Day changed to 2021-02-01
[20:43] cruciform: jfw, I'm trying to press your mp-wp, but running into the error message: Failed to load GPG key: .wot/hanbot.asc when I try to use ante/descendant/press commands. I've got the patches, seals and .wot files in the right places.
[20:43] cruciform: iirc, this is the same problem I was having with asciilifeform's key when trying to press V.pl, as a result of GPG 2.x ; I think we got around that by changing the install script to use GPG 1.x? Is there anything I can do to fix this problem?
[21:06] cruciform: nevermind the above: I'd derped with regard to getting the correct pubkeys - all fixed!
[22:13] jfw: cruciform: glad you figured it out then. what we did was even described in the recent log though :P
[22:16] jfw: We have a supposedly heavy snowstorm coming through tonight; if I don't check in by 15 UTC tomorrow it probably means the local power is out.
[22:40] cruciform: jfw, yes, indeed - I was trying to describe it in my own words. Having pressed mp-wp, I'm a tad stumped as to how to proceed from here
[22:44] cruciform: I'm currently poking around, trying to setup a LAMP stack
[23:20] jfw: cruciform: describing in your own words is well and good, but then a better way to structure your confusion might read something more like "we got around it by changing something or other; I think it was an install script but your comment only mentions v.pl, is that what that is?"
[23:21] jfw: to which I could reply: not really, in that "installing" means a bit more at least in my usage than what v.pl alone currently does which is mainly pressing, not integrating it into the system in a finished & usable form (e.g. in the search path).
[23:22] jfw: LAMP stack is a good start, yes, as you'll need some idea re apache and mysql administration once your demands on the blog exceed the most basic level.
[23:24] jfw: but basically, the pressed tree goes in some directory that apache is configured to serve at your chosen url, which most likely needs to be at the subdomain root (ie http://example.com/ or http://blog.example.com/ but not http://example.com/blog/)
[23:24] cruciform: aha, yes - structuring the confusion (as specifically as possible)
[23:25] jfw: then you load up said url in a browswer, work through the initial setup wizard that comes up, and see what it does & how it fails.
[23:25] cruciform: I'm recalling dorion (I think) linking me to a resource for how to ask good questions
[23:26] cruciform: thanks - very helpful!
[23:26] jfw: you're welcome. I'll be back in a bit.
Day changed to 2021-02-02
[01:13] jfw: you're thinking of http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2020/jwrd-logs-for-nov-2020/#482 with http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html being the corrected link.
[01:13] sourcerer: 2020-11-17 18:22:08 (#jwrd) dorion: cruciform, btw, did you ever read eric raymond's essay on [catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html][smart questions] ?
[01:14] cruciform: aha, thanks!
[01:20] jfw: note though that ESR might not be the best example of a well developed human (there's threads in the old logs but iirc he basically stumbled into money in the heyday of the Linux-powered web then turned out penniless some years later)
[01:21] jfw: I haven't looked too closely at the smart questions doc, apparently some find it helpful & can't hurt to read (except for the time as ever)
[01:23] cruciform: aye; given how rudimentary my question-framing skills are, don't see it hurting
[01:23] jfw: + finally note that hacker culture as he constructs it is not something we're trying to reproduce here in full.
[01:23] cruciform: noted - I'll stick to "ask better questions!"
[01:24] cruciform: how's that potential storm looking?
[01:28] jfw: nothing's materialized as yet.
[01:38] jfw: oh, I think I'm mistaken above about the url path root - some web applications do require that but I now recall mp-wp being flexible about it; there were old links in the form of polimedia.us/trilema/ , and I had initially tried to use http://welshcomputing.com/fixpoint/ , which did work as far as the internal linkages but I got myself into different trouble with the anti-pingback-spam mechanism
[01:38] jfw: due to use of a gateway.
[01:44] cruciform: thanks for the pointers; I'll get tinkering tomorrow - gn!
[01:44] jfw: 'night!
[14:53] jfw: The snow fell but it's pretty light; I'm not expecting power problems at this point.
[15:36] cruciform: jfw, sounds good - see you at 18:00UTC
Day changed to 2021-02-03
[01:39] jfw: I open a shipment of 10 thinkpad keyboards just arrived off the slow boat from China, supposedly new, looking good on first inspection; second inspection (after picking off these little fragments of packing peanuts now clinging to everything that came near them) reveals that every last one is somewhere between used and well-used and have perhaps just had the key caps replaced to look shiny.
[12:39] dorion: damn.
[16:23] jfw: starting to see a pattern here as regards procuring older tech through mainstream channels; I've had two recent bait-and-switches from amazon (CMR HDD, DDR2 SDRAM) and now this one from ebay, at least "using them the way they want to be used" as this seller had >5k feedback, 100% positive.
[16:26] jfw: the idea with the keyboards was to save time & money by getting ahead of the depleting supplies of wear parts, but looks like the takeaway is the cost of the refub biz is going up.
[16:26] jfw: *refurb
[16:27] jfw: as I'll be back to digging around for keyboards one at a time or ordering 4 machines in hopes of getting 2 acceptable keyboards and so forth.
[16:34] jfw: But in minor wins nonetheless worth celebrating, my recent buy of network cable making gear has worked out fine: my first cable crimped /a la medida/ went into production yesterday.
[16:34] jfw: took maybe an hour to finalize the pinout & do the handiwork, but it worked on the first try and that'll improve with practice.
[16:41] jfw: 10 cents a foot for 1gbit on solid copper (no 'copper clad aluminum' which was apparently a thing), hard to beat. Went with cat5e because the higher specs don't actually do much for this speed but do add cost and weight and sometimes reduce cable flexibility.
[16:43] jfw: (sold as "kink resistant" ofc.)
[23:12] cruciform: JWRD: All our gear is guaranteed kinky!
Day changed to 2021-02-04
[18:43] jfw: well, we're nothing if not unconventional
[18:50] jfw: cruciform: but how goes with LAMP setup? have you perhaps found the manuals for apache, mysql and php, or scoped out the versioning choices to be made?
[19:07] cruciform: jfw, thanks for asking - I've been avoiding tackling it up til now; that's due to change this evening. Starting by checking the manuals is of course a great idea; I've not considered the proper versions issue - I shall check republican blogs for guidance there.
[19:16] jfw: I'll note that it's certainly not required to get everything just right for your first ever setup, but there are some choices that will lead you farther from the beaten path than others.
[19:22] cruciform: yea; I'll not allow uncertainty over versioning to get in the way of reading the current versions' manuals; having a tinker
[19:22] jfw: as for republican blogs, there's certainly useful information there but everyone made their own choices (e.g. for lack of an adequate TMSR-standard OS) so it bears considering who you'll be able to get meaningful help from
[19:24] jfw: hm, I'd at least get the major versions picked first and go to the corresponding manuals rather than going with whatever rip-"current"
[19:25] cruciform: aha, yes - ok; which versions do you use?
[19:25] jfw: as usual with manuals the point isn't to read cover-to-cover but at the very least to know where they are and what they can help with
[19:25] jfw: ha, a questions
[19:25] jfw: *question!
[19:25] cruciform: lol
[19:26] cruciform: I'd also ask what the reasoning behind your choices is, but I don't think I know enough yet for that to be particularly meaningful
[19:27] jfw: I'm presently running on centos 6 and mostly going with their packaged versions: apache httpd 2.2.15, mysql 5.1.73, php 5.3.3
[19:27] cruciform: hrm, actually - it'd probably be good for the logs, and useful to me in the future - even if not presently - to know *why* you chose whichever versions?
[19:27] cruciform: aha - I belive my Azure VM even has that CentOS flavour
[19:27] jfw: however going forward I'll most likely be sticking with: apache 2.2 series, because they broke config compatibility for no good reason in 2.4
[19:29] jfw: mysql 5.6.38
[19:30] jfw: and certainly nothing past php 5 series as they broke compat in all sorts of ways, death by thousand papercuts kinda thing.
[19:31] jfw: MP at least at one point was reportedly using php 4.x; there were some nuisances in getting mp-wp on php5 but they're well known by now.
[19:33] cruciform: thanks!
[19:34] jfw: you're welcome.
[21:06] cruciform: jfw, why centos 6?
[21:36] jfw: in a word: systemd.
[21:38] jfw: (assuming you mean "as opposed to 7 or whatever, 'everybody' says it's too old and omg you gotta update !!")
[21:44] jfw: CentOS is mostly just an independent rebuild of the RHEL sources, and as such used to be one of the more stable / well behaved & maintained free distros around. Signs of decay were already visible in RHEL 6 though eg NetworkManager and it accelerated from there.
[21:52] jfw: see also http://ossasepia.com/2020/04/21/ossasepia-logs-for-10-Dec-2019/ mostly.
Day changed to 2021-02-05
[19:23] jfw: Apparently one of the ways I lose small items is by squirreling them away tidily in boxes - not necessarily the original boxes, and sometimes within further boxes. Not quite disorganization, more like halfway-organization - doing the physical part but missing the logical part (labeling & cataloging & such)
[19:24] cruciform: jfw, I have the opposite problem of neurotically over-cataloging/labelling - as recently, with moving shit into storage (the moving taking 10% the time of labelling)
[19:25] jfw: ooh, you at the level of printing & scanning barcodes yet?
[19:28] cruciform: haha - don't give me ideas!
[19:30] jfw: curious though, why do you think you overdo it? did you lose gems long ago that started the habit, or get it drilled in by others, or just tended that way?
[19:31] jfw: I suppose like anything it's a matter of cost vs benefit and importance of keeping things straight in a given situation.
[19:31] cruciform: hrm - very good question; I'll have to think about it
[19:32] jfw: the two data points in other words
[19:32] cruciform: yes; though in my case, it's more obsessive (doesn't tend to rise as far as the cost/benefit consideration)
[19:35] jfw: so perhaps more a matter of placating feelings than of solving a problem, while I'm apparently on this referencing of vintage hanbot kick.
[19:42] cruciform: time for a reread on my part, at any rate - thanks for the links
[19:58] jfw: no prob. in my case I've just turned up a power supply that I thought I'd missed packing on a trip last week, and a console cable that I thought I lost months ago and meanwhile got replaced; but haven't yet turned up the little bag of cable ties I was actually looking for!
Day changed to 2021-02-06
[03:04] jfw: Since we haven't mentioned it here yet: JWRD recently closed a deal, a good year in gestation, to build up a self-hosted IT plant for a smallish independently-minded firm in town.
[03:07] jfw: This means expanding our software and hardware offerings into what we're calling our Private Enterprise Computing Platform or PECP.
[03:10] jfw: This further means, for one thing, resuming the LAMP-in-Gales work (previously seen and suspended)
[03:14] jfw: and for another, Gales on APU1
[03:17] jfw: in which vein, I've now managed a first bootup of the installer (which just needed a couple kernel and bootloader tweaks due to the serial-only console of said machine), and have a promising lead on an end run fo the enclosure preassembly nonsense.
[03:19] jfw: Which would additionally allow us to deck them out with full-size SSD and TRNG.
[03:25] jfw: One potential bother I'm seeing on this first exploration is what seems to be an incomplete open source driver for its Realtek 8111E GBICs: "r8169 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for rtl_nic/rtl8168e-2.fw failed with error -2" (ie it tries to load a vendor-supplied blob which we don't allow it)
[03:27] jfw: nonetheless in this state it does subsequently get "link up" (without the helpful "at 1000mpbs" type info I'm accustomed to, perhaps that's just in the intel nic driver? and with unclear signals from the port LEDs) and pings get through.
[03:33] jfw: I'm aware of talk in the old logs about "all current NICs are evil", nonetheless the "Intel Pro/1000" (e1000e driver) on my trusty thinkpads seem to work fine without asking for magic firmware.
[03:37] jfw: ...which prolly means the magic is just baked into roms, out of sight and out of mind, I suppose
Day changed to 2021-02-07
[17:34] jfw: cruciform: I think it would indeed be for the best to pause classes until we get your lost machines replaced, rather than continuing to faff about with the untested ubuntu setup.
[17:34] cruciform: no problem; I'm inclined to agree
[17:35] jfw: sadly I don't have much progress to report on the laptops front but will get to it real soon now.
[17:35] cruciform: do you have an ETA on replacement machines?
[17:35] cruciform: great
[17:36] jfw: so perhaps I can get them in the mail Wednesday and you get them by Tuesday the 16th; I wouldn't quite bank on it though.
[17:38] cruciform: no problem; hopefully the new ones will stay in my position a tad longer, and the prior set are causing all sorts of consternation
[17:39] jfw: oh, one of the machines in the pipeline seems to have a defective 'ThinkLight' (little white LED at the top of the screen that shines down on the keyboard, activated by Fn-F12); do you anticipate that being a bother or tolerable?
[17:39] cruciform: that's fine
[17:40] cruciform: maybe you could glue a candle to it or something?
[17:40] jfw: cool. I could swap with another with slower CPU and noisy fan, doesn't quite sound like a win :)
[17:40] jfw: haha
[17:42] jfw: I used to roll with a mechanical 'Das Keyboard' without the key cap labels, don't need no stinkin' photons just to be able to type, but others might go for the candle solution I'm sure.
[17:43] cruciform: yea - I've got a similar model from Cooler Master (though the keycaps are printed on the vertical front edge of keycaps
[17:44] cruciform: like so
[17:45] jfw: right. numpad isn't optional in my book though ;)
[17:46] cruciform: it gets in the way when playing Starcraft, which was a big problem at time of purchase
[17:47] jfw: hm, how's that? need to keep the mouse closer or what?
[17:48] cruciform: yea - the keyboard's too wide; keep bumping mouse into it
[17:49] cruciform: it's been a good few years since I played, now - may end up preferring a numpad again
[17:49] jfw: certainly if you need to switch between mouse/kb frequently I could see distance being a problem but then that's a bothersome situation no matter what.
[17:50] cruciform: this keyboard's held up fine since ~2016, or so (Cherry Blue switches)
[17:50] jfw: yeah they're ok as long as you don't have a roommate or officemate, heh.
[17:51] cruciform: I've never minded the sound of others blue-switching; quite enjoy the sound, actually
[17:51] jfw: the feel still isn't quite as good as the old 'Model M' buckling springs.
[17:51] cruciform: must try one of those, sometime
[17:51] cruciform: friend's got an old IBM keyboard that may or may not be buckling-spring
[17:52] cruciform: Cherry Reds were awful - pure mush
[17:52] jfw: I've rather lost track of the colors besides blue.
[17:53] cruciform: aren't capacitive switches all the rage, now?
[17:54] jfw: (and yeah I don't mind the sound but the types who don't get why spend >$5 on a keyboard anyway sometimes do.)
[17:54] jfw: what's that, sounds like a switch with no actual movement?
[17:55] cruciform: thankfully, don't have many of those "people" around me
[17:56] cruciform: I belive they still have tactile feedback; just the actuation mechanism that differs
[17:59] jfw: sounds like a pretty small thing to rage about but hey, perhaps I'll figure it out on one of those nonexisted bored days, heh.
[17:59] jfw: *nonexistant
[18:02] jfw: funny too how the "why >$5 on keyboard??" types see no problem with 200x that for new pNoje every year or w/e.
[18:02] cruciform: pNoje?
[18:03] jfw: old variety speak for what you get when "typing" on iphone keyboard.
[18:03] cruciform: aha
[18:04] cruciform: yea - the number of times people say they're upgrading... "what's wrong with your old phone?" "nothing"
[18:04] cruciform: I get regular stick for using a 2016 iPhone SE - that actually fits in a human hand
[18:06] jfw: clearly, because that means you're trying to use it as a tool rather than object of worship.
[18:08] cruciform: still baffled by the pseudo-reality of people preferring to bury face in screen rather than... look around when out and about
[18:12] jfw: these days they're probably taught that the male gaze can transmit eye infections or something.
[18:13] jfw: but I'm open to alternative explanations!
[18:16] jfw: avoidance of risking the grave dangers of having a conversation perhaps.
[18:22] cruciform: lol
[18:25] cruciform: from what I gather, it's exceedingly rare for a cute girl to be approached; perhaps the phone-reality is superior to what's available on the street, nowadays
[18:41] jfw: that part at least seems quite different in LatAm, although they're as stuck in the phones as anyone, if not more so for lack of prior computing/internet culture
[18:42] jfw: surely it's still rare for girl to get the sort of attention she'd *like* to get but what can you do.
[18:47] jfw will be off to approach some hot CPUs and take their measurements
[18:48] cruciform: lol - good luck!
[22:12] jfw: well, my oh so unreasonable skepticism verging on hostility towards the surprise apu1 preassembly is vindicated: having gathered data from the working system to my satisfaction I've now removed the board and found that they did it wrong.
[22:14] jfw: the southbridge chip was entirely unconnected to the heatsink, with no thermal pad; and even the CPU pad was off-center.
[22:16] jfw: the aluminum heat spreader is pretty well cemented to the case bottom so I'm not sure I could even move it to the right position now.
[22:17] jfw: I'm thinking they might have blindly followed the apu2 procedure not noticing it was an apu1.
Day changed to 2021-02-08
[01:17] dorion: jfw, sounds like a mess, thanks for getting to the bottom of that.
[05:53] jfw: yw; the bright side is that now we have a concrete "wtf" to get back to the pcengines dude with. open to suggestions on how to go about that
[05:55] jfw: for instance: given the medium size of our order, the hassle they've saddled us with and that they clearly would rather not be bothered with the apu1 line anymore, would they give us a hefty discount?
[05:57] jfw: or: would they hand over the CAD files + whatever other design docs for the official enclosure so that the adults can relieve them of the burden of talking to western-hemisphere manufacturers?
[05:58] jfw: though if they won't, since I have it disassembled now it's that much easier to reverse-engineer.
[06:03] jfw: I must confess my image of the "engineering process" at pcengines is now something like: sign NDAs and buy into some AMD reference designs; load up some swank EDA CAD tools; mash ctrl-c ctrl-v in various combinations until some constraint analyzer widget lights up green; mail to china.
[06:12] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1406 is indeed the case, the realtek thing isn't even some full firmware image but a "patch", complete with state machine / mini bytecode interpreter in the driver for scripting the patching process
[06:12] sourcerer: 2021-02-06 03:37:32 (#jwrd) jfw: ...which prolly means the magic is just baked into roms, out of sight and out of mind, I suppose
[06:16] jfw: and "updated firmware with stability fixes" was all the explanation the linux kernel developers found to be needed. I plan to just keep it out but reserve the option to use it if an actual need becomes evident.
[06:20] jfw: Due to the lack of speed info in the driver messages and apparent lack of working status LEDs (possibly that'd be one of the firmware issues), and the potential need to diagnose remotely whether a gigabit link is actually running at gigabit and not falling back to morse code for compatibility or w/e, I did an "ethtool" port for Gales; by which I've confirmed it's getting gigabit, at least
[06:20] jfw: nominally.
[06:21] jfw: oh, the one more input to that decision was checking that the latest busybox ifconfig still hadn't done the todo of adding media status.
[06:22] jfw: now why is it so much easier for me to dump this in the log than actually write the status report I meant to have out yesterday...
[06:27] jfw: well I hope the bystanders are entertained at least and it's good to have this fully on the record.
[17:32] cruciform: As of November 30 2020 CentOS 6.10 is EOL. I was running into errors using yum to update/install packages: "Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: base". Uncommenting the baseurl= line under [base] in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file didn't help, but modifying the base URLs to point to the now-archived repos at https://vault.centos.org , as in [https://web.archive.org/web/20210208172721/https://forums.cpanel.net/th
[17:32] cruciform: reads/yumrepo-error-and-cannot-find-valid-baseurl.682465/][post #7] solved the issue.
[17:35] cruciform: and, in other brokens, the line-break of that copy-and-pasted URL above breaks the bot's logging of same
[18:58] jfw: Good to know that switching to "vault" still works at least.
[18:59] jfw: re irc line-wrap, I'm not sure there's much a bot can do about it; the protocol doesn't distinguish continuation/final fragments to allow for reliable reassembly
[19:04] jfw: the tmsr approach to irc annoyances was more along the lines of redesigning computer networking altogether to replace it (gossipd) rather than mending the historical artifacts; though that never came to pass, for one thing it broke out into a whole chain of dependencies not timely resolvable
[19:05] jfw: (adequately functioning brains & connected bodies being ultimately the main ingredient in short supply, by my read)
Day changed to 2021-02-12
[12:02] cruciform: jfw, dorion: I'll have spotty internet over the next few days - should be back online Monday
Day changed to 2021-02-16
[04:38] jfw: cruciform: I've made headway on the refurbishing; there's some parts details to resolve still and a bunch else on my plate as usual but I currently expect to have two machines for you in the mail by Thursday.
[04:42] jfw: I'll also leave the teaser that we've begun looking into how to replace our thinkpad offering with all-new parts that aren't such a dwindling resource (not to mention hassle to source).
[04:44] jfw: The minimum viable option I've come up with so far would be slower than the thinkpads, though still serviceable for a bitcoin node, so I don't expect the value of past purchases to be diluted any time soon. Those thinkpads may well be Peak Laptop as far as the free world is concerned.
Day changed to 2021-02-18
[01:53] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1486 - make that Friday.
[01:53] sourcerer: 2021-02-16 04:38:03 (#jwrd) jfw: cruciform: I've made headway on the refurbishing; there's some parts details to resolve still and a bunch else on my plate as usual but I currently expect to have two machines for you in the mail by Thursday.
[16:12] cruciform: jfw - great!
Day changed to 2021-02-19
[04:44] jfw: I have one annoyance to note with our current X200 Coreboot config: the Linux text console comes up at the laptop display's native resolution - which is great until you want to use an external monitor on the VGA port. If you run an X server then it should be able to handle things fine, but Gales Linux doesn't presently have that.
[04:47] jfw: An older config I have on one of my own machines actually handles this better - it comes up in some low-res VGA mode at boot time, then switches to the native mode of the external monitor if connected otherwise the laptop panel once the linux inteldrmfb driver initializes.
[04:49] jfw: Thus I have high hopes that some coreboot config tweaking and reflashing can remedy this - there are a bunch of VGA / VESA knobs to twiddle with interactions that are rather confusing to the outsider.
[04:50] jfw: When I first developed this process the big pain was getting any display output *at all*.
[04:52] jfw: (and that part was essential because of course the various bootloader options didn't work on the first try either; now I can experiment and even if coreboot doesn't light up the display, then Linux will.)
[20:06] PDogJr: I've seen a bunch of sites among this network of people using mp-wp. Is that a modified wordpress? Where can I find the source?
[22:43] jfw: cruciform: your package is in the mail with expected delivery next Wednesday the 24th at end of day.
[22:44] jfw: PDogJr: I was giving some pointers not that long ago actually, check the logs which are linked in the topic.
[22:44] jfw: PDogJr: what's your interest in mp-wp, do you own a blog? digging for 'sploits?
Day changed to 2021-02-20
[01:44] PDogJr: I have a blog
[01:44] PDogJr: I'm trying to write my own comment system and I was curious how others have written theirs
[01:44] PDogJr: seems like everyone in this community automatically assumes the worst
[02:41] dorion: hello PDogJr, welcome.
[02:41] PDogJr: hi
[02:43] dorion: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1497 -- did you get to the bottom of what the mp stands for ? billymg has a mirror of several of the patches and seals.
[02:43] sourcerer: 2021-02-19 20:06:22 (#jwrd) PDogJr: I've seen a bunch of sites among this network of people using mp-wp. Is that a modified wordpress? Where can I find the source?
[02:44] PDogJr: no I have not yet figured it out
[02:48] dorion: mp is for Mircea Popescu, the owner of http://trilema.com ; mp-wp various improvements, such as proper trackbacks and proper html linking and select functionality, etc.
[02:51] dorion: he made it available when he was heading tmsr, which is why you find the source mirrored as vpatches.
[02:53] PDogJr: thanks for the info
[02:57] dorion: V emerged to suit first the needs of Bitcoin source code management, which may be where it seems like everyone "assumes the worst".
[02:58] dorion: PDogJr, you're welcome. those are just entry points and there as several layers of resourceful links underneath.
[02:59] dorion: PDogJr, mind sharing the link to your blog ?
[03:00] PDogJr: I'm not usually inclined to post the link since I'll be rewriting everything and breaking a lot of stuff but it's poorchop dot com
[03:01] dorion: well I'll take it as a compliment then, thanks. lol.
[03:01] dorion: PDogJr, mine is http://dorion-mode.com
[03:02] PDogJr: nice, liking the photos
[03:03] PDogJr: been populating my rss feed with any good blogs I can find, will add yours to the list
[03:03] dorion: nice, have you been finding a few ?
[03:05] PDogJr: yeah quite a bit, luckily people tend to link to other blogs one way or another on their own sites
[03:06] PDogJr: stumble across one every now and then when searching for something, sometimes find them through news aggregators
[03:07] PDogJr: good to have a feed that I can follow with good content written by people who care instead of the clickbait and distracting stuff that populates the mainstream web
[03:08] PDogJr: that's how I found asciilifeform's blog which led me to the ring of all these mp-wp users but they all seem excessively paranoid
[03:09] dorion: PDogJr, "quoting is scholarship", afterall.
[03:11] dorion: PDogJr, what do you mean by paranoid ? and what do you mean by excessively ? have any links handy ?
[03:12] PDogJr: ascii banning me from his room after I didn't immediately respond to his question to explain in detail what I was doing in his chat, jfw thinking that I'm looking for exploits by asking for info/source code for mp-wp
[03:13] PDogJr: ascii comparing it to a stranger showing up at my door and standing there the whole day without explaining what he's doing, as if someone using a bouncer on irc is comparable to a strange man showing up at your house and standing there menacingly
[03:14] dorion: PDogJr, ah, I see what you mean then.
[03:20] dorion: PDogJr, what I'll say for now then is there is nothing new in the world except the history you don't know. one of the stronger aspects of tmsr, meanwhile closed, is how well documented it is so if you like new, there's a ~decade of history you could read of which mp-wp would one of the many tools produced.
[03:22] PDogJr: yeah that applies to most sites that I've been following
[03:22] PDogJr: lots of old content to comb through, too little time
[03:23] dorion: PDogJr, probably not equally though. which is the signal and which is the noise ? that's the challenge.
[03:26] PDogJr: well that's the beauty of RSS, the feed is curated by none other than yourself so hopefully the noise is low to nonexistent
[03:26] dorion: PDogJr, re standing on someone's door, he's an asciilifeform afterall, what'd you expect ? lol.
[03:26] PDogJr: heh
[03:27] PDogJr: I'm not sure what all this is about reading that post in the comments, seems very obtuse to me
[03:27] dorion: which now ?
[03:28] PDogJr: the whole web ring of everyone associated with mp
[03:28] PDogJr: I see lots of mention of bitcoin but other than that, not sure what everyone is talking about most of the time
[03:30] PDogJr: not understanding most of these comments or mp's responses http://trilema.com/2020/closure/#comment-151569
[03:32] dorion: it's the web of trust, wot, mp owns the bitcoin stock exchange, mpex, and there is a whole variety speak.
[03:32] dorion: PDogJr, which languages do you read ?
[03:32] PDogJr: English only
[03:35] dorion: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1541 -- here's some context : http://trilema.com/2016/modernism-and-traditionalism/
[03:35] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 03:30:43 (#jwrd) PDogJr: not understanding most of these comments or mp's responses http://trilema.com/2020/closure/#comment-151569
[03:36] dorion: PDogJr, that english as a single language is likely part of your trouble.
[03:38] PDogJr: I'd love to learn more languages but finding resources, times, and people with whom I can practice is next to impossible
[03:38] dorion: PDogJr, where are you located ?
[03:39] dorion: PDogJr, what do you do for a living ?
[03:39] PDogJr: I'd rather not be too specific especially since this is logged forever for all the world to see
[03:40] dorion: don't you see that'd only make meeting people even more impossible though ?
[03:42] PDogJr: nope
[03:42] dorion: PDogJr, why'd anyone talk to a nobody ?
[03:43] PDogJr: we're all nobodies and announcing your location and profession to the world doesn't make you more of a somebody than anybody else
[03:43] PDogJr: I could say I live in Zimbabwe and that I pick up trash for a living, what difference would it make
[03:49] dorion: PDogJr, I don't accept "we're all nobodies"
[03:50] dorion: if "we're all nobodies", no one would have an identity.
[03:50] PDogJr: I don't accept that disclosing personal info makes you better than anybody else
[03:53] dorion: PDogJr, identity is a fixed point upon which the whos from the whats may be sorted. i admit i'd have been more polite/proper for me to ask you to register a gpg key if you intend to talk here.
[03:54] dorion: PDogJr, do you realize you started talking to some strangers about their paranoia then yourself tenaciously block friendly/curious questions directed at you ?
[03:55] PDogJr: if you actually require users to register a gpg key to partake in a a public channel hosted on a public, widely known network then I will see myself out
[03:55] PDogJr: there's a difference between attacking someone for asking a question about the software powering your blog and asking someone where they live and what they do for a living
[03:56] PDogJr: which is intensely personal when asked together
[03:57] PDogJr: why not ask for my social security number or information on the parties with whom I conduct business
[03:59] dorion: PDogJr, relax. I'm not used to people being so sensitive about sharing basic facts of life and you're at my doorstep eating up my time afterall, I'll ask want I want.
[04:00] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1503 - look in the mirror, pretty much. wondering if maybe a dog is digging for bones is hardly a "worst"; though at this point indeed it doesn't look like anythinig that exciting.
[04:00] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 01:44:41 (#jwrd) PDogJr: seems like everyone in this community automatically assumes the worst
[04:00] PDogJr: I gave you a pretty simple response and you turned it into an issue of not wanting to talk to a "nobody" and then stating that I need to share gpg key if I intend on staying here
[04:02] PDogJr: yeah I'm looking in the mirror and I still don't see how not wanting to disclose geographic info and profession equates to not wanting to discuss the software that you talk about in the open
[04:02] dorion: PDogJr, the fact is, irc nicks are way easier to steal than gpg keys.
[04:03] PDogJr: sure, but I've been on freenode a very long time and I've never seen anyone take it seriously enough to demand gpg keys
[04:04] dorion: PDogJr, perhaps find better friends then ?
[04:04] PDogJr: I'd agree with that if I had the kinds of friends who wouldn't hold a conversation unless I shared my gpg key
[04:05] PDogJr: anyways thanks for the info about mp-wp, I guess I'll get to searching for exploits apparently and doing all the nonsensical stuff that I was being accused of doing
[04:06] jfw: PDogJr, nobody has demanded anything that I can see here but I'm certainly hearing a lot of whining.
[04:08] jfw: guess asciilifeform didn't need that storied ban hammer after all, if the willfully-nobodies see themselves out so easily
[04:10] dorion: jfw, a "who are you ?" from the beginning would've saved some time, but at least I'm glad it was logged.
[04:13] jfw: well, he/she/it pretty much opened by saying "everyone in town wrinkles their nose whenever I enter the room, what's wrong with everyone's sense of smell??"
[04:27] dorion: jfw, my read is that dog asked for a resource without giving anything, you made a joke about sploits, I shared a bunch of resources and we got talking about languages and dog said "it's impossible" for dog to learn and I so I asked where dog is since I thought dog might be a person aaaaaand... it's gone and not coming back.
[04:30] jfw: right. well, I also gave a complete if minimal answer to the minimal initial request
[04:31] dorion: that you did.
[04:38] jfw: about 'demanding' key registration though, I don't expect I will, it's just that you'll be treated as a newcomer every time since for all we know that's what you are; and how open we are to newcomers will change with the time and weather.
[04:49] dorion: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1556 -- I didn't manage to answer this in the flow, but if I knew that for 1) I'd make sense for me to ask if you'd read about that very unfair perspective and for 2) I could share with you the richest man from my town in recent years (after they closed the marble quarries) was the
[04:49] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 03:43:32 (#jwrd) PDogJr: I could say I live in Zimbabwe and that I pick up trash for a living, what difference would it make
[04:49] dorion: one who managed to pick up trash the most efficiently, his name trades as cwst on nasdaq.
[04:51] dorion: jfw, makes sense. I went to that when hair raised on dog's neck when I asked about where dog is and what dog does.
[04:55] jfw: nothing wrong with it, at minimum makes for an interesting test. do they know gpg? are they interested enough to bother? etc. or in this case, breaking out in hives at the mere suggestion of having long-term identity, it would appear
[04:57] jfw: I suppose we do need to see to getting an actual place to register tho.
[05:11] dorion: indeed.
[17:46] cruciform: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1498 -- great; shall we aim to resume on Tuesday, March 2nd @18:00 UTC?
[17:46] sourcerer: 2021-02-19 22:43:38 (#jwrd) jfw: cruciform: your package is in the mail with expected delivery next Wednesday the 24th at end of day.
[20:05] cruciform: In miscellaneous lulz, I’ve now offered four friends free BTC if they’ll merely send me an address. None of em have (poker player, compsci student, two programmers).
Day changed to 2021-02-21
[03:05] jfw: cruciform: the 2nd it is.
[03:08] jfw: give those friends some time I suppose, though if they hadn't gotten interested after all this time already then the odds are looking slim.
[04:10] cruciform: who knew giving away money was so hard?! The compsci student was particularly lulzy - she'd done a summer internship with a "blockchain company"; I asked her how Bitcoin worked - no clue
Day changed to 2021-02-24
[02:12] jfw: https://bugs.python.org/issue42938 << unsurprising but possibly still worth a mention: all versions of python (including 2.x which they evidently imagine themselves at liberty to ignore) caught with pants down importing libc routines long known to be inherently unsafe.
[02:20] jfw: the Gales Linux port is unaffected, though by a somewhat lengthy chain of causes: the blunder is in the 'ctypes' module, which provides support for the bit-futzing needed to translate data structures when interfacing with C code; this module isn't present in the Gales port, probably because it didn't work for whatever reason by default with static linking, and nothing important has been found to
[02:20] jfw: require fixing it as yet
[02:21] jfw: the virtue of strategic laziness, I suppose.
[02:29] jfw: for MP-WP operators or anyone else at risk of winding up in the PHP mines, I've added frozen documentation for php 4 and 5 to the library, in both bulk-downloadable archive and broken-out html form. that they aren't actually specific to the nominal versions and include all manner of extraneous "notes from the future" is the php folks' doing, not mine;
[02:29] jfw: or " The reason for this is how our documentation is structured" as they put it.
[02:33] jfw: cruciform: want to invite those friends and the compsci student in particular to the channel?
[02:34] cruciform: I could, but given they weren't interestd in phree-btc, I doubt they'd have the gumption to show up
[02:34] cruciform: still, no harm in asking
[02:36] jfw: right, who knows, perhaps the problem is environmental. rather, we *know* it's environmental, but less so how a given brain responds to a given change of environment.
[02:37] cruciform: why, then, is YH closed - if not for uniformity of (lack of) response?
[02:38] cruciform: ditto, TMSR
[02:41] jfw: as I understand it, it's not that there was *no* response, but that there wasn't enough to make those projects work in the way that they had been designed.
[02:42] jfw: to make them worth the ongoing investment to the people who built them up.
[02:47] cruciform: granted - lack of *sufficient* response. Perhaps worse than no response at all, for all the investment
[02:53] jfw: Not worse than nothing, by my read, at least in diana_coman's case
[03:09] jfw: as far as what the situation means for me: it's that there's no competent help around with which to build a castle; nonetheless the horde is at the gates as ever and I still can't do it all myself; thus essentially I have no choice but to figure out how to be at the top of a smaller pyramid, rather than midway up a larger one (now that I've quite mixed my architectural metaphors)
[03:10] cruciform: lol
[14:31] cruciform: jfw, I'd like to be able to get a post up on Wednesday, if possible. Doesn't need all the bells and whistles sorted by then. Can spill over into Thursday.
[14:45] jfw: We shall see then if four calendar days is enough runway for JWRD to get into the SaaS business but so far it's still looking doable to have the basics up by tonight.
[14:46] cruciform: sounds good! We'll see if any of my friends can get into #JWRD in less time (one of 'em - a programmer - is currently unable to figure out how to open IRC...)
[14:50] jfw: the missing pieces are probably a bit larger than "how to open", heh.
[14:51] jfw: I'll be mostly heads-down today though, for the obvious reasons.
[21:44] cruciform: the laptops have arrived; don't seem to have been dinged for customs
Day changed to 2021-02-25
[00:41] dorion: cheers.
[02:19] jfw: cruciform: http://cockroachman.net/ is live and waiting to meet its new owner.
[02:21] jfw: if you're on in the next hour or two I can walk you through it live, otherwise I'll perhaps write up some instructions.
[03:01] cruciform: jfw, sweet! I'm just about to hit the sack - would be grateful for some pointers - gn!
[08:32] jfw: cruciform: http://paste.deedbot.org/?id=752Z
[18:03] jfw: well that was a pain. looks like freenode in their usual style silently pulled the plug on both the servers in my whitelist, though with one of them in some state of half-online sputtering
[18:05] cruciform: jfw, I'm getting a "403 Forbidden You don't have permission to access /wp-admin/ on this server." error page when trying to access http://cockroachman.net/wp-admin/ via browser
[18:07] jfw: upon updating my hosts file I then hit what seems to be an improperly handled error case in yrc (the SockError case in conn_start not doing enough cleanup eg conn_close) so a manual disconnect + connect and rejoin chans was required.
[18:07] jfw: besides that issue itself it seems to want a /reconnect command in case of other such issues
[18:08] jfw: cruciform: looking
[18:11] jfw: cruciform: try now
[18:12] jfw: looks like I wrote up the change I was going to make then missed actually making it, sorry about that.
[18:12] cruciform: thanks - works fine now
[18:14] jfw: the old "attached you will find the crucial information..." / "wait, where's the attachment?"
[18:14] cruciform: ye, classic - I'm neurotic about attaching first
[18:15] cruciform: how long did the setup take, out of interest?
[18:19] jfw: looks like about 14 hours all told; mostly because there were new things to research, discuss, decide & test about how to get the server configuration into shape for a (somewhat) wider user base, old annoyances that came to light afresh and so on.
[18:21] cruciform: nice; will get coin to ya later today. Any chance you can get the media upload function working (specifically images)?
[18:22] cruciform: also, I've sorted the Tuesday doublebook, so still on for session @ 18:00 UTC March 2nd
[18:24] jfw: I looked at it briefly, the first problem was that it wasn't even reporting any errors so completely unclear as to where to start or how to test any given step. Pretty typical of the wordpress code-mess too.
[18:24] jfw: ack re Tuesday.
[18:24] jfw: re media upload, is this an efficiency consideration or do you just not know how to use scp or what's the problem specifically?
[18:25] cruciform: I don't know how to use scp, but can learn; just wondered why it wasn't working via browser GUI
[18:29] jfw: At least the known part of it is that the php runs as a separate user ID that deliberately doesn't have write access to its own code. Loosening permissions on the uploads directory would be one approach.
[18:30] cruciform: aha; I'm rather keen to learn the scp/your scripting approach, anyway
[18:31] cruciform: manual upload/formatting is a huge pain in the arse
[18:32] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2019/blogging-photos-and-chat-logs-some-handy-scripts/ was my imagemagick-based approach
[18:33] cruciform: cheers, shall grok
[18:34] cruciform: I asked 3 of the 4 people who refused my phree-coins offer to pop into #JWRD during office hours
[18:35] cruciform: I do find the lack of interest in BTC amongst technical people baffling
[18:36] jfw: they actually declined rather than just couldn't figure it out or something?
[18:36] cruciform: 1 hard declined; the other 2, it's not clear
[18:38] cruciform: aha - one seems to be on his way
[18:39] jfw: hello PeteLondon
[18:40] PeteLondon: hey guys hope you're good
[18:40] cruciform: oioi
[18:40] PeteLondon: haha i wouldnt have guessed its cruciform
[18:40] cruciform: lol, which would've been your guess?
[18:40] PeteLondon: I havent installed VIM do I need to do that before the IRC channel expires
[18:41] PeteLondon: "sourcerer"
[18:41] cruciform: lol - that's a bot
[18:41] cruciform: also, a tad DnD/neckbeard-y, even for me
[18:41] cruciform: dorion and jfw are the guys I'm doing the BTC security course under
[18:42] PeteLondon: not impressed sorry unless you can center a div within a div
[18:42] PeteLondon: :)
[18:42] cruciform: PeteLondon is an old school buddy; why don't ya introduce yourself?
[18:43] cruciform: all I know is that he can (maybe) bubble sort
[18:43] PeteLondon: i love that you use IRC for the course - who needs teams anyway
[18:44] PeteLondon: I'm a 33yo programmer basically with 1yrs experience basically self-taught, mainly doing web development
[18:44] jfw: sourcerer keeps the channel log and cites sources. for instance: I take it you're one of the free btc offer recipients who hasn't quite figured out what that even means yet
[18:44] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 20:05:48 (#jwrd) cruciform: In miscellaneous lulz, I???ve now offered four friends free BTC if they???ll merely send me an address. None of em have (poker player, compsci student, two programmers).
[18:44] PeteLondon: I know I know
[18:44] PeteLondon: I need to buy a trezor basically if thats even the thing these days
[18:45] cruciform: you need a trezor to receive phree buttcoins?
[18:45] PeteLondon: alright ill get one now one sec
[18:46] PeteLondon: just answered the door to a woman
[18:46] cruciform: lol, that wasn't what I was getting at
[18:46] PeteLondon: she said shes here for a viewing - I slate absolutely everything about the flat, theyre illegal etc etc
[18:46] PeteLondon: 5mins later she says shes the agent
[18:46] PeteLondon: bit awkward
[18:48] cruciform: the free coins offer was just to get you back into it, really: friends don't let friends own no BTC
[18:48] PeteLondon: i have a localbitcoins account just trying to get the address
[18:48] cruciform: iirc, trezors have had issues with security
[18:49] PeteLondon: it is not surprising really (to an amateur) as you need a google chrome extension
[18:49] PeteLondon: to operate the thing
[18:50] jfw: myeah, these "hardware wallets".
[18:50] cruciform: for example
[18:52] jfw: using a dedicated computer, whether full size or pocket size, to protect sensitive information is fine, in fact the only correct approach, but those fashionable ones are fashionable instead because they're selling "don't have to understand anything, just use the magic stick"
[18:54] cruciform: and, he's off
[18:55] jfw: possibly network trouble - you still there PeteLondon19?
[18:55] cruciform: he did have network trouble, and has had enough of computers for the day
[18:56] cruciform: maybe there's a market for freenode magic sticks
[18:56] jfw: anyway to try to unpack something from this pile of confusion: the channel isn't expiring any time soon, not to worry there, though people aren't always at the keyboard of course
[18:56] sourcerer: 2021-02-25 18:40:51 (#jwrd) PeteLondon: I havent installed VIM do I need to do that before the IRC channel expires
[18:57] jfw: no idea what installing vim would be required for though.
[18:57] cruciform: he's poking fun at The Right Thing approach of JWRD
[18:58] PeteLondon19: haha
[18:58] cruciform will bbl
[18:59] PeteLondon19: it disconnected bc of a vpn on my laptop i think
[18:59] PeteLondon19: also need to verify my identity using a link on my phone where i have to upload a copy of my passport
[18:59] PeteLondon19: ive had enough of computers for the day (next 3 hours) so off for a walk, be back in a bit
[18:59] jfw: lol, yeah that's definitely a sign of what NOT to look for in a possible bitcoin wallet.
[18:59] PeteLondon19: ^^^
[18:59] PeteLondon19: have a nice evening guys
[19:01] jfw: well, perhaps he finds the logs or his way back in some less burnt-out day.
Day changed to 2021-02-26
[17:07] dorion waves
[17:37] jfw: wb from the freenode "fiber cut".
[20:44] jfw: cruciform: I've received your payment, thank you!
[23:40] cruciform: jfw, glad to hear it
[20:43] cruciform: jfw, I'm trying to press your mp-wp, but running into the error message: Failed to load GPG key: .wot/hanbot.asc when I try to use ante/descendant/press commands. I've got the patches, seals and .wot files in the right places.
[20:43] cruciform: iirc, this is the same problem I was having with asciilifeform's key when trying to press V.pl, as a result of GPG 2.x ; I think we got around that by changing the install script to use GPG 1.x? Is there anything I can do to fix this problem?
[21:06] cruciform: nevermind the above: I'd derped with regard to getting the correct pubkeys - all fixed!
[22:13] jfw: cruciform: glad you figured it out then. what we did was even described in the recent log though :P
[22:16] jfw: We have a supposedly heavy snowstorm coming through tonight; if I don't check in by 15 UTC tomorrow it probably means the local power is out.
[22:40] cruciform: jfw, yes, indeed - I was trying to describe it in my own words. Having pressed mp-wp, I'm a tad stumped as to how to proceed from here
[22:44] cruciform: I'm currently poking around, trying to setup a LAMP stack
[23:20] jfw: cruciform: describing in your own words is well and good, but then a better way to structure your confusion might read something more like "we got around it by changing something or other; I think it was an install script but your comment only mentions v.pl, is that what that is?"
[23:21] jfw: to which I could reply: not really, in that "installing" means a bit more at least in my usage than what v.pl alone currently does which is mainly pressing, not integrating it into the system in a finished & usable form (e.g. in the search path).
[23:22] jfw: LAMP stack is a good start, yes, as you'll need some idea re apache and mysql administration once your demands on the blog exceed the most basic level.
[23:24] jfw: but basically, the pressed tree goes in some directory that apache is configured to serve at your chosen url, which most likely needs to be at the subdomain root (ie http://example.com/ or http://blog.example.com/ but not http://example.com/blog/)
[23:24] cruciform: aha, yes - structuring the confusion (as specifically as possible)
[23:25] jfw: then you load up said url in a browswer, work through the initial setup wizard that comes up, and see what it does & how it fails.
[23:25] cruciform: I'm recalling dorion (I think) linking me to a resource for how to ask good questions
[23:26] cruciform: thanks - very helpful!
[23:26] jfw: you're welcome. I'll be back in a bit.
Day changed to 2021-02-02
[01:13] jfw: you're thinking of http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2020/jwrd-logs-for-nov-2020/#482 with http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html being the corrected link.
[01:13] sourcerer: 2020-11-17 18:22:08 (#jwrd) dorion: cruciform, btw, did you ever read eric raymond's essay on [catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html][smart questions] ?
[01:14] cruciform: aha, thanks!
[01:20] jfw: note though that ESR might not be the best example of a well developed human (there's threads in the old logs but iirc he basically stumbled into money in the heyday of the Linux-powered web then turned out penniless some years later)
[01:21] jfw: I haven't looked too closely at the smart questions doc, apparently some find it helpful & can't hurt to read (except for the time as ever)
[01:23] cruciform: aye; given how rudimentary my question-framing skills are, don't see it hurting
[01:23] jfw: + finally note that hacker culture as he constructs it is not something we're trying to reproduce here in full.
[01:23] cruciform: noted - I'll stick to "ask better questions!"
[01:24] cruciform: how's that potential storm looking?
[01:28] jfw: nothing's materialized as yet.
[01:38] jfw: oh, I think I'm mistaken above about the url path root - some web applications do require that but I now recall mp-wp being flexible about it; there were old links in the form of polimedia.us/trilema/ , and I had initially tried to use http://welshcomputing.com/fixpoint/ , which did work as far as the internal linkages but I got myself into different trouble with the anti-pingback-spam mechanism
[01:38] jfw: due to use of a gateway.
[01:44] cruciform: thanks for the pointers; I'll get tinkering tomorrow - gn!
[01:44] jfw: 'night!
[14:53] jfw: The snow fell but it's pretty light; I'm not expecting power problems at this point.
[15:36] cruciform: jfw, sounds good - see you at 18:00UTC
Day changed to 2021-02-03
[01:39] jfw: I open a shipment of 10 thinkpad keyboards just arrived off the slow boat from China, supposedly new, looking good on first inspection; second inspection (after picking off these little fragments of packing peanuts now clinging to everything that came near them) reveals that every last one is somewhere between used and well-used and have perhaps just had the key caps replaced to look shiny.
[12:39] dorion: damn.
[16:23] jfw: starting to see a pattern here as regards procuring older tech through mainstream channels; I've had two recent bait-and-switches from amazon (CMR HDD, DDR2 SDRAM) and now this one from ebay, at least "using them the way they want to be used" as this seller had >5k feedback, 100% positive.
[16:26] jfw: the idea with the keyboards was to save time & money by getting ahead of the depleting supplies of wear parts, but looks like the takeaway is the cost of the refub biz is going up.
[16:26] jfw: *refurb
[16:27] jfw: as I'll be back to digging around for keyboards one at a time or ordering 4 machines in hopes of getting 2 acceptable keyboards and so forth.
[16:34] jfw: But in minor wins nonetheless worth celebrating, my recent buy of network cable making gear has worked out fine: my first cable crimped /a la medida/ went into production yesterday.
[16:34] jfw: took maybe an hour to finalize the pinout & do the handiwork, but it worked on the first try and that'll improve with practice.
[16:41] jfw: 10 cents a foot for 1gbit on solid copper (no 'copper clad aluminum' which was apparently a thing), hard to beat. Went with cat5e because the higher specs don't actually do much for this speed but do add cost and weight and sometimes reduce cable flexibility.
[16:43] jfw: (sold as "kink resistant" ofc.)
[23:12] cruciform: JWRD: All our gear is guaranteed kinky!
Day changed to 2021-02-04
[18:43] jfw: well, we're nothing if not unconventional
[18:50] jfw: cruciform: but how goes with LAMP setup? have you perhaps found the manuals for apache, mysql and php, or scoped out the versioning choices to be made?
[19:07] cruciform: jfw, thanks for asking - I've been avoiding tackling it up til now; that's due to change this evening. Starting by checking the manuals is of course a great idea; I've not considered the proper versions issue - I shall check republican blogs for guidance there.
[19:16] jfw: I'll note that it's certainly not required to get everything just right for your first ever setup, but there are some choices that will lead you farther from the beaten path than others.
[19:22] cruciform: yea; I'll not allow uncertainty over versioning to get in the way of reading the current versions' manuals; having a tinker
[19:22] jfw: as for republican blogs, there's certainly useful information there but everyone made their own choices (e.g. for lack of an adequate TMSR-standard OS) so it bears considering who you'll be able to get meaningful help from
[19:24] jfw: hm, I'd at least get the major versions picked first and go to the corresponding manuals rather than going with whatever rip-"current"
[19:25] cruciform: aha, yes - ok; which versions do you use?
[19:25] jfw: as usual with manuals the point isn't to read cover-to-cover but at the very least to know where they are and what they can help with
[19:25] jfw: ha, a questions
[19:25] jfw: *question!
[19:25] cruciform: lol
[19:26] cruciform: I'd also ask what the reasoning behind your choices is, but I don't think I know enough yet for that to be particularly meaningful
[19:27] jfw: I'm presently running on centos 6 and mostly going with their packaged versions: apache httpd 2.2.15, mysql 5.1.73, php 5.3.3
[19:27] cruciform: hrm, actually - it'd probably be good for the logs, and useful to me in the future - even if not presently - to know *why* you chose whichever versions?
[19:27] cruciform: aha - I belive my Azure VM even has that CentOS flavour
[19:27] jfw: however going forward I'll most likely be sticking with: apache 2.2 series, because they broke config compatibility for no good reason in 2.4
[19:29] jfw: mysql 5.6.38
[19:30] jfw: and certainly nothing past php 5 series as they broke compat in all sorts of ways, death by thousand papercuts kinda thing.
[19:31] jfw: MP at least at one point was reportedly using php 4.x; there were some nuisances in getting mp-wp on php5 but they're well known by now.
[19:33] cruciform: thanks!
[19:34] jfw: you're welcome.
[21:06] cruciform: jfw, why centos 6?
[21:36] jfw: in a word: systemd.
[21:38] jfw: (assuming you mean "as opposed to 7 or whatever, 'everybody' says it's too old and omg you gotta update !!")
[21:44] jfw: CentOS is mostly just an independent rebuild of the RHEL sources, and as such used to be one of the more stable / well behaved & maintained free distros around. Signs of decay were already visible in RHEL 6 though eg NetworkManager and it accelerated from there.
[21:52] jfw: see also http://ossasepia.com/2020/04/21/ossasepia-logs-for-10-Dec-2019/ mostly.
Day changed to 2021-02-05
[19:23] jfw: Apparently one of the ways I lose small items is by squirreling them away tidily in boxes - not necessarily the original boxes, and sometimes within further boxes. Not quite disorganization, more like halfway-organization - doing the physical part but missing the logical part (labeling & cataloging & such)
[19:24] cruciform: jfw, I have the opposite problem of neurotically over-cataloging/labelling - as recently, with moving shit into storage (the moving taking 10% the time of labelling)
[19:25] jfw: ooh, you at the level of printing & scanning barcodes yet?
[19:28] cruciform: haha - don't give me ideas!
[19:30] jfw: curious though, why do you think you overdo it? did you lose gems long ago that started the habit, or get it drilled in by others, or just tended that way?
[19:31] jfw: I suppose like anything it's a matter of cost vs benefit and importance of keeping things straight in a given situation.
[19:31] cruciform: hrm - very good question; I'll have to think about it
[19:32] jfw: the two data points in other words
[19:32] cruciform: yes; though in my case, it's more obsessive (doesn't tend to rise as far as the cost/benefit consideration)
[19:35] jfw: so perhaps more a matter of placating feelings than of solving a problem, while I'm apparently on this referencing of vintage hanbot kick.
[19:42] cruciform: time for a reread on my part, at any rate - thanks for the links
[19:58] jfw: no prob. in my case I've just turned up a power supply that I thought I'd missed packing on a trip last week, and a console cable that I thought I lost months ago and meanwhile got replaced; but haven't yet turned up the little bag of cable ties I was actually looking for!
Day changed to 2021-02-06
[03:04] jfw: Since we haven't mentioned it here yet: JWRD recently closed a deal, a good year in gestation, to build up a self-hosted IT plant for a smallish independently-minded firm in town.
[03:07] jfw: This means expanding our software and hardware offerings into what we're calling our Private Enterprise Computing Platform or PECP.
[03:10] jfw: This further means, for one thing, resuming the LAMP-in-Gales work (previously seen and suspended)
[03:14] jfw: and for another, Gales on APU1
[03:17] jfw: in which vein, I've now managed a first bootup of the installer (which just needed a couple kernel and bootloader tweaks due to the serial-only console of said machine), and have a promising lead on an end run fo the enclosure preassembly nonsense.
[03:19] jfw: Which would additionally allow us to deck them out with full-size SSD and TRNG.
[03:25] jfw: One potential bother I'm seeing on this first exploration is what seems to be an incomplete open source driver for its Realtek 8111E GBICs: "r8169 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for rtl_nic/rtl8168e-2.fw failed with error -2" (ie it tries to load a vendor-supplied blob which we don't allow it)
[03:27] jfw: nonetheless in this state it does subsequently get "link up" (without the helpful "at 1000mpbs" type info I'm accustomed to, perhaps that's just in the intel nic driver? and with unclear signals from the port LEDs) and pings get through.
[03:33] jfw: I'm aware of talk in the old logs about "all current NICs are evil", nonetheless the "Intel Pro/1000" (e1000e driver) on my trusty thinkpads seem to work fine without asking for magic firmware.
[03:37] jfw: ...which prolly means the magic is just baked into roms, out of sight and out of mind, I suppose
Day changed to 2021-02-07
[17:34] jfw: cruciform: I think it would indeed be for the best to pause classes until we get your lost machines replaced, rather than continuing to faff about with the untested ubuntu setup.
[17:34] cruciform: no problem; I'm inclined to agree
[17:35] jfw: sadly I don't have much progress to report on the laptops front but will get to it real soon now.
[17:35] cruciform: do you have an ETA on replacement machines?
[17:35] cruciform: great
[17:36] jfw: so perhaps I can get them in the mail Wednesday and you get them by Tuesday the 16th; I wouldn't quite bank on it though.
[17:38] cruciform: no problem; hopefully the new ones will stay in my position a tad longer, and the prior set are causing all sorts of consternation
[17:39] jfw: oh, one of the machines in the pipeline seems to have a defective 'ThinkLight' (little white LED at the top of the screen that shines down on the keyboard, activated by Fn-F12); do you anticipate that being a bother or tolerable?
[17:39] cruciform: that's fine
[17:40] cruciform: maybe you could glue a candle to it or something?
[17:40] jfw: cool. I could swap with another with slower CPU and noisy fan, doesn't quite sound like a win :)
[17:40] jfw: haha
[17:42] jfw: I used to roll with a mechanical 'Das Keyboard' without the key cap labels, don't need no stinkin' photons just to be able to type, but others might go for the candle solution I'm sure.
[17:43] cruciform: yea - I've got a similar model from Cooler Master (though the keycaps are printed on the vertical front edge of keycaps
[17:44] cruciform: like so
[17:45] jfw: right. numpad isn't optional in my book though ;)
[17:46] cruciform: it gets in the way when playing Starcraft, which was a big problem at time of purchase
[17:47] jfw: hm, how's that? need to keep the mouse closer or what?
[17:48] cruciform: yea - the keyboard's too wide; keep bumping mouse into it
[17:49] cruciform: it's been a good few years since I played, now - may end up preferring a numpad again
[17:49] jfw: certainly if you need to switch between mouse/kb frequently I could see distance being a problem but then that's a bothersome situation no matter what.
[17:50] cruciform: this keyboard's held up fine since ~2016, or so (Cherry Blue switches)
[17:50] jfw: yeah they're ok as long as you don't have a roommate or officemate, heh.
[17:51] cruciform: I've never minded the sound of others blue-switching; quite enjoy the sound, actually
[17:51] jfw: the feel still isn't quite as good as the old 'Model M' buckling springs.
[17:51] cruciform: must try one of those, sometime
[17:51] cruciform: friend's got an old IBM keyboard that may or may not be buckling-spring
[17:52] cruciform: Cherry Reds were awful - pure mush
[17:52] jfw: I've rather lost track of the colors besides blue.
[17:53] cruciform: aren't capacitive switches all the rage, now?
[17:54] jfw: (and yeah I don't mind the sound but the types who don't get why spend >$5 on a keyboard anyway sometimes do.)
[17:54] jfw: what's that, sounds like a switch with no actual movement?
[17:55] cruciform: thankfully, don't have many of those "people" around me
[17:56] cruciform: I belive they still have tactile feedback; just the actuation mechanism that differs
[17:59] jfw: sounds like a pretty small thing to rage about but hey, perhaps I'll figure it out on one of those nonexisted bored days, heh.
[17:59] jfw: *nonexistant
[18:02] jfw: funny too how the "why >$5 on keyboard??" types see no problem with 200x that for new pNoje every year or w/e.
[18:02] cruciform: pNoje?
[18:03] jfw: old variety speak for what you get when "typing" on iphone keyboard.
[18:03] cruciform: aha
[18:04] cruciform: yea - the number of times people say they're upgrading... "what's wrong with your old phone?" "nothing"
[18:04] cruciform: I get regular stick for using a 2016 iPhone SE - that actually fits in a human hand
[18:06] jfw: clearly, because that means you're trying to use it as a tool rather than object of worship.
[18:08] cruciform: still baffled by the pseudo-reality of people preferring to bury face in screen rather than... look around when out and about
[18:12] jfw: these days they're probably taught that the male gaze can transmit eye infections or something.
[18:13] jfw: but I'm open to alternative explanations!
[18:16] jfw: avoidance of risking the grave dangers of having a conversation perhaps.
[18:22] cruciform: lol
[18:25] cruciform: from what I gather, it's exceedingly rare for a cute girl to be approached; perhaps the phone-reality is superior to what's available on the street, nowadays
[18:41] jfw: that part at least seems quite different in LatAm, although they're as stuck in the phones as anyone, if not more so for lack of prior computing/internet culture
[18:42] jfw: surely it's still rare for girl to get the sort of attention she'd *like* to get but what can you do.
[18:47] jfw will be off to approach some hot CPUs and take their measurements
[18:48] cruciform: lol - good luck!
[22:12] jfw: well, my oh so unreasonable skepticism verging on hostility towards the surprise apu1 preassembly is vindicated: having gathered data from the working system to my satisfaction I've now removed the board and found that they did it wrong.
[22:14] jfw: the southbridge chip was entirely unconnected to the heatsink, with no thermal pad; and even the CPU pad was off-center.
[22:16] jfw: the aluminum heat spreader is pretty well cemented to the case bottom so I'm not sure I could even move it to the right position now.
[22:17] jfw: I'm thinking they might have blindly followed the apu2 procedure not noticing it was an apu1.
Day changed to 2021-02-08
[01:17] dorion: jfw, sounds like a mess, thanks for getting to the bottom of that.
[05:53] jfw: yw; the bright side is that now we have a concrete "wtf" to get back to the pcengines dude with. open to suggestions on how to go about that
[05:55] jfw: for instance: given the medium size of our order, the hassle they've saddled us with and that they clearly would rather not be bothered with the apu1 line anymore, would they give us a hefty discount?
[05:57] jfw: or: would they hand over the CAD files + whatever other design docs for the official enclosure so that the adults can relieve them of the burden of talking to western-hemisphere manufacturers?
[05:58] jfw: though if they won't, since I have it disassembled now it's that much easier to reverse-engineer.
[06:03] jfw: I must confess my image of the "engineering process" at pcengines is now something like: sign NDAs and buy into some AMD reference designs; load up some swank EDA CAD tools; mash ctrl-c ctrl-v in various combinations until some constraint analyzer widget lights up green; mail to china.
[06:12] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1406 is indeed the case, the realtek thing isn't even some full firmware image but a "patch", complete with state machine / mini bytecode interpreter in the driver for scripting the patching process
[06:12] sourcerer: 2021-02-06 03:37:32 (#jwrd) jfw: ...which prolly means the magic is just baked into roms, out of sight and out of mind, I suppose
[06:16] jfw: and "updated firmware with stability fixes" was all the explanation the linux kernel developers found to be needed. I plan to just keep it out but reserve the option to use it if an actual need becomes evident.
[06:20] jfw: Due to the lack of speed info in the driver messages and apparent lack of working status LEDs (possibly that'd be one of the firmware issues), and the potential need to diagnose remotely whether a gigabit link is actually running at gigabit and not falling back to morse code for compatibility or w/e, I did an "ethtool" port for Gales; by which I've confirmed it's getting gigabit, at least
[06:20] jfw: nominally.
[06:21] jfw: oh, the one more input to that decision was checking that the latest busybox ifconfig still hadn't done the todo of adding media status.
[06:22] jfw: now why is it so much easier for me to dump this in the log than actually write the status report I meant to have out yesterday...
[06:27] jfw: well I hope the bystanders are entertained at least and it's good to have this fully on the record.
[17:32] cruciform: As of November 30 2020 CentOS 6.10 is EOL. I was running into errors using yum to update/install packages: "Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: base". Uncommenting the baseurl= line under [base] in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file didn't help, but modifying the base URLs to point to the now-archived repos at https://vault.centos.org , as in [https://web.archive.org/web/20210208172721/https://forums.cpanel.net/th
[17:32] cruciform: reads/yumrepo-error-and-cannot-find-valid-baseurl.682465/][post #7] solved the issue.
[17:35] cruciform: and, in other brokens, the line-break of that copy-and-pasted URL above breaks the bot's logging of same
[18:58] jfw: Good to know that switching to "vault" still works at least.
[18:59] jfw: re irc line-wrap, I'm not sure there's much a bot can do about it; the protocol doesn't distinguish continuation/final fragments to allow for reliable reassembly
[19:04] jfw: the tmsr approach to irc annoyances was more along the lines of redesigning computer networking altogether to replace it (gossipd) rather than mending the historical artifacts; though that never came to pass, for one thing it broke out into a whole chain of dependencies not timely resolvable
[19:05] jfw: (adequately functioning brains & connected bodies being ultimately the main ingredient in short supply, by my read)
Day changed to 2021-02-12
[12:02] cruciform: jfw, dorion: I'll have spotty internet over the next few days - should be back online Monday
Day changed to 2021-02-16
[04:38] jfw: cruciform: I've made headway on the refurbishing; there's some parts details to resolve still and a bunch else on my plate as usual but I currently expect to have two machines for you in the mail by Thursday.
[04:42] jfw: I'll also leave the teaser that we've begun looking into how to replace our thinkpad offering with all-new parts that aren't such a dwindling resource (not to mention hassle to source).
[04:44] jfw: The minimum viable option I've come up with so far would be slower than the thinkpads, though still serviceable for a bitcoin node, so I don't expect the value of past purchases to be diluted any time soon. Those thinkpads may well be Peak Laptop as far as the free world is concerned.
Day changed to 2021-02-18
[01:53] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1486 - make that Friday.
[01:53] sourcerer: 2021-02-16 04:38:03 (#jwrd) jfw: cruciform: I've made headway on the refurbishing; there's some parts details to resolve still and a bunch else on my plate as usual but I currently expect to have two machines for you in the mail by Thursday.
[16:12] cruciform: jfw - great!
Day changed to 2021-02-19
[04:44] jfw: I have one annoyance to note with our current X200 Coreboot config: the Linux text console comes up at the laptop display's native resolution - which is great until you want to use an external monitor on the VGA port. If you run an X server then it should be able to handle things fine, but Gales Linux doesn't presently have that.
[04:47] jfw: An older config I have on one of my own machines actually handles this better - it comes up in some low-res VGA mode at boot time, then switches to the native mode of the external monitor if connected otherwise the laptop panel once the linux inteldrmfb driver initializes.
[04:49] jfw: Thus I have high hopes that some coreboot config tweaking and reflashing can remedy this - there are a bunch of VGA / VESA knobs to twiddle with interactions that are rather confusing to the outsider.
[04:50] jfw: When I first developed this process the big pain was getting any display output *at all*.
[04:52] jfw: (and that part was essential because of course the various bootloader options didn't work on the first try either; now I can experiment and even if coreboot doesn't light up the display, then Linux will.)
[20:06] PDogJr: I've seen a bunch of sites among this network of people using mp-wp. Is that a modified wordpress? Where can I find the source?
[22:43] jfw: cruciform: your package is in the mail with expected delivery next Wednesday the 24th at end of day.
[22:44] jfw: PDogJr: I was giving some pointers not that long ago actually, check the logs which are linked in the topic.
[22:44] jfw: PDogJr: what's your interest in mp-wp, do you own a blog? digging for 'sploits?
Day changed to 2021-02-20
[01:44] PDogJr: I have a blog
[01:44] PDogJr: I'm trying to write my own comment system and I was curious how others have written theirs
[01:44] PDogJr: seems like everyone in this community automatically assumes the worst
[02:41] dorion: hello PDogJr, welcome.
[02:41] PDogJr: hi
[02:43] dorion: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1497 -- did you get to the bottom of what the mp stands for ? billymg has a mirror of several of the patches and seals.
[02:43] sourcerer: 2021-02-19 20:06:22 (#jwrd) PDogJr: I've seen a bunch of sites among this network of people using mp-wp. Is that a modified wordpress? Where can I find the source?
[02:44] PDogJr: no I have not yet figured it out
[02:48] dorion: mp is for Mircea Popescu, the owner of http://trilema.com ; mp-wp various improvements, such as proper trackbacks and proper html linking and select functionality, etc.
[02:51] dorion: he made it available when he was heading tmsr, which is why you find the source mirrored as vpatches.
[02:53] PDogJr: thanks for the info
[02:57] dorion: V emerged to suit first the needs of Bitcoin source code management, which may be where it seems like everyone "assumes the worst".
[02:58] dorion: PDogJr, you're welcome. those are just entry points and there as several layers of resourceful links underneath.
[02:59] dorion: PDogJr, mind sharing the link to your blog ?
[03:00] PDogJr: I'm not usually inclined to post the link since I'll be rewriting everything and breaking a lot of stuff but it's poorchop dot com
[03:01] dorion: well I'll take it as a compliment then, thanks. lol.
[03:01] dorion: PDogJr, mine is http://dorion-mode.com
[03:02] PDogJr: nice, liking the photos
[03:03] PDogJr: been populating my rss feed with any good blogs I can find, will add yours to the list
[03:03] dorion: nice, have you been finding a few ?
[03:05] PDogJr: yeah quite a bit, luckily people tend to link to other blogs one way or another on their own sites
[03:06] PDogJr: stumble across one every now and then when searching for something, sometimes find them through news aggregators
[03:07] PDogJr: good to have a feed that I can follow with good content written by people who care instead of the clickbait and distracting stuff that populates the mainstream web
[03:08] PDogJr: that's how I found asciilifeform's blog which led me to the ring of all these mp-wp users but they all seem excessively paranoid
[03:09] dorion: PDogJr, "quoting is scholarship", afterall.
[03:11] dorion: PDogJr, what do you mean by paranoid ? and what do you mean by excessively ? have any links handy ?
[03:12] PDogJr: ascii banning me from his room after I didn't immediately respond to his question to explain in detail what I was doing in his chat, jfw thinking that I'm looking for exploits by asking for info/source code for mp-wp
[03:13] PDogJr: ascii comparing it to a stranger showing up at my door and standing there the whole day without explaining what he's doing, as if someone using a bouncer on irc is comparable to a strange man showing up at your house and standing there menacingly
[03:14] dorion: PDogJr, ah, I see what you mean then.
[03:20] dorion: PDogJr, what I'll say for now then is there is nothing new in the world except the history you don't know. one of the stronger aspects of tmsr, meanwhile closed, is how well documented it is so if you like new, there's a ~decade of history you could read of which mp-wp would one of the many tools produced.
[03:22] PDogJr: yeah that applies to most sites that I've been following
[03:22] PDogJr: lots of old content to comb through, too little time
[03:23] dorion: PDogJr, probably not equally though. which is the signal and which is the noise ? that's the challenge.
[03:26] PDogJr: well that's the beauty of RSS, the feed is curated by none other than yourself so hopefully the noise is low to nonexistent
[03:26] dorion: PDogJr, re standing on someone's door, he's an asciilifeform afterall, what'd you expect ? lol.
[03:26] PDogJr: heh
[03:27] PDogJr: I'm not sure what all this is about reading that post in the comments, seems very obtuse to me
[03:27] dorion: which now ?
[03:28] PDogJr: the whole web ring of everyone associated with mp
[03:28] PDogJr: I see lots of mention of bitcoin but other than that, not sure what everyone is talking about most of the time
[03:30] PDogJr: not understanding most of these comments or mp's responses http://trilema.com/2020/closure/#comment-151569
[03:32] dorion: it's the web of trust, wot, mp owns the bitcoin stock exchange, mpex, and there is a whole variety speak.
[03:32] dorion: PDogJr, which languages do you read ?
[03:32] PDogJr: English only
[03:35] dorion: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1541 -- here's some context : http://trilema.com/2016/modernism-and-traditionalism/
[03:35] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 03:30:43 (#jwrd) PDogJr: not understanding most of these comments or mp's responses http://trilema.com/2020/closure/#comment-151569
[03:36] dorion: PDogJr, that english as a single language is likely part of your trouble.
[03:38] PDogJr: I'd love to learn more languages but finding resources, times, and people with whom I can practice is next to impossible
[03:38] dorion: PDogJr, where are you located ?
[03:39] dorion: PDogJr, what do you do for a living ?
[03:39] PDogJr: I'd rather not be too specific especially since this is logged forever for all the world to see
[03:40] dorion: don't you see that'd only make meeting people even more impossible though ?
[03:42] PDogJr: nope
[03:42] dorion: PDogJr, why'd anyone talk to a nobody ?
[03:43] PDogJr: we're all nobodies and announcing your location and profession to the world doesn't make you more of a somebody than anybody else
[03:43] PDogJr: I could say I live in Zimbabwe and that I pick up trash for a living, what difference would it make
[03:49] dorion: PDogJr, I don't accept "we're all nobodies"
[03:50] dorion: if "we're all nobodies", no one would have an identity.
[03:50] PDogJr: I don't accept that disclosing personal info makes you better than anybody else
[03:53] dorion: PDogJr, identity is a fixed point upon which the whos from the whats may be sorted. i admit i'd have been more polite/proper for me to ask you to register a gpg key if you intend to talk here.
[03:54] dorion: PDogJr, do you realize you started talking to some strangers about their paranoia then yourself tenaciously block friendly/curious questions directed at you ?
[03:55] PDogJr: if you actually require users to register a gpg key to partake in a a public channel hosted on a public, widely known network then I will see myself out
[03:55] PDogJr: there's a difference between attacking someone for asking a question about the software powering your blog and asking someone where they live and what they do for a living
[03:56] PDogJr: which is intensely personal when asked together
[03:57] PDogJr: why not ask for my social security number or information on the parties with whom I conduct business
[03:59] dorion: PDogJr, relax. I'm not used to people being so sensitive about sharing basic facts of life and you're at my doorstep eating up my time afterall, I'll ask want I want.
[04:00] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1503 - look in the mirror, pretty much. wondering if maybe a dog is digging for bones is hardly a "worst"; though at this point indeed it doesn't look like anythinig that exciting.
[04:00] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 01:44:41 (#jwrd) PDogJr: seems like everyone in this community automatically assumes the worst
[04:00] PDogJr: I gave you a pretty simple response and you turned it into an issue of not wanting to talk to a "nobody" and then stating that I need to share gpg key if I intend on staying here
[04:02] PDogJr: yeah I'm looking in the mirror and I still don't see how not wanting to disclose geographic info and profession equates to not wanting to discuss the software that you talk about in the open
[04:02] dorion: PDogJr, the fact is, irc nicks are way easier to steal than gpg keys.
[04:03] PDogJr: sure, but I've been on freenode a very long time and I've never seen anyone take it seriously enough to demand gpg keys
[04:04] dorion: PDogJr, perhaps find better friends then ?
[04:04] PDogJr: I'd agree with that if I had the kinds of friends who wouldn't hold a conversation unless I shared my gpg key
[04:05] PDogJr: anyways thanks for the info about mp-wp, I guess I'll get to searching for exploits apparently and doing all the nonsensical stuff that I was being accused of doing
[04:06] jfw: PDogJr, nobody has demanded anything that I can see here but I'm certainly hearing a lot of whining.
[04:08] jfw: guess asciilifeform didn't need that storied ban hammer after all, if the willfully-nobodies see themselves out so easily
[04:10] dorion: jfw, a "who are you ?" from the beginning would've saved some time, but at least I'm glad it was logged.
[04:13] jfw: well, he/she/it pretty much opened by saying "everyone in town wrinkles their nose whenever I enter the room, what's wrong with everyone's sense of smell??"
[04:27] dorion: jfw, my read is that dog asked for a resource without giving anything, you made a joke about sploits, I shared a bunch of resources and we got talking about languages and dog said "it's impossible" for dog to learn and I so I asked where dog is since I thought dog might be a person aaaaaand... it's gone and not coming back.
[04:30] jfw: right. well, I also gave a complete if minimal answer to the minimal initial request
[04:31] dorion: that you did.
[04:38] jfw: about 'demanding' key registration though, I don't expect I will, it's just that you'll be treated as a newcomer every time since for all we know that's what you are; and how open we are to newcomers will change with the time and weather.
[04:49] dorion: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1556 -- I didn't manage to answer this in the flow, but if I knew that for 1) I'd make sense for me to ask if you'd read about that very unfair perspective and for 2) I could share with you the richest man from my town in recent years (after they closed the marble quarries) was the
[04:49] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 03:43:32 (#jwrd) PDogJr: I could say I live in Zimbabwe and that I pick up trash for a living, what difference would it make
[04:49] dorion: one who managed to pick up trash the most efficiently, his name trades as cwst on nasdaq.
[04:51] dorion: jfw, makes sense. I went to that when hair raised on dog's neck when I asked about where dog is and what dog does.
[04:55] jfw: nothing wrong with it, at minimum makes for an interesting test. do they know gpg? are they interested enough to bother? etc. or in this case, breaking out in hives at the mere suggestion of having long-term identity, it would appear
[04:57] jfw: I suppose we do need to see to getting an actual place to register tho.
[05:11] dorion: indeed.
[17:46] cruciform: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2021/jwrd-logs-for-Feb-2021/#1498 -- great; shall we aim to resume on Tuesday, March 2nd @18:00 UTC?
[17:46] sourcerer: 2021-02-19 22:43:38 (#jwrd) jfw: cruciform: your package is in the mail with expected delivery next Wednesday the 24th at end of day.
[20:05] cruciform: In miscellaneous lulz, I’ve now offered four friends free BTC if they’ll merely send me an address. None of em have (poker player, compsci student, two programmers).
Day changed to 2021-02-21
[03:05] jfw: cruciform: the 2nd it is.
[03:08] jfw: give those friends some time I suppose, though if they hadn't gotten interested after all this time already then the odds are looking slim.
[04:10] cruciform: who knew giving away money was so hard?! The compsci student was particularly lulzy - she'd done a summer internship with a "blockchain company"; I asked her how Bitcoin worked - no clue
Day changed to 2021-02-24
[02:12] jfw: https://bugs.python.org/issue42938 << unsurprising but possibly still worth a mention: all versions of python (including 2.x which they evidently imagine themselves at liberty to ignore) caught with pants down importing libc routines long known to be inherently unsafe.
[02:20] jfw: the Gales Linux port is unaffected, though by a somewhat lengthy chain of causes: the blunder is in the 'ctypes' module, which provides support for the bit-futzing needed to translate data structures when interfacing with C code; this module isn't present in the Gales port, probably because it didn't work for whatever reason by default with static linking, and nothing important has been found to
[02:20] jfw: require fixing it as yet
[02:21] jfw: the virtue of strategic laziness, I suppose.
[02:29] jfw: for MP-WP operators or anyone else at risk of winding up in the PHP mines, I've added frozen documentation for php 4 and 5 to the library, in both bulk-downloadable archive and broken-out html form. that they aren't actually specific to the nominal versions and include all manner of extraneous "notes from the future" is the php folks' doing, not mine;
[02:29] jfw: or " The reason for this is how our documentation is structured" as they put it.
[02:33] jfw: cruciform: want to invite those friends and the compsci student in particular to the channel?
[02:34] cruciform: I could, but given they weren't interestd in phree-btc, I doubt they'd have the gumption to show up
[02:34] cruciform: still, no harm in asking
[02:36] jfw: right, who knows, perhaps the problem is environmental. rather, we *know* it's environmental, but less so how a given brain responds to a given change of environment.
[02:37] cruciform: why, then, is YH closed - if not for uniformity of (lack of) response?
[02:38] cruciform: ditto, TMSR
[02:41] jfw: as I understand it, it's not that there was *no* response, but that there wasn't enough to make those projects work in the way that they had been designed.
[02:42] jfw: to make them worth the ongoing investment to the people who built them up.
[02:47] cruciform: granted - lack of *sufficient* response. Perhaps worse than no response at all, for all the investment
[02:53] jfw: Not worse than nothing, by my read, at least in diana_coman's case
[03:09] jfw: as far as what the situation means for me: it's that there's no competent help around with which to build a castle; nonetheless the horde is at the gates as ever and I still can't do it all myself; thus essentially I have no choice but to figure out how to be at the top of a smaller pyramid, rather than midway up a larger one (now that I've quite mixed my architectural metaphors)
[03:10] cruciform: lol
[14:31] cruciform: jfw, I'd like to be able to get a post up on Wednesday, if possible. Doesn't need all the bells and whistles sorted by then. Can spill over into Thursday.
[14:45] jfw: We shall see then if four calendar days is enough runway for JWRD to get into the SaaS business but so far it's still looking doable to have the basics up by tonight.
[14:46] cruciform: sounds good! We'll see if any of my friends can get into #JWRD in less time (one of 'em - a programmer - is currently unable to figure out how to open IRC...)
[14:50] jfw: the missing pieces are probably a bit larger than "how to open", heh.
[14:51] jfw: I'll be mostly heads-down today though, for the obvious reasons.
[21:44] cruciform: the laptops have arrived; don't seem to have been dinged for customs
Day changed to 2021-02-25
[00:41] dorion: cheers.
[02:19] jfw: cruciform: http://cockroachman.net/ is live and waiting to meet its new owner.
[02:21] jfw: if you're on in the next hour or two I can walk you through it live, otherwise I'll perhaps write up some instructions.
[03:01] cruciform: jfw, sweet! I'm just about to hit the sack - would be grateful for some pointers - gn!
[08:32] jfw: cruciform: http://paste.deedbot.org/?id=752Z
[18:03] jfw: well that was a pain. looks like freenode in their usual style silently pulled the plug on both the servers in my whitelist, though with one of them in some state of half-online sputtering
[18:05] cruciform: jfw, I'm getting a "403 Forbidden You don't have permission to access /wp-admin/ on this server." error page when trying to access http://cockroachman.net/wp-admin/ via browser
[18:07] jfw: upon updating my hosts file I then hit what seems to be an improperly handled error case in yrc (the SockError case in conn_start not doing enough cleanup eg conn_close) so a manual disconnect + connect and rejoin chans was required.
[18:07] jfw: besides that issue itself it seems to want a /reconnect command in case of other such issues
[18:08] jfw: cruciform: looking
[18:11] jfw: cruciform: try now
[18:12] jfw: looks like I wrote up the change I was going to make then missed actually making it, sorry about that.
[18:12] cruciform: thanks - works fine now
[18:14] jfw: the old "attached you will find the crucial information..." / "wait, where's the attachment?"
[18:14] cruciform: ye, classic - I'm neurotic about attaching first
[18:15] cruciform: how long did the setup take, out of interest?
[18:19] jfw: looks like about 14 hours all told; mostly because there were new things to research, discuss, decide & test about how to get the server configuration into shape for a (somewhat) wider user base, old annoyances that came to light afresh and so on.
[18:21] cruciform: nice; will get coin to ya later today. Any chance you can get the media upload function working (specifically images)?
[18:22] cruciform: also, I've sorted the Tuesday doublebook, so still on for session @ 18:00 UTC March 2nd
[18:24] jfw: I looked at it briefly, the first problem was that it wasn't even reporting any errors so completely unclear as to where to start or how to test any given step. Pretty typical of the wordpress code-mess too.
[18:24] jfw: ack re Tuesday.
[18:24] jfw: re media upload, is this an efficiency consideration or do you just not know how to use scp or what's the problem specifically?
[18:25] cruciform: I don't know how to use scp, but can learn; just wondered why it wasn't working via browser GUI
[18:29] jfw: At least the known part of it is that the php runs as a separate user ID that deliberately doesn't have write access to its own code. Loosening permissions on the uploads directory would be one approach.
[18:30] cruciform: aha; I'm rather keen to learn the scp/your scripting approach, anyway
[18:31] cruciform: manual upload/formatting is a huge pain in the arse
[18:32] jfw: http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2019/blogging-photos-and-chat-logs-some-handy-scripts/ was my imagemagick-based approach
[18:33] cruciform: cheers, shall grok
[18:34] cruciform: I asked 3 of the 4 people who refused my phree-coins offer to pop into #JWRD during office hours
[18:35] cruciform: I do find the lack of interest in BTC amongst technical people baffling
[18:36] jfw: they actually declined rather than just couldn't figure it out or something?
[18:36] cruciform: 1 hard declined; the other 2, it's not clear
[18:38] cruciform: aha - one seems to be on his way
[18:39] jfw: hello PeteLondon
[18:40] PeteLondon: hey guys hope you're good
[18:40] cruciform: oioi
[18:40] PeteLondon: haha i wouldnt have guessed its cruciform
[18:40] cruciform: lol, which would've been your guess?
[18:40] PeteLondon: I havent installed VIM do I need to do that before the IRC channel expires
[18:41] PeteLondon: "sourcerer"
[18:41] cruciform: lol - that's a bot
[18:41] cruciform: also, a tad DnD/neckbeard-y, even for me
[18:41] cruciform: dorion and jfw are the guys I'm doing the BTC security course under
[18:42] PeteLondon: not impressed sorry unless you can center a div within a div
[18:42] PeteLondon: :)
[18:42] cruciform: PeteLondon is an old school buddy; why don't ya introduce yourself?
[18:43] cruciform: all I know is that he can (maybe) bubble sort
[18:43] PeteLondon: i love that you use IRC for the course - who needs teams anyway
[18:44] PeteLondon: I'm a 33yo programmer basically with 1yrs experience basically self-taught, mainly doing web development
[18:44] jfw: sourcerer keeps the channel log and cites sources. for instance: I take it you're one of the free btc offer recipients who hasn't quite figured out what that even means yet
[18:44] sourcerer: 2021-02-20 20:05:48 (#jwrd) cruciform: In miscellaneous lulz, I???ve now offered four friends free BTC if they???ll merely send me an address. None of em have (poker player, compsci student, two programmers).
[18:44] PeteLondon: I know I know
[18:44] PeteLondon: I need to buy a trezor basically if thats even the thing these days
[18:45] cruciform: you need a trezor to receive phree buttcoins?
[18:45] PeteLondon: alright ill get one now one sec
[18:46] PeteLondon: just answered the door to a woman
[18:46] cruciform: lol, that wasn't what I was getting at
[18:46] PeteLondon: she said shes here for a viewing - I slate absolutely everything about the flat, theyre illegal etc etc
[18:46] PeteLondon: 5mins later she says shes the agent
[18:46] PeteLondon: bit awkward
[18:48] cruciform: the free coins offer was just to get you back into it, really: friends don't let friends own no BTC
[18:48] PeteLondon: i have a localbitcoins account just trying to get the address
[18:48] cruciform: iirc, trezors have had issues with security
[18:49] PeteLondon: it is not surprising really (to an amateur) as you need a google chrome extension
[18:49] PeteLondon: to operate the thing
[18:50] jfw: myeah, these "hardware wallets".
[18:50] cruciform: for example
[18:52] jfw: using a dedicated computer, whether full size or pocket size, to protect sensitive information is fine, in fact the only correct approach, but those fashionable ones are fashionable instead because they're selling "don't have to understand anything, just use the magic stick"
[18:54] cruciform: and, he's off
[18:55] jfw: possibly network trouble - you still there PeteLondon19?
[18:55] cruciform: he did have network trouble, and has had enough of computers for the day
[18:56] cruciform: maybe there's a market for freenode magic sticks
[18:56] jfw: anyway to try to unpack something from this pile of confusion: the channel isn't expiring any time soon, not to worry there, though people aren't always at the keyboard of course
[18:56] sourcerer: 2021-02-25 18:40:51 (#jwrd) PeteLondon: I havent installed VIM do I need to do that before the IRC channel expires
[18:57] jfw: no idea what installing vim would be required for though.
[18:57] cruciform: he's poking fun at The Right Thing approach of JWRD
[18:58] PeteLondon19: haha
[18:58] cruciform will bbl
[18:59] PeteLondon19: it disconnected bc of a vpn on my laptop i think
[18:59] PeteLondon19: also need to verify my identity using a link on my phone where i have to upload a copy of my passport
[18:59] PeteLondon19: ive had enough of computers for the day (next 3 hours) so off for a walk, be back in a bit
[18:59] jfw: lol, yeah that's definitely a sign of what NOT to look for in a possible bitcoin wallet.
[18:59] PeteLondon19: ^^^
[18:59] PeteLondon19: have a nice evening guys
[19:01] jfw: well, perhaps he finds the logs or his way back in some less burnt-out day.
Day changed to 2021-02-26
[17:07] dorion waves
[17:37] jfw: wb from the freenode "fiber cut".
[20:44] jfw: cruciform: I've received your payment, thank you!
[23:40] cruciform: jfw, glad to hear it