Forest @forestjohnson@pixie.town

Ok, article is updated with several factual accuracy fixes and additional info, and I'm publishing it wider now.

I was looking for an easy-to-read page w/ info on what common features processes have on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I **COULD NOT FIND ANY** on the web.

How the heck did this happen!? At any rate, here's the missing article, just had to write it first.

https://sequentialread.com/what-is-a-process/

@technomancy test

I could not find any concise but useful single page descriptions of what a process is and what you can do with a process, so I decided to write my own:

https://sequentialread.com/what-is-a-process/

AHHHH I was wrong turns out it was a typo bug in the matrix version we were using. Updating to matrix-synapse v1.50.2 fixes it.

Here is the pull request to fix the issue in matrix-synapse

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/11819

cyberia.club matrix server outage RCA

RCA is that a cyberia.club user was in a 4chan-associated room on matrix.org which was experiencing an extreme volume of hate message spam from a common "chud" server.

Since we had an incomplete block on the offending server / since matrix-synapse's block feature is buggy, this resulted in what appeared to be an ` O(n*m)` number of error messages in our log file, where `n` is the # of spam messages and `m` is the average number of times that federation was attempted for each message. This log spam filled our disk and caused matrix to crash.

insight was gained by creating a histogram of bytes-per-minute in the log file, and by examining the rooms related to those high-volume error messages.

The issue was resolved by "purging" the room via the matrix administration API, (kick all local users, delete, & block) and then manually deleting all `federation_inbound_events_staging` rows associated with that room from the database.

this is what I worked on today

https://git.sequentialread.com/forest/config-lite

streaming again today https://stream.sequentialread.com/

Music rn:
✖️✖️🐧🐧 Wasted Penguinz

Netizens are always telling me that self-hosting is too difficult for the average person, citing security risks and complexity.

Well, security risks and complexity didn't seem to stop everyone from running a web browser!

I believe the difference boils down to investment. It's harder to make a profit from helping folks self-host. "Teach a Man to Fish" and all. So the industry never worked on making self-hosting easy and "normal" in the same way that web browsing was made easy and "normal".

How did they do it for web browsing? A whole heck of a lot of work, mostly around user interface design and usability. The tech giants of today, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon all got their start by imagining new, easier to navigate interfaces that everyone could use, not just the tech elite.

I'm not out to "make it big" in the same way that they did, but I **AM** inspired by the change-making disruptive power that they wielded, especially the transformative power of software usability.

Most of the hosting and server software of today is designed by and for technical people, almost exclusively in professional contexts. Their designs either start from the business goals or from the computer hardware.

For contrast, successful designs for user-focused products (client software) unsurprisingly always start with the user & how to interface with the user, everything else is derived from that.

But the boots-on-the-ground digital laborer who is tasked with deploying and maintaining these systems is almost never considered in the design process. They are simply expected to be "professional" and to be able to handle it. Any ease-of-use or convenience they enjoy was probably "snuck in" on the side, while the manager wasn't looking.

I see this tendency towards profit-driven and inhumane/elitist design in the server software arena as the ultimate "root cause" to explain why hosting / application security is hard, as well as why so many security vulnerabilities and server misconfigurations exist in the first place.

It's not easy because no one was ever paid to make it easy. Because if you gave it all away, what would money, power, and software platforms be worth?

Well, spoiler alert, I think it would be worth a hell of a lot, actually. The potential benefit to everyone & to the economy and society would be enormous.

So I start all of my designs from the self-hoster, the individual person maintaining the system. From there, I work towards the "hardware" and the real world, things like the "dorm room LAN" network environment, the Total Cost of Ownership of a server, etc.

Ultimately, I think I'm trying to bring imaginative & disruptive "big-tech" usability to the world of "small-tech" open-source self-hosting platforms and tools.

I spent all my time today finally getting around to fixing that reflection-based environment variable config override thingy

@dumpsterqueer : I was talking about this back when you were thinking about refactoring the configuration library for GTS

I know the ship has already sailed and I'm not recommending it for GTS; I just wanna show it off I guess 😇

It's a bit arcane but it appears to actually work; and the error/warning logs are the best ive ever seen on a library like this: https://git.sequentialread.com/forest/file-and-or-env-config

OMFG brain fart, I meant **WireGuard** not shark 🦈🦈🦈

streaming today, working on version 2 (from-scratch rewrite) of my threshold reverse tunnel app

https://stream.sequentialread.com/

music today: 🔥💀 AFI ❄️🥀

now with QUIC, hopefully able to compete with Wireshark on latency

im cooking up a hair brained scheme to host twitch.tv out of moms basement

Finally now we're cookin!! down to about 250ms to join a torrent swarm and torrent a file 😎 Here are some stream clips!!

- furiously looking up information on node.js webtorrent/bittorrent tracker (part 1, typescript/socket listening issues, video cuts out)

14min https://picopublish.sequentialread.com/files/stream_clip_2022-01-02_13-46/

- part 2, partial success after I realized first clip got messed up

6min https://picopublish.sequentialread.com/files/stream_clip_2022-01-02_15-09/

part 3, two torrents completed in 500ms

6min https://picopublish.sequentialread.com/files/stream_clip_2022-01-02_17-20/

writing typescript type defs for webtorrent/bittorrent-tracker https://stream.sequentialread.com/

music: 🍄 Gnome 🧙🎸

streaming again today, more WebTorrent adventures https://stream.sequentialread.com/

😋

back at it again https://stream.sequentialread.com/

hopefully I can torrent some bytes today. music: gold panda

continuing my bad habit of starting a million projects: https://git.sequentialread.com/forest/tuber

🍠 Tuber: Serve Your Media Without Limits From a "Potato" Computer Hosted in Mom's Basement: Take our Beloved "Series of Tubes" to Full Power

Nowhere close to operational yet but as far as I can tell there's no reason why it won't work? I'm excited about this one.

I'm streaming now, finally taking some time to start working on that p2p cdn idea i had

https://stream.sequentialread.com

The idea is its an HTTP reverse proxy you can put on any web server and you can configure it to offer media files and downloads over WebTorrent instead of over HTTP
inspired by https://github.com/Novage/p2p-media-loader but for HTTP in general instead of just the <video> and <audio> elements in a page

Music rn: 🎹🌌 MGMT 🌀🎸