ABOUT ME
30something computer programmer and all around computer nerd with too many
projects, too little time and dicipline to actually make something..
Having a personal website is such a 90's thing, which suits me just fine, being
born in the mid 80's, 90's stuff is intrinsically cool to me. Being
self-absorbed, narcissistic and vain also helps.
That said, it can come as no surprise to anybody that I love to read my own
words, and I find almost everything I do exceedingly interesting, otherwise, I
wouldn't do it.
I've made several websites over the years, trying to keep up with whatever the
popular fashion was, always ending up dissatisfied with the result after some
time.
The very first website I made, was HTML, lots of images, and lots of.. markup.
The next ones I made were PHP with CMS like qualities. Now I'm going back to
basics, I think. I don't know if that is a popular thing to do, but I've
rethought what I want a website to be. We now have a word to distinguish
websites from "those other things" which are called "Web Apps". Websites are
linked documents of content, they're documents that link to each other, nothing
more. I don't want this website to be beautiful, I want it to be raw. I want it
to be about information. About what I want to say and show.
I'm a 30 year old computer geek. I work as a programmer, I read books, I play
computer games and hang out with interesting people. I attempt to create.
Sometimes I stream old DOS games on twitch.tv, but I'm not very good at it. I'm
a big fan of cyberpunk and hard science fiction. I'm waiting impatiently for the
singularity.
I think computers were cooler back in the day. I want to write that I'm an
atheist, programmer, writer, philosopher, artist, poet, scientist and inventor,
so I do, but it's probably not more true for me than for everyone else, and I'm
not sure if I like labels anyway, so it is ironic how much I like to put them,
both on others and myself.
I suffer from "bitter old man syndrome" or, as I'd like to call it, "clarity".
I'm biased, and I know it. Things I know well and understand are better than
things that I personally do not know well or understand. I like to think I'm
both deeply introspective and reflective and I've heard nothing opposing that
from my surroundings.
I grew up when the Internet was young and nobody really knew what it was going
to become, and my ideas about what it is, and especially, what it should be,
stems from early 90's propaganda. It's not that I don't know any better, it's
just that, I like those ideas better. I like computers and information. I like
the idea, that everyone connects to this global computer network and share
information and resources. Nobody ever needed a web-hotel or "hosting" less than
today. Everyone can setup their very own servers, in their homes, on their
workstations or their old computers, and it is something I encourage everyone to
do. The Internet is not just facebook and google, it is also you and me!
WHAT A MESS!
Yes. I'm not very organized. I find it difficult to categorize things. Say I'd
want a "games" section on this website, well, it'd leave my blog in a weird
position, it's not a game, and it's not strictly about games, and what about
things that are both games and other things, most games are programs, not all,
but most, but far from all programs are games. It'd leave FinalKey alone in
another category, and I'd start subdividing endlessly, until everything is put
into a category, or more likely a subcategory, and before long, I'd have more
metadata than data. I'd have every single thing in a single box, in a single box
in a single box. It's just not for me, at least, I've not yet found a good way
of doing it, so, everything goes in a big box.
ME, ON-LINE
It began in school, 8th grade, I was about 13 years old IIRC, and I found, by
coincidence, a printout from a website HTML.dk, it was an introduction to the
markup language, explaining how to make your first web page from scratch, in
notepad. I read it while waiting for the bus, and when I got home, I spent the
night creating a concept, I didn't know what kind of thing I wanted to put on
there, I just knew I wanted a webpage "home page", because IT. WAS. COOL!
The next year, I still didn't have Internet at home yet, so to get online, I
used to call the public library, to sign up for 1 hour of Internet time at their
public computers (they had two!). I went there often, to download games to
floppies from underdogs, to play at home. One day, I went there, and wrote an
E-Mail to the headmaster of the local youth-school, explaining that I had a
"small and fast" webserver that I'd like to put online, and, that maybe we could
make some sort of arrangement.<
We did, the deal was, that I could bring the machine, and we set it up in this
tiny room that had the switch, modem and the cleaning utilities for the local
youth-club. In exchange for this, I'd give them FTP access so they could upload
image-files for use on their own website, without them having to pay for more
room with their hosting provider. After putting the server up, I was estatic! I
could reach it by IP from the next room! I announced that it was online, and was
promptly informed that it couldn't be reached from anywhere else.. We talked
with the ISP and they explained public IP's and we got one, and they helped
forwarding port 20, 21 and 80 to the machine on the LAN, excellent! Now we were
online! So I bought my first domain name, it was called subserver.dk, the
process involved printing out forms to fill out, on paper, and FAXing the
documents to hostmaster, exciting stuff for a 14 year old geek!
Some time after that, I got ADSL at home, 128/64 kbit, so I moved the server
home, and figured out how to do the routing and stuff myself, my first router
was a TRENDnet one, it worked ok. My entire network was my PC and the webserver.
On IRC I was told about virtual hosts and apache configuration, I let someone I
trusted connect to the machine over VNC, it was scary stuff! He was kind enough
to tell me what he did to the configuration to make apache serve from different
webroots depending on the domain you hit the server from, glorious stuff! I
should mention, by the way, this was around 2000, the server was my previous
desktop PC, it was a Pentium 100, overclocked to 133 mhz, with 32 MiB of EDO
ram, here's the crazy part: It ran Windows 95! I actually had this for 2-3 years
before it was upgraded to a 550 mhz pentium 3 with 1 GiB of ram and, I think it
ran Windows too, I think Win2k. The TRENDnet router was replaced by the 133 mhz
Pentium sporting a second NIC and SmoothWall, that was awesome! At some point, I
installed Linux on the P3 box too, and I became a fan of Linux and Free
Software.
Over the years, I've had multiple servers, always hosted at home, on my own
systems. The website you're reading now is no different, it's hosted on my own
internet connection, by my own server machine. I believe people who can, should
host, not putt that out to some cloud-provider. Maybe I'll write an article on
why I feel that way some day, but not now.
HOW DUSTED.DK IS CREATED
In the past I wrote 3 or 4 CMS systems from scratch, using PHP and MySQL, and I
had a lot of fun doing that, I enjoyed tweaking the rendering, and adopting it
to new ideas as I got them. My first page, subserver.dk was dynamic from the
start, so I could log-in and post new articles and stuff like that, there was
also a guestbook and random people, mostly from IRC would drop comments. It was
a lot of fun, and I had never heard about SQL escaping, but I was curious why,
when I made a site for trading used hardware, that people couldn't put their 17"
monitor up for sale.. Different times indeed, the net was a lot less mean to
newbies than it is now.. I caught up with input checking and all that.
Migrating my systems to a newer server was often bothersome, needing to remember
all the strange stuff sticking out here and there, how to configure the
databases just right, exporting and importing and all that. Porting to newer
versions of PHP and just generally a pain. I also forgot more than once, to
export some important table, and I'd have to reconstruct things by hand. So I
started toying with the idea to go back to basics.
I think the original idea with HTML and the World Wide Web is beautiful. I like
the idea, that HTML should describe "what" things on the page is, but not so
much "how" they should look. So, while there is CSS on my page, I'm not entirely
happy with that, and I encourage you to try and turn it off, see that this page
is still usable, even in a text-only browser like elinks.
Presently I wrote a HTML template, and figured out a directory structure, and
that's what I'm using. There is absolutely nothing automatic in this project, I
just use the cp command and vim and nothing else for creating and maintaining
the site and I enjoy it! It's fun, it's not difficult, and it uses very few
resources on the server machine, I could host this from that same 133 mhz
Pentium, and maybe one day, I will again!
As for the current software "stack" here is _ALL_ the technology involved in
dusted.dk: * Physical server machine (6 core Xeon, 64 GiB RAM, much disk in ZFS)
* Ubuntu server as OS
* Docker
* Container with nginx, hosting static files and being reverse proxy
for other sites (handles virtual hosts)
* NodeJS server for hosting the Phlog and the Gopher version of
DusteD.dk
* Many more containers for all the other crap that's not dusted.dk
As for the directory structure, that's very simple as well, nginx has been
configured to disallow directory listing, and will look for index.html in a
directory:
- .../www/dusted.dk/
index.html
- pages
- about/
index.html
- computers/
index.html
... image files
- software/
index.html
- files/
... downloadable files
