I still get stuck doing some escalated tech support. In most cases, I use the exact same tools as the other tiers. I’m convinced that I’m no better, I just don’t have anyone else to pass it to so I beat/hack on it until we figure it out and solve it. That not having someone to hand it to matters.

Been rewriting a venerable UI/function for a week. It’s evolved a lot. I might just understand it well enough to rewrite it 1 more time, even better. While the UI gets "simpler" each time. The logic behind it still seems overly complicated and wondering if I will understand it in 5 weeks, or 5 years.

"It’s not what a program does that makes it a good program, it’s what it does when it doesn’t." Am throwing garbage data into SQL just to watch a function deal with it and fix it... and grinning as I remember "Yoda Dan" saying something like the above, but my brain attached Yoda ears and voice to him. Kinda fits.

It's a pleasant Sunday Morning. Fed the cats. Having good coffee and the brain WANTS to code. So.. tunes playing and diving in until Nancy wakes up. Hope ya'll get to enjoy the day as well.

Padawannabe is trying to maintain state, not understanding that in most cases, Tim Berners-Lee (and I agree) is still correct: The web should be stateless. That same applies to government control of the internet. With very rare exceptions. #stateless.

Tail server error logs. Strangely relaxing. Until it not. WTF was THAT? And a new rule added to the "watcher" for errant probes and pkes. #sysadmin

At my primary project (VoIP), I detect and temporarily block (for a day) certain ip address ranges for nefarious activities, probes, scans, pokes... Updated code makes some of those blocks semi-permanent. As of this morning, 348 /24's have reached the "we never want to see you again" rating. Wondering if there is a good place to share such data.

Padawannabe code review has me saying "read that line of code to me" a lot. between Visual Studio and wherever else he's snarfing code from, there is a lot of "implied logic" as opposed to my very explicit logic style. It's very JavaScripty... In PHP. And he can't read me the logic. This is also the AI/LLM issue: If you can't read it, can you modify/fix it? Can you test for it? Can you trust it? #PHP

Am reading some postfix docs while tuning up a mail server. Realizing how much I appreciate that these are legacy venerable docs/pages and not rewritten by an LLM or even a marketing department. They old school internet ugly. Very technically correct. Very useful.

Need to use LetEncrypt/acme.sh for a domain currently registered and DNS served by squarespace. Which does not have a useful API. Linode/Akamai does and already it's a Linode server anyway. Never used Linode/Akamai for DNS hosting... Anyone going to scream a reason not to? And yes, considered running my own DNS server for this, but... Do enough of that elsewhere to not want to do more. #dns #acme #letsencrypt

Checking out mails servers and saw a test for DANE. Time to learn something new? DANE = DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities. Poorly supported in end clients, but I'm liking the ideas presented for verifying what CA is supposed to be the issuing CA. A cross check. May also be useful for self-signed certs. Gonna have to play. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities #certificates #dane #ssl #tls

Just installed the "Free Edition" of Mattermost 11.3 on Debian 13. It does everything this small group needs. They like it, I like it. As is. Licensing options start at $10/mth/year per user. I/We'd like to support their efforts, but think more software needs a "supporter tier".. A reasonable sum that helps keep a "free" version free and available, and stops the "upgrade nagging". #FOSS #mattermost

Padawan removed a "sleep(5)" because a maintenance task loop was taking too long. Hit the upstream system API with 1k+ requests in a couple of seconds. We don't pay for that level of service, or need it. Now blocked for a while. Be patient and kind to those upstreams when you can. #api

Been using Authorize.net payment gateways their birth. Current API codebase on a project is 10 years old and needs some freshening up or a complete rewrite. Reviewing API docs. The current (V1 10+ years?) API still supports JSON by converting it to XML, so exact order matters. I appreciate a stable API, but granddaddy of payment processing can afford a more modern API. The good news: It keeps old farts like me employed. #api

Minor issue. Immediate fix was to update 70 systems with about 6 lines of code and extra data. Walked away from the issue. Slept. Coffee. Breakfast. Staring out the window realizing that everything I needed was on the main C&C server, just wasn't glueing the pieces together. One 3 line "if" statement, adding 2 new pieces of data to the event log. Test. As it's Friday.. I'm watching that work in production and not touching anything else.

Working with an educated young man (BS/CompSci) on (to me) a simple task. The lack of a common vernacular and toolset is frustrating. I live and work on the CLI, on actual servers. He works with Visual Studio in dev environments. I said: "grep jsonhtml *.php" He types: "grep jsonhtml asterisk.php". Well, we do work with Asterisk, so ok. When I said "no, a splat" the response was: "what's a splat?" #vernacular

An upstream vendor sent an email/announcement of "DNS Updates" and my heart skipped a beat. Either they did it well or fixed issues quick enough I did not notice. Yet. DNS is a key core dependency in so many things, I make changes warily and watch. Sure they do as well. ;) #dns #telnyx

After playing with the bloat of timepicker-ui (awesome, does everything, ph@t) and others, going to invest some cold weather computer time into making my own simple variant.... cuz this can't be that hard, can it? Yeah yeah, I know, it's a maze of twisty javascript and ui passages, all alike. Cranking up some music, mild tea for a change of flavor/caffiene and we'll see what comes out the other side. #javascript #time #html #ui

Dealing with a UI in the medical world where the time really really needs to be in 24 hour format. Wish it was an html option, like "type=time24" but instead it's become a dive into the heavy over complicated world of JavaScript frameworks for what is a very simple single page internal use application/web page that currently has no javascript and minimal CSS. #html #time #javascript

Pretty sure I had deleted my github account years ago. Found it. 7 fallow projects, last one updated 2020. Regained access. Deleted the org, account and all again. Making a note of it here. #github