Entries tagged meta

I've set up and maintained a few blogs over time. I was even a part of a planet at one time. Remember those? Aggregators of multiple blogs in one. I had one for my teenager-focused online Linux User's Group. Maybe I'll sit down and write a memoir about that sometime.

It's been a while since I've felt the need to update nobody in particular about my life and thoughts and feelings. A lot has happened. I've launched a fairly successful career, got married to a wonderful man named Patrick, and with him, I have a mini Italian Greyhound named Violet.

I've had friends, fallings-out, hobbies, abandoned projects, weird encounters, new habits (some good, some bad, some eradicated), and I talked to a well-known conspiracy theorist at a Chinese restaurant with a mouth full of Mu Shu vegetables.

And you, internet, missed all of it. I'm so sorry. I'll start catching you up.

So my last name is Williamson now...

Tags: blogging, meta, personal | No comments

In my professional life, I make websites performant and reliable. It's in the job title -- Site Reliability Engineer. I do this using Content Delivery Networks, load balancers, stateless infrastructure, layers of caching, and container orchestration technology. I could think of a few other buzzwords to throw in there, and it probably sounds real impressive to a lay person.

Of course, all that is managed. I abstract myself from managing all of that stuff with just a few text files. Of course, it took significant professional experience to know what I'm doing with those text files, and to be able to arrange these components into a stable infrastructure. And I derive great satisfaction from being able to help create something awesome. And I'm pretty good at what I do, according to my boss and our uptime graphs. I'm not at liberty to share such data so broadly, but I can illustrate this roughly in a graph...

So naturally, since my day to day is spent in the public cloud, using all these wonderful things that have enabled small-time companies with limited upfront budgets to build ultra-reliable, globally distributed websites and services with just a few text files, my personal infrastructure should be built the same way, right? I should be using the trendiest web frameworks, JAM stack, serverless, Cloudflare, all managed using the latest Hashicorp offerings.

Nah.

You're getting this page from an old-fashioned Apache httpd instance (of course, a reasonably up-to-date one). I have one CGI script (in Perl). No CDN, because I don't think I need one. It's my personal website, so I want to be in control of how it's served. And no Javascript. In layperson's terms, I'm kicking it old-school.

I suppose this is my way of maintaining work-life balance, while still exercising some of my skills that I use in a professional setting. I find it relaxing to shift paradigms. I love my job and my work, but I can't really decompress if I just go from writing YAML files at work to writing YAML files at home.

Likewise, I'm never going to roll into work one morning and say "hey y'all, let's ditch this microservices thing and write a bunch of Perl CGI scripts!"

...I just thought of a really funny April Fools prank.

Tags: meta, sre, tech, work | No comments

Been a while since my last post. Hardly 10 posts in and I'm already taking hiatuses. Well, in short, we placed 2nd in a chilli contest and carved Gaston from Animal crossing in a pumpkin. Then I went to Austin very briefly and bought five bottles of a most elusive remedy, melatonin in jelly-bean form.

So upon reviewing this blog, I see that I have actually received my first spam comment! I have removed it from the site, but I'm keeping the comment file for posterity -- one for the scrapbook! Here's a pastebin of the comment text.

Ironincally, it's a spam comment advertising a spam commenting service. I've always wondered how those script kiddos get business. It's like the internet version of those "Does advertising work? JUST DID!" billboards littering the highways, advertising nothign but themselves.

I've been meaning to take out some cheap ads for DFW 8mm, maybe I should give the Russian spammers a chance.

Tags: blogging, herewego, meta, spam | No comments

I've been having a bit of a spam problem on this blog. I really didn't want to do a captcha when I set it up, and I still don't. Captchas are always too cumbersome, if they're effective at all. Often they're more obtrusive to humans than they are to bots. Even good captcha can often be farmed out to humans after a trivial amount of reverse engineering. It can be very cost-effective to do this.

I think RBLs will be a little more effective for my use case, and be completely unobtrusive to most users. And it only took five lines of code:

#
# Check for spam on the Usenix RBL
#
my @ipa = split('\.', $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'});
my @ipa_rev = reverse(@ipa);
my $dnsbl_host = join('.', @ipa_rev) . ".all.s5h.net";
if (gethostbyname("$dnsbl_host")) {
        $COMMENT = "/srv/ephemeris/comments.spam/"
}

So it still saves the comment, but in a quarantine folder that doesn't get built with the rest of the site HTML. I might check it sometimes, maybe never. The spammer does not get notified that their comment was quarantined. So if you comment something and it never shows up, you can email me and I'll check it out. You might need to get your IP cleared over here (click the "rblremove" link -- don't refresh it too many times). However, you may have been listed because you have some malware on your computer or network that's part of a botnet.

Hey, spammers, if you're reading this, why do you only spam my Birthday Post?

Tags: blogging, internet, meta, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam | No comments

I haven't updated this blog in a while. I've been busy.

Often we think of "busy" as a lie, or a convenient excuse. It does seem that people use it as a shorthand for, "I'm prioritizing other things in favor of this." Whether those other things are a severe injury, full-time employment, a spa day, or sitting around all day playing Mario Party 64, it's not a lie.

Is that valid? Depends on who's complaining. I often find that the biggest critic of my time-management skills is myself. I get antsy if I find myself watching too much TV, a bit less so if I'm playing video games. I guess I want to feel like I'm doing something when I'm doing nothing.

Not that I feel much better if I spend every waking hour over a span of 96 hours tracking and commanding a work-related incident. 100% commitment to Quadrant I doesn't make me happy either. That didn't make anybody happy.

Well, here I am now, with work stable, school caught up (oh, school's going well, by the way), and now I'm writing in my blog. I'm sure the spam bots that read my blog will be pleased.

Tags: life, meta, personal, perspective | No comments