Another weekend, another wabt-hole.

I got crystal to compile to WebAsembly and then run in Brave, and it only took two days to get setup and get it to print out “Hello, World!” in the console.

I have tried to use WebAssembly a couple of years ago, but dropped it once I failed to get a simple hello world program to function. This is the same reason I don’t have Haskell under my programming utility belt, no hello world. It is rather helpful that the environment, tools and tutorials have come a long way in the past couple of years.

While doing a websearch for “steam ipfs”, I happened upon the website en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org. I have known that there was a copy of Wikipedia made in 2017 for English, Kurdish and Turkish, but only today did I find out that somebody has registered a domain name for it. I looks like a recent development.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about things that could be used to replace parts of the internet and web we currently use. There are projects like cjdns that are looking to replace the network routing layer of the internet with a system that does not require a centralized authority to issue IP addresses.

There are other parts of the web stack that are looking to be replaced (IPFS is one of them, looking to replace HTTP(S)), but the one I will be looking at in this post is the Domain Name System (DNS).

Planned obsolescence is evil. It robs the greater part of the people of their things by consciously designing those things so they break well before the end of their useful life. And it is robbery. Theft. Its incredibly sad that people now expect their things to constantly break.

The perfected form of planned obsolescence would be to have everything break as soon as it was taken out of the box, so that you were forced to turn right around an go buy another one, which itself would promptly break, and so on, until you run completely out of both money and debt, reducing you to abject poverty while making the rich even richer.

I run an instance of Nextcloud for storing files, contacts, calendars and similar things that most other people use Google or Microsoft for. I self-host the server, as should be done to truly own the data, but about a month ago, the official Nextcloud app on my phone stopped working for no discernible reason.

I have got to where fixing that was the next task, so that’s what I tackled today. At first glance, the problem was that I was running an ancient version of Nextcloud (16.0.1.1! Yikes!), so the first order of business was to update to a newer version.

I have made another change to the git repo handling code so that when publishing, only the repos that have been updated are added to IPFS again. This way, large repos only slow down the publish process when they are updated and not every time any repository is updated. The new process is this:

1. post-update hook adds its path to the spool directory
2. Monitor process sees update and starts publish
3. The existing repo is added to a temporary directory in the mutable file system (MFS)
4. For each updated repo:
   1. The repo is added to ipfs without pinning
   2. The directory for that repo in MFS is removed and replaced with the new hash
5. The old hash is unpinned and the new hash pinned
6. The root hash of the new repo directory structure is published
7. Remove temporary directory from MFS

Now, git push is almost exactly the same speed as a plain ssh remote (only an additional flag set), the update is fast for small repositories and only slows down when processing a large repo.

If you were curious how I go about writing posts for this blog, keep reading. If not, there’s plenty of internet out there to hold your attention.

The main tools I use are:

• hugo
• vim
• aspell
• ssh
• bash
• ipfs

Static Site Generator - Hugo

I use the static site generator hugo for generating this site with a minimally customized Mainroad. There really isn’t a lot to talk about here that I haven’t already covered elsewhere.

If you’ve been following my IPFS Scanner, you will have notices some changes today. I’ve added tags. There are also a good number of sites listed now, with widely varying levels of stability and content. Don’t blame me if there isn’t good content there: go make a site and make sure it is published with you node’s primary key (that would be ipfs name publish /ipfs/QyourSiteHashGoesHere).

I’ve reworked the site generator to allow me to attach tags to every site in the index by /ipns/ key. This will be completely manual for the foreseeable future. I’ve also added hierarchical sub-index generation based on these tags. Any tag that gets more than 10 sites assigned to it gets an index page. Every subtag on that sub-index that has more than 10 sites also gets a sub-index, and so on.

I was reviewing the results of my IPNS Scanner and found that a new blog is listed: ParanoidPenguin.net. In addition to being available on the http(s) web, it is also available on the ipfs web. I don’t know (yet) if the IPFS version is official (the site being a static site generated by hugo makes me think it is likely).

Browsing over the articles, one in particular stood out to me, this one on web server security. I run a web server for me to have access to personal services while away from my home network, and as they are exposed to the internet at large, I decided to point the services the security challenge references. I’m not going to give out either the URL or the test results, but I will say, that if you run a web server, you should also use these services and then secure whatever you can. Unless you have already run these or similar tests, or are obsessive about security, then you will have a list of things to do.

Copenhagen: The Science Is Settled; The Policy And Politics Aren’t

• The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder, Journalist

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.

• Richard Feynmann, Scientist

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves.

• Isaac Asimov, Science Fiction Author

This morning, this article at The Burning Platform popped into my feed, talking about “listen to the scientists”. Which got me to thinking about science in general, and hot-button science like anthropogenic (man-made) climate change and science-backed responses to viral pandemics (COVID-19). In short, my thoughts on the matter are this: