TIL: you can easily get the `aws` CLI tool to set up a SSH server that connects to an EC2 node's serial console. Super useful! (can even get to grub this way)
TIL2: NixOS's default serial-getty seems to exit and NOT restart itself after too many login failures (need `systemd.services."serial-getty@".serviceConfig.Restart = "always”;`). Glad I tested this before I need it.
Microsoft reliability team, meeting up with GitHub folks at recent company-wide retreat: hold my seltzer?
Seems like lots of Outlook users learning about the Single Point of Failure that is email, today, if you do MFA wrong…
#VCF #Montreal was great. I think @foulab was really well represented. Lots of people came by to see our stuff; especially the PDP-11/70.
The NeXT machines were a smaller but more approachable curiosity, and I must've talked to 150+ people about their importance in history, both for Apple/iPhone, and the whole World Wide Web (and the Doom engine).
I am, however, getting too old to be lifting what must've been a couple thousand pounds of gear into and out of a U-Haul, in a single weekend. (-:
Rick Rolled in a browser from 1991 at #VCF
When your mesh repeater doesn’t reach the real mesh from inside the #VCF concrete and steel building.
@foulab Packing up MeshCoCo to bring to #VCF #VCFMontreal
The interactive BOM that @BlueSCSI hosts is super useful! https://bluescsi.com/boms/2023.10a-50pin
Built a second Meshtendo cart. Getting ready for #VCF Montreal. Worked first time, so no ugly bodge wires tapped on to the cart edge pads this time. Much cleaner!
Getting dark at 4pm and I haven't been diligent about my Vitamin D. 😬
Somehow it's become even worse than when I wrote about this almost 10 years ago: https://seancoates.com/blogs/dst-pain
So basically “good luck” at work tomorrow, then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-foXT4hUXQ
Interesting-to-me considerations for working on kit this old:
- `sudo` wasn't invented yet; I can `su`, but that is WAY outside of my muscle memory
- the default shell is `csh`; it does have `sh` (no `bash`). I am not great at either of these shells
- when using telnet to log in, it REALLY has no clue what terminal `xterm-256color` could possibly be
- there is no DHCP, so network gets configured by hand, including resolv.conf. Processes ruthlessly hit disk to figure out how to resolve DNS
This is what we set out to build with Gimme Bar, then Haven. Neither got much traction. There might be more appetite for this kind of thing, now, 15 years later, when more people are in the reality that things they love are quietly disappearing from the web. https://digipres.club/@misty/117526807949463958
The mechanism here is that <ISINDEX> causes WorldWideWeb.app to open the search dialog box in the video. When submitting that, it adds `?Mandela` to the URL and GETs it again. My proxy passes that along to Wikipedia as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/rest.php/v1/search/page?q=Mandela ; then it parses the output back into the HTML/0.9 dialect that this browser can use (e.g. don't quote attributes, don't close block tags, etc.).
So… this WorldWideWeb.app browser from 1991 doesn't have `<FORM>`. It DOES, however have a weird `<ISINDEX>` tag that is used to put keywords into URLs: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Tags.html#18
I've been building things for the web for more than 30 years, and I've *never* used <ISINDEX> before tonight.
(Awkward camera work aside, this is blowing my mind.)
My modern browser ( @Vivaldi ; it still works!) being served from real NeXT hardware by CERN HTTPd, on the @foulab network. (You'll be able to come use it at our table at #VCF #VCFMontreal !)
The original document is still up at https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
/cc @timbl if you happen to be watching this account
