~login @TTBP

28 october 2018

Small updates to `tcoin`

tcoin now shows the last 10 messages instead of the last 10 lines of messages.

It does this by ignoring the newline that separates a transaction line from the message line. The algorithm uses newlines to track messages, but counts 0 newlines for "\n" and 1 newline for "\n\n" (where \n means newline). This means that a message accompanying a transaction (which shows up as "\n_\n\n" will be seen by the algorithm as "_\n". This way, even transactions with messages (these span three or more lines) look like a single newline-suffixed lines to the algorithm.

tcoin now breaks down how the number of tildecoins you have was determined.

The number of tildecoin is base_amount + transfers + tildegame_amount + dailyadventure_amount. The base amount is 1000, which is the number of tildecoins that every account begins with. transfers is the net amount of tildecoins received. If more are received than sent, then transfers is positive. If the opposite is true, then it is negative. When both are equal, it is zero. tildegame_amount is the your tilde score in the !tilde game on #bots in the tilde.town irc. This game was created by ~krowbar. dailyadventure_amount is the coins you earn in the daily adventure game. This game is can be played by running da in the terminal. It was created by ~troido.

Those are the only two updates to tcoin. There was also some refactoring done, but the code is still spaghetti bolognese (and not the tasty, melts-in-your-mouth kind).

18 august 2018

I didn't want to post right now, but since I'm here already, might as well write a single sentence.

14 june 2018

updates to pcoin

I decided to create pcoin because there was a need for tcoin to be more than just sending digital coins from one person to another. Programs had to have their own accounts. The goal was to create the components that would make it easy to create automated-dealer casino-style games like poker (Texas Hold'em) and blacjack.

First, there had to be a digital currency. At tilde.town's scale, there was no need for a decentralised cryptocurrency. Since the digital currency had to be local to tilde.town, and townies trust ~vilmibm (our fantastic admin and benevolent overlord) not to mess with things, it was not hard to realise that a model based on trusting a centralised party to keep transactions safe and secure from tampering would be a perfect fit.

After tcoin was done and all the bugs were ironed out (at least, the obvious ones and the ones brought to my attention were), I waited some time trying to come up with a model for authenticating programs. After talking to several townies about it, we came to the conclusion that a long key is the simplest solution. So pcoin was just a fork of tcoin with the method of authentication changed. This didn't mean pcoin was particularly suited to the kind of things programs would need it to do, as I realised during the development of chin.

After some naive design decisions with chin that led to the subsequent killing of the chin server process because it put too much load on the server by copying and reading a 3 MB file on every run, I realised that pcoin wasn't suited to the needs of programs. I had two paths I could take: I could modify chin's code to extract useful information from pcoin's message log (which was enough for chin's needs, but horribly inefficient), or I could modify pcoin to make it easier to code chin and make it easier for future programs as well.

I chose the second path, because improvements to pcoin would benefit future programs as well.

There were several realisations that I came to while developing chin, and in retrospect, making a game that used pcoin was the right approach to finding out what program-specific features pcoin could implement that made it easier for programs to implement tildecoin integration.

tcoin is like a bank, but each program is like its own mini-bank. Transferring tildecoin to a program doesn't mean the program owns the amount. It is owed to the user, and the latter should always be able to take their balance back.
During the process of running the program, the user may win or lose tildecoin. This means that more tildecoin (or less) is owed to the user than the amount that was transferred to the program originally.

Each program would have had to develop its own means of storing transaction data from users and paying them out when the user wanted. Each program would have had to write the same kind of business logic that is used in tcoin (or pcoin, for that matter). The best way to solve this problem, I came to realise, was to make it pcoin's responsibility instead of each individual program's.

Thus, programs now have a special data store in pcoin called "program_accounting". This data store contains the amount of tildecoin owed to each user, and the total amount owed to all users. Whenever a user sends tildecoin to a program, the amount of tildecoin owed to that user and the total amount owed to all users is automatically updated (by tcoin) in the program's data store. Thus, the program doesn't need to read through its transactions to figure out what it owes each user. That data is already available in this data store, although its integrity can be confirmed using the program's message log.

In addition, a program can increase or decrease what it owes each user using pcoin. This means it can make it pcoin's responsibility to determine what the program owes each user after the program's operation. For example, if you win tildecoin in chin, the amount owed to you is increased using pcoin. It is decreased if you lose tildecoin in chin. Thus, if a program wants to take donations, it will have to decrease the amount it owes the user to 0. The default behaviour is that tildecoin sent to programs is not their own, but is owed to the user who sent it.

The program is not allowed to increase the amount it owes a user beyond what it can immediately fulfil, and is not allowed to decrease the amount owed to a user below 0. This is enforced in pcoin's code.

For the program to find out how much it owes vilmibm, the command is pcoin internal_balance vilmibm. For the program to find out how much it owes to all users/programs, the command is pcoin total_owed. For the program to store the information that it owes vilmibm <amount> tildecoin more, the command is pcoin add_internal_balance vilmibm <amount>. For the program to store the information that it owes vilmibm <amount> tildecoin less, the command is pcoin add_internal_balance vilmibm -⁠<amount>.

When the program sends tildecoin back to the user it owed, the program's data store (in addition to tcoin's data store) is updated so that the total amount owed and the amount owed to that user is decreased by the amount sent back to the user.

I hope these changes to pcoin will encourage townies to look into getting a tildecoin account for their program (email login@tilde.town (tilde-town's local email) with the program name, and I'll reply with the key and some instructions to get started with pcoin) and integrating tildecoin into their programs. As always, I seek advice on how to make pcoin better (or less worse). You can send your suggestions, advice and feedback through login@tilde.town or irc.

Thank you for taking the time to read this far :) Have a wonderful day!

04 june 2018

chin

The first program created with tildecoin integration (using pcoin) is here. It's called chin, which is short for chinchirorin, a Japanese gambling game played with three six-sided dice in a small bowl. The rules of the game are not standardised, but the version we use has no dealer's advantage. Therefore, your chance of winning is the exact same as the dealer's chance of winning.

To play chinchirorin, simply type /home/login/bin/chin in the terminal prompt. This game involves betting tildecoin, so to make your tildecoin available to chin, you need to send some tildecoin to the program Chin. You can do so by entering tcoin send Chin in the terminal prompt. Don't worry, any tildecoin that you've sent to Chin can be got back from inside the chin program (unless you lose them in a gamble). Similarly, you can get more tildecoin back than you put in if you win more than you lose. All games that use pcoin will allow you to deposit and withdraw your coins with them.

I hope you enjoy this game very much, and I hope you'll like the other games with tildecoin integration that are still to come :)

29 april 2018

pcoin is here

pcoin, which is tcoin for programs, is here. It's the exact same as tcoin, except for two things.

Typing just pcoin doesn't work. You must type pcoin -m for messages and pcoin -b for your balance.
After typing your command, you must enter your key through stdin, and if your key matches, the corresponding action will be performed on your program's tildecoin account.

Please send me a message on irc (or better yet, login@tilde.town) if you want a key for your multiplayer poker program (or any other program(s)). You must tell me what username you'd like (and it must start with a capital letter, to distinguish from human users).

Also, program accounts start with 0 tildecoins and don't earn tildecoins from playing the tilde game. I hope you enjoy pcoin, and I can't wait to see that multiplayer poker program that works with tildecoin!

07 february 2018

tildecoins!

I just created an executable for https://tilde.town users called tcoin. It's located at /home/login/bin/tcoin, so if you want to simply run it as tcoin, you should create a symlink to it called tcoin in your bin directory. To read the help text, just execute tcoin --help. To check your balance, execute tcoin. To send tildecoins to another user on https://tilde.town, execute tcoin send <username> <amount>. Only the first two decimal places of the amount are considered, and subsequent digits are ignored.

I hope you enjoy tcoin! It's not easy to modify the number of coins you have unless you have access to my ssh account or to root. I hope you'll trust us not to manipulate your balances. We have no incentive to do so; tildecoins are not legal tender.

19 january 2018

tildebook

If you go to https://tilde.town/~login/tildebook, you can see my tildebook. Each user on tilde.town gets a 144px-by-144px space to do whatever they want. That's their tildebook. http://tildebook.tk redirects to the HTTPS version of the longer URL. https://tildebook.tk doesn't work right now, but should start working soon.

In order to claim your space, create an HTML file called tildebook_profile.html in your public_html directory (not in a subdirectory of public_html). To make sure your design fits in your iframe on tildebook, you must make sure your page fits and looks good in a 144px by 144px square. Every week, the order of squares is shuffled so that every user gets a chance to be near the top of the page (and so that new users are able to claim their space within a week of becoming a townie).

If you want to see your tildebook on tildebook immediately after you've made the tildebook_profile.html file in your public_html directory (not in a subdirectory of public_html), you can run /home/login/cronjobs/update_tildebook to do just that. I've set the permissions on the script and everything it touches so that there are no hiccups when people other than the script's user-owner run it.

As always, I hope you enjoy tildebook! If you want to say something to me, my email address is login@tilde.town. Please don't hesistate to send me an email or two. I'd actually love to get some email!

08 january 2018

writo

There was a time when I didn't like writo. It was slow, it had one-off errors that I had to work around, and its resize mechanism went haywire sometimes. I hated writo, but I was in love with the idea of writo. An infinite persistent drawable world with no private ownership. It could show that human honour could make the need for rules and enforcement obsolete if there were infinite resources at our collective disposal. It could be the proof that the tragedy of the commons was a bogus theory made up by people with big heads and small hearts to justify capitalism and nothing other than that. It could show that we the human species could achieve world peace by furthering the frontiers of space. The earth is not limitless, but space truly is (as far as we know).

With the loving care and tireless dedication of ~selfsame, writo overcame its flaws and became perfect. There were no more one-off errors and the program resized when the window size was changed like water in a new-sized container. Sure, the controls were a little hard to get used to and changing the colour on Terminal for macOS required setting the "Show Alternate Screen" option so that PageUp and PageDown were sent as inputs to the server instead of just scrolling the Terminal up or down a page.

I was so happy with writo, but I felt horrible when it hit me that this wonderful thing was only visible to the thousand-odd members of https://tilde.town. writo is collective art! It should be displayed in public, proud and tall! I, struck with inspiration, set out to find where the world of writo was stored.

I asked twice on https://tilde.town's internal IRC and tried to find out who made writo. I searched the https://tilde.town home page for clues, where I found that ~selfsame (you wonderful person!) was the one behind writo. I scoured ~selfsame's directory to look for writo, and it was harder than I anticipated. Finally, I found a file called world.edn.

world.edn is now symlinked to https://tilde.town/~login/writo/world.edn for easy access, but I didn't know what format it was in when I found it. Why didn't this guy just use JSON? I searched the web for .edn and found that it was a data-storage format called Extensible Data Notation. I found out how this format worked and found a library that converts from .edn to Python's native dictionary format. There was a small hickup with how this library handled vectors (it made them mutable, making it impossible to import .edn maps that used them as keys). I edited the library to treat .edn vectors as Python tuples instead of Python lists, which completely solved the problem. By now, I was wondering why the wonderful ~selfsame hadn't come up with a public-facing web-page for writo. As it turns out, he already had! I was happy that this existed, but sad that all my work had gone to waste. I opened the public-facing web page and was stunned to find out that it wasn't updated in months, couldn't show negative coordinates, and was exclusively in black and white! My work had not gone to waste after all. I set out to create a coloured version of the public-facing page that update every hour and could show negative coordinates. I'm happy to report that ~login's writo-viewing page is at https://tilde.town/~login/writo. It's in full colour, and if you have JavaScript enabled, automatically puts the origin at the centre of the page. If you want to find the origin but don't want to enable JavaScript, you can go to https://tilde.town/~login/writo/index.html#origin. This should, at the very minimum, take care of horizontal scrolling for you.

I hope you enjoy viewing writo at https://tilde.town/~login/writo/, and if you find any problems or have any suggestions for improvement, please send me an email. My (https://tilde.town-only) email address is login@tilde.town. If ~selfsame appreciates this, I'll be really happy!

29 december 2017

This is a public service announcement for `feels`

If feels complains about your config every time you start it, it's because you don't have a gopher folder in your home directory and don't have the corresponding entry in ttbprc. I had this problem too, but I solved it by following the steps below (~endorphant might fix it when he/she has the time):

Enter cd ~/.ttbp/config. This will take you to the feels config folder.
Enter nano ttbprc. This will open ttbprc, your feels config file. This file is in the JSON format.
According to your preference, add the key-attribute pair "gopher": true or "gopher": false in the file. Follow the pattern of the file if you don't know about JSON. JSON is designed to be understood on the first try.
If you've set gopher to true, then enter mkdir ~/public_gopher. This creates a folder called public_gopher in your home directory.
Start feels and see if there are any complaints about the config file. If things are not working as expected, then type mkdir ~/.ttbp/gopher. This creaes a folder called gopher in your .ttbp subdirectory.

Things should start working normally. If there are still problems, just send endorphant@tilde.town an email. I, too, am willing to field questions. You can send emails to login@tilde.town to reach me.

And as always, have fun at tilde.town!

28 december 2017

This is a DM to ~sebboh

Even though this is meant for ~sebboh, I feel like I should send it through the same medium I received the message in.

I don't deny that I sent those wall(1) messages. And yes, there's no bitcoin in store for opting into centralfeels. It was edgy sarcasm at best, and decepting marketing at worst. I was just frustrated that I had to make centralfeels opt-in, because publishing posts publicly on individual tilde.town blogs is different from having all that in one place. The only difference is discoverability. A dedicated reader could scrape all those blogs through the public-facing web pages if they wanted to. All I was doing was scraping posts from inside tilde.town's server. I even took care to pick only those posts that were guaranteed to be accesible through public-facing web pages. I guess I was desperate to let people know there was something called feels on tilde.town, and something called centralfeels that they should opt into if they want. I didn't want centralfeels to die of obscurity. If those wall(1) messages were unethical, I was willing to ask for forgiveness than permission.

I admit I didn't realise that wall(1) interpretted ~ (the tilde character) before sending the message. I next tried to escape the tilde, but that didn't work either. Finally, I just wrote <tilde> to represent the symbol and banked on tilde.town users being savvy enough to understand what I meant.

The threat of ending me (or at least, my user) was not kind of you at all. I don't know what you mean by "hold down alt and type FAXMACHINE". I assume one or more of the keyboard combinations Alt+F or Alt+A or Alt+X or ... Alt+E close(s) the active window. I assure you, the comand touch ~/.centralfeels only creates an empty file with the name .centralfeels in your home directory.

I'm somewhat surprised that the official URL, https://tilde.town/~login/centralfeels or the URL that redirects http://centralfeels.cf don't come up on DuckDuckGo at all. Instead, only my post announcing centralfeels does. That's really interesting.

I wonder whether public wall(1) messages hide the username of the sender, or if you just did that to protect my privacy. If it was the latter, then I'm afraid you gave it away when you linked to my public-facing web page in your post. If it was the former, then that's something I learned today.

In conclusion, hello ~sebboh! Nice to meet you too! I hope you have lots of fun at tilde.town!

24 december 2017

I spent some time on my home page's colour scheme and title. I think it looks better now. I also made my code for this year's Advent of Code (AoC 2017) available on the web at https://tilde.town/~login/advent17/. There's a noticeable improvement in my code-writing style when comparing the earlier days' code to the later ones'. I used Python for everything this year, but I might try a different programming language next year. Oh well, I had fun changing my home page and I like how it looks now. I might change my feels' design soon though; it doesn't fit with my preferred style any longer.

23 december 2017

centralfeels now has its own domain name

Now, centralfeels.cf redirects to centralfeels. Now, (hopefully) there's more incentive to opt into centralfeels. Just type "touch ~/.centralfeels" to create an empty file named .centralfeels in your home directory. This will opt you into centralfeels.

Also, centralfeels looks a little better on screens with small widths (primarily smartphones).

19 december 2017

centralfeels now works statically

In the past, the centralfeels page would use JavaScript to request data.json through XMLHttpRequest (what many of you would colloquially call AJAX, even though in this case it's asynchronous JavaScript and JSON rather than asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and then create the appropriate HTML and insert it into the DOM on the client. I realised that this broke the experience for NoScript users and those users who preferred not to enable JavaScript by default. It also made search engines not index the content on centralfeels (which, it could be argued, was a virtue).

Now, the centralfeels page along with its content is generated by the server itself. This means that NoScript users and those users that don't enable JavaScript can view the page just fine. Search engines will now be able to index the page just fine.

Also, I've left data.json just in case someone else wants to use it. It'll save them the time required to write a scraper for centralfeels. They'll be happier not to write a scraper than I'll be sad to let data.json remain, so the total happiness of the world would increase, so whatever.

17 december 2017

centralfeels now has nicer dates

They follow the same format as the dates on my computer. If the year is the current one, the year is not displayed. Otherwise, it is. The whole date is always stored in the datetime attribute of the <date> tag.

09 december 2017

centralfeels now has username, date, time and permalink

Well, the title is not entirely accurate. What is not mentioned is that the username also links to the feels of the user and the permalink is linked to from the date. The time of posting is displayed on the left.

With this, all the information that was present in the data.json file at https://tilde.town/~login/centralfeels/data.json since the very beginning (with the exception of time of post, which was added later) is visible in the user interface.

Now, all that's left to do is create a standard way to view everybody's blog from right within centralfeels. Then, centralfeels will become like a medium.com-clone for tilde.town. In any case, this update isn't coming any time soon...

07 december 2017

centralfeels is now darker

I was reading some feels at centralfeels last night, and it was very glaring.

So, I've changed the colour scheme to a darker, more soothing one. I hope this increases centralfeel's aesthetics and therefore usage.

Again, if you want your feels to appear on centralfeels, place a file (it's fine if it's empty) named ".centralfeels" in your home directory on tilde.town.

06 december 2017

centralfeels, tilde.town's latest feels in reverse-chronological order

I made a thing to make it easier to browse everybody's feels on the web.

On mobile, it's hard to download ConnectBot or the iOS equivalent and set it up just to read some feels.

This problem is frustrating because feels that fellow townies have made public are in fact available on the web. The only difficuly is that they're scattered throughout tilde.town's user pages and subdirectories.

centralfeels solves the above issues by making the equivalent of "global feels" on ttbp available on the web. Feels are presented in reverse-chronological order and are updated four times a day.

Since most townies may not be comfortable with having their thoughts collected and made available in a centralised location, centralfeels is disabled by default. Even when enabled, it only picks up those entries which were available publicly in the first place. If you want o be extra-cautious about some particularly private entries, please chmod 700 them. I cannot recommend this enough.

I have not, do not and will not collect feels from your directory without your express permission. You can signal your approval to have your feels be made available on centralfeels by creating a file named ".centralfeels" in your home directory. Once you do that, your feels will begin appearing on centralfeels. It might take a quarter-of-a-day for centralfeels to respond to the presence or absence of the ".centralfeels" file. If you want it done immediately, you can simply run /home/login/cronjobs/update_centralfeels yourself. I've tried my best to make it possible for you to do this, for example, by changing the group owner of /home/login/cronjobs/update_centralfeels and /home/login/public_html/centralfeels/data.json to "town". I've done this in good faith, and it is entirely possible for a mischievous townie to make centralfeels say whatever she/he wants. Please don't do this, otherwise we won't be able to have nice things. If, by chance, you need sudo to run the script, ~vilmibm (tireless maintainer and benevolent overlord of tilde.town) may be able to run it for you.

I'd like to thank ~endorphant for creating such a ridiculously awesome blogging platform, and of course ~vilmibm for creating the Universe inside which ttbp exists, but a solar system. I'd also like to extend my thanks to everybody else for their invaluable contributions to tilde.town in word and code. Without you, tilde.town wouldn't be such a fantastic place.

Without further ado, I'd like to present to you: CENTRALFEELS.

Thank you very much for reading. I hope you enjoy centralfeels as much as I enjoyed making it. 🍾

P.S. The source code is at /home/login/cronjobs/update_centralfeels. Improvements are welcome. However, if you read it, you will know exactly how spaghetti-like I write my code. My only defence is that I'm working on becoming better at writing code.

P.P.S. If you'd like to develop your own UI (or a native centralfeels app or something like that), the data for the twenty latest entries is stored at https://tilde.town/~login/centralfeels/data.json.

19 october 2017

New name: ~login

I just changed my name on tilde.town. It's ~login now.

07 october 2017

Just some thoughts

First of all, let me put it out there that I haven't told anybody about this blog. It's not linked to from anywhere. My Google+ page, my Blogger blog and the many other places on the Internet where I've made a home for myself or where I've stayed for a small period of time bear no reference to this blog.

Since the last time I posted, a lot of things that I didn't expect would happen happened. I'm not going to go into details here but I know that future-me will always know what unexpected happening I'm referring to when (if!) he reads this post with this date (7 Oct 2017).

I have failed to realise in the past, the extent of the privilege that has been afforded to me. It can be characterised completely as an accident of birth. Many people would kill to trade places with me. Many people already have killed to be given an opportunity like that. And yet here I am, complaining about my misfortune.

I should count myself lucky that I was given a good education and a happy childhood. I should count myself lucky that I could eat 3 square meals every single day. I should count my blessings, because I have received more of them than the majority of people living today (and with where things seem to be headed, the majority of people living tomorrow).

Thank you.

30 november 2016

FMovies

There are only a few websites that choose to infringe on copyrights on a massive scale and give them away for free, and pay attention to their front-end UI. MovieTV was one of them, but it is neither free nor open to signups any more. Only if you were a paying customer has your account information been retained.

The person behind MovieTV is on the lookout for movies and TV series available in the very highest quality (1080p) on torrents and Usenet, and hosts them illegaly on their server. The website makes money by charging users a monthly fee, and no fees have to be distributed to anyone other than this person. I bet this person invests all the money earned from MovieTV into index funds and individual stocks to protect it from inflation, so that in case the film industry and Uncle Sam come knocking, they can settle (and hopefully keep a portion of th earnings).

It's the principle of asking for forgiveness instead of asking for permission (because the latter is almost never given to prevent competition even at the cost of consumer satisfaction (the consumer will not like what they don't see). Look at Netflix. They had to fund their own TV series like House of Cards to save money by undercutting cable channels).

FMovies is one of the few alternatives left. It is quite noisy without ad blockers, but with them it is completely ad-free. It probably offers more than any other content provider, and it does that for free (donations are welcome, though, I think). They even have a companion website called 9Anime that offers a variety of anime in 1080p for free.

It's getting so popular, that Google has been forced to mark it as a phishing website (at least temporarily) to disincentivise people from seeking them out. I cannot fathom how they haven't been shut down yet (their domain name has not been revoked yet), but I bet they make a lot of money on mobile (which, for the most part, don't have ad-blockers (yet)).

08 september 2016

The beat from Tyga - Ice Cream Man

The lyrics are absolutely awful, but the beat and piano riff going on in the background is simply beautiful.

I pulled the instrumental version from the internet (thanks to the person who reproduced the instrumental from the original song, painstakingly I imagine). Then I edited the beginning and ending of the song so that it feels almost continuous when played on repeat in gapless-playback media players like VOX.

Anyway, here's the song, and it's approximately 6 MB. I hope you have fun with this.

14 august 2016

DoTA 2 is a waste of time

Such complicated rules, so many possible mechanics and team-play possibilities. Each game lasts around 40 minutes (sometimes more, rarely less) and is different from every other game.

You cannot play this game with random players. You have to get used to your team's style of play, and no one player can single-handedly win the game.

All these mechanisms to learn... and for what? It almost seems like the game was designed poorly and people exploited its loopholes and then the authors simply said this was part of the "game mechanic" and that they weren't going to make everything fair to every character in the DoTA universe. Some DoTA heroes are just plain shit and cannot fulfil any role in a team of five trying to destroy the opposite team's Ancient (which is a building-like structure).

If, instead, the mechanisms of chemical reactions, the reasoning and deduction behind Maths' proofs, the nuances and applications of simple laws of physics — all these were studied, they would have credible application in the real world instead of the made-up world of DoTA.

So don't play DoTA because it's not a game that relaxes you, but one that competes for your time with other relevant and difficult activities.

13 august 2016

In the song Wall Fuck, by Flume, there is a part where a high-pitched sine wave increases to the next octave. It is then followed by a slight pitch sequence (D#... F# C# D#) and a further linear/logarithmic approach to the next octave.

I wish there was a sequence where the sine wave started from the lowest human-hearable frequency and did that pitch-sequence, followed by logarithmic increase to the next octave, all the way to just beyond human hearing ability. That would be so cool.

I just hope somebody comes up with that. If somebody doesn't, then I'll take that part of the song and make a long YouTube video using Audacity to pitch shift the part to fulfil my request. I'll link that here when somebody else/I do it.

Till then, see you.

04 august 2016

What's going on here? What is tilde.town still doing here?

There is a deep question that has found its way into my mind after watching Mr. Robot's fifth (and currently latest) episode, "eps2.3_logic-b0mb.hc".

Are there any hacking attempts on tilde.town? It's essentially free (for the people who haven't donated via Patreon) server space with ssh access. Even the best web hosts don't give their users ssh access to the server because it's probably very difficult to keep people with ssh access to a machine from accessing other people's files.

I love how TTBP (tilde town's very own blogging platform, written by i_dont_know_whom has a grainy feel to it, like it was written as a fun project. But when I went to Github and saw the actual code, it was pretty structured and thought out. I would be embarrassed if anybody saw how badly I'd coded and structured my blogging script (that I used to use prior to TTBP's creation). I'm impressed that i_dont_know_whom even thought of integrating feature requests into the software itself. TTBP was self-contained. It's very well planned out.

Praises aside, I wish there was an ability to edit posts and have them reflect on the HTML versions too. When I wanted to make a change, I had to make it in two different places. Surely, TTBP can handle this within itself. It does allow me to make edits, but instead of opening the file in the editor I've chosen (nano), it opens it up in "vim" by default, going against my editor setting. I think this was hardcoded into the program and the ability to choose your own editor was put in later (and the required changes were not made throughout the codebase). Maybe i_dont_know_whom uses "vim" and didn't notice the bug creeping in. The lack of a test suite shows how informal this project was. Writing unit tests is never fun.

I... should stop writing now.

02 august 2016

Some stuff that happens but there's no explanation and it seems like magic or fate or whatever you want to call it

Nope. Just no. There's always an explanation; it is only a matter of whether that explanation is understood or not. Like the sound a falling apple in the middle of an uninhabited jungle, does an explanation that nobody understands even constitute an explanation?

Frankly? I don't know. I just don't know. What do you think? Too bad there are no comments. Oh well, you can just hyperlink to this web page in your response, and provided trackbacks are implemented, I might see it.

Thanks again, for taking the time to read this. It's a waste of your time... now go do some work.

31 july 2016

There is something going on here

Also, Stranger Things is an AWESOME TV series. Netflix has really brought in the nostalgia feel with this one.

29 july 2016

This is some new stuff I'm trying out. I used to have my own blog stuff running, but this is a real blogging platform! With the global list of feels to read -- there's also a centralised system to access all this stuff with a menu and everything -- I don't see how this cannot be a blogging system.

It's pretty cool, if you ask me. Thanks, ~endorphant, for making this. It's awesome.