be much better than Electron. You know, it's funny that Atom is slowly rewriting performance sensitive parts in C++ blog.atom.io/2017/... so maybe this whole trend will just go away eventually?
6y, 21w reply
👽 Paul Webb Has anyone tried the new Firefox? It's friggin' amazing. Like, I'll switch to it tmrw from Vivaldi good. Obviously, it's still in beta so some things need fixing but I'm liking it a lot.
Mark Dain Firefox Quantum [?]. I've been using the nightly builds for some time, it's renewed so much hope I had for Firefox beating the "but Chrome is faster" myth - it only feels faster. Mozilla overhauled the UI to be just as slick. I can't wait to see Firefox in 2018 now they're working on "HolyJit" which is a new JS engine, which, just like Stylo, is written in Rust! Safer and faster than Chrome in the long run, that's my bet.
6y, 21w 4 replies
John Olinda One of the most unsettling things about being a sysadmin is how many problems are resolved - sometimes permanently - with a reboot. I can't even begin to remember all the problems that I've never gotten to the bottom of because they popped up once and never again.
Mark Dain This! Yeah, I managed to find the issue - it was another, unrelated service (with another unrelated timer) that was launching it. The unrelated service just had the wrong ExecStart value, and was broken but nobody knew. As for why that never fired on the test server - that particular timer is disabled. The only thing I didn't figure out was why when first installed it would run at 2:30 AM rather than 1:30 AM, but everything has stabilized now.
6y, 21w reply
Eric What does it do when it's set to 13:30?
Mark Dain I'll have to check Monday (which may be fine as I rebooted Friday). I'd be completely confused if 13:30 worked as the development server is fine with 1:30... honestly I'd bet a reboot will fix it, and this problem won't ever show up again. If that happens, I guess it can be chalked up to "computers aren't perfect". Bugs exist in systemd, Linux, Xen, and processors themselves
6y, 22w 2 replies
Mark Dain I have a problem at work I'm stuck on and I can't find anything online about this bug. Has anyone ever had a systemd timer configured `OnCalendar=*-*-* 01:30:00` (so 1:30 AM) but it's firing _every 12 hours_?! It runs 1:30 PM too as well as 1:30 AM. Other Linux boxes with "identical, as far as I can tell" configuration behave properly (run once every 24 hours at 1:30 AM). Ubuntu/17.04, Linux/4.9.36, systemd/232. Any tips greatly appreciated, been stuck for days on this!
Eric What does it do when it's set to 13:30?
6y, 22w 3 replies
Nkrs I am not the guy who customizes his programming tools to the extreme levels, but there is a short list of things I usually do, one of which is making sure that Visual Studio stops putting curly braces on separate lines.
Mark Dain You monster
6y, 22w 1 reply
🦿 Lucian Marin It's on localhost. But with telnet you can issue commands and keep result history. It can be replaced with nc, but you have to use echo. Anyway, it's not a big deal. But I still don't trust Apple with APFS. I will skip High Sierra unless I buy a new MacBook Pro.
Mark Dain Oh 100% -- I've heard multiple APFS horror stories, like encrypting an HFS+ volume but High Sierra transparently changed it to APFS (no warning or indication). Disabling encryption didn't revert it back to HFS+ which can't be done as far as I know, so now the volume is unreadable in earlier Macs. There's also Unicode issues with low level usage as normalization is now done higher than filesystem level.
6y, 22w reply
John Olinda That's definitely along the lines that I'm considering. It would have some built-in data based on common questions teachers get. I guess the only additional component is being able to add information to the bot interactively. So I could cc it on my class emails and it would parse them (I use the same format every day) and then reply to student requests based on that data.
Mark Dain Hmm, I suppose if you used a database with the final (cleaned up) list of questions, you could have it receive the email and add to it. I'm not sure how to have a program receive emails, other than have it poll IMAP every few minutes. Definitely seems feasible. I'd be willing to help you write it - just message me on IRC, probably this weekend.
6y, 22w 1 reply
John Olinda So I've been rattling around an idea for a tool that functions as a teacher's assistant, via email (or I suppose chat would work as well). It would be designed to interact with teachers, students, and parents to remind about upcoming assignments and calendar events. I'm assuming there are projects similar to this in the wild, but I'm wondering what would be required to roll my own. Probably too much.
Mark Dain Sounds a bit like a tool I built at my company. It's a Slack bot that responds to various questions about Linux usage (not everyone is comfortable with command line usage). Simple questions like "how do I create files?" will reply with a message about touch and about available text editors (it'll always recommend nano). More complicated questions, it provides wiki links. It can also handle poorly written questions like "hwo to delte directory???". Honestly, it just cleans up the input a bit, then uses a gigantic regex. Works better than you'd think.
6y, 22w 3 replies
🦿 Lucian Marin Apple removed telnet from High Sierra. I used it to connect to memcached. Apple is really going downhill. Should I get an average PC and install Linux?
Mark Dain I *really* hope that memcached instance was on your local network. Telnet isn't encrypted and anything data sent is open for people to see. Apple also removed PPP based VPNs because they have ancient and broken encryption & authentication. Similar effort: App Transport Security. You just shouldn't be using Telnet, rather SSH if you can - that's what they're thinking. If you absolutely need it, you could SSH in and use Telnet on 127.0.0.1? It's probably also available on Homebrew. Apple isn't going downhill, they're discouraging insecure practices
6y, 22w 2 replies