Oh, you thought we were done going back in time? Well I’ve got news for you, Doc Brown, you’d better not mothball the ol’ time machine just yet, because we’re going back even further. That’s right, for Day 4 I’ve decided to use Fortran!
My original plan was to stick with the “systems language” theme for Day 3 and go with Zig, but the more I thought about it the more I started to think, you know, Zig is nice and clean and modern. It hasn’t had time to get all warty and ugly with bolted-on afterthoughts and contentious features that divide the community into warring tribes, and it has things like common datastructures in its standard library. I should probably save it for one of the later days, when I anticipate spending more time fighting the problem and less time fighting the language. Also I looked at Day 3 and it (the first part at least) looked very simple, which makes me even less inclined to use a big honkin’ heavy-duty language like Zig. Instead, today I’m going to take a look at Forth!
Well, Day 1 went swimmingly, more or less, so let’s push on to Day 2: C++! C++, of course, is famous for being what happens when you take C and answer “Yes” to every question that starts “Can I have” and ends with a language feature. Yes, you can have classes and inheritance. Yes, even multiple inheritance. Yes, you can have constructors and destructors. Yes, you can have iterators (sorta). Yes, you can have metaprogramming. Yes, you can have move semantics. Yes, you can also have raw pointers, why not?
As time goes on, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that I’m a bit of a programming-language dilletante. I’m always finding weird niche languages like Pony or Roc, going “wow that looks cool,” spending a bunch of time reading the documentation, and then never actually using it and forgetting all about it for the next three years.
I just got done deleting ~30 bogus user accounts from my personal Gitea insteance. They all had reasonable-ish-sounding names, one empty repository, and profiles that looked like this. Note the exceedingly spammy link to a real site (still up as of writing) and the ad-copy bio.
Like a lot of people, my main experience with private keys has come from using them for SSH. I’m familiar with the theory, of course - I know generally what asymmetric encryption does, and I know that it means a compromised server can’t reveal your private key, which is nice although if you only ever use a given private key to SSH into your server and the server is already compromised, is that really so helpful?
If you’ve used desktop Linux, then I’m sorry for you. You will, however, most likely be familiar with the practice of using the same app from either the CLI or the GUI, depending on how you invoke it and what you want to do with it. In some cases, the CLI merely replicates the functionality of the GUI, but (due to being, you know, a CLI) is much easier to incorporate in scripts and such. In other cases (Wezterm is a good example) the GUI app acts as a “server” with which the CLI communicates to cause it to do various things while it runs.
Recently I’ve had a chance to get to know Vue a bit. Since my frontend framework of choice has previously been Svelte (this blog is built in Svelte, for instance) I was naturally interested in how they compared.
A while back I had occasion to make a number of docker containers directly accessible on the LAN, i.e. without all the usual ceremony of port-forwardism that Docker requires. In retrospect I made it a lot more complicated than it had to be, but I wanted to document the process anyway because you never know when that sort of thing might come in handy.
Recently at work we’ve been moving to a new VPN, and naturally as part of that process we done a bunch of research into the available options before settling on one. Mostly I want to document that for my own future reference, so that if this question comes up again I don’t have to go redo it all, but if it ends up being helpful to someone else someday then that’s great too. (If I ever get this blog site launched, that is. Currently it’s not looking too good.)