Archive of posts from 2022/08 📝

This evening, a contestant on The Chase UK (one of my favourite television programmes) was asked the following question:

I have tuned in to two IANA Root KSK signing ceremonies this year. The last one was held last Wednesday. The Root KSK ceremony is where representatives come together to sign the new keys for the root DNS servers. These are the servers at the heart of the DNS protocol. The root servers let you find TLD-level servers. Cloudflare has a great blog post on what the root servers are and how the ceremony works. The ceremonies are often quite long but if I know one is on I will tune in.

A few weeks ago, I learned that the IndieWeb community aims to archive all of the Etherpad documents from meetups on the wiki. Etherpad documents are made available at online meetups so participants can document ideas and what happened in the call. Archiving these documents to the wiki makes them easily searchable and ensures their contents are preserved not only in a document that could be edited further down the line.

I am continuing my foray into learning more about Linux and Unix. Over the last few days, I have learned about some shortcuts on the terminal that have made me think: "I wish I knew this existed long ago." (I'm not sure if the shortcuts I have learned are portable to every terminal, but they work on macOS and should work on Linux too.)

I have installed Plan 9 on my Raspberry Pi. I am excited to start using it. I can't use Plan 9 yet because I need a new keyboard and mouse to use with my Pi. So, this evening I decided to peruse the online Plan 9 manual pages. I am excited and have been eagerly trying a few commands on my Mac to see what commands are also on my Mac.

For the last few days, the server on which this website (and many others I run!) started acting strangely. Every so often, nginx would stop working and I'd have to restart the service manually. I had restarted nginx two or three times over the last few days so I knew something wasn't right. I spent some time this afternoon figuring out what was wrong. I found an issue with certbot renewals and nginx that, when resolved, fixed the errors I found in nginx and the /var/log/syslog file on my computer.

I was trying to implement the Fisher-Yates algorithm earlier this evening. This algorithm lets you randomly shuffle the contents of a list. I wanted to provide a list of songs and return a shuffled list. I decided to use Lisp for this since I don't know much Lisp and I want to build my skills.

Earlier this week I watched Alex Chan's Sans I/O programming talk. In the talk, Alex argues the importance of separating I/O and program logic, with reference to a situation where his team was unable to use already-available parsing libraries for BagIt data because said libraries depended on local access to a file. This talk resonated with me because it made me realise I tend to couple I/O and logic in my code without realising it. I'd highly recommend watching the talk in full, or at least reading Alex's accompanying summary on their blog.

It has been a few weeks since I last blogged. I have been busy learning, working, and travelling. Today I have a blog post to share with you, or at least I will by the time I finish hitting keys in sequence to produce this post.