DWiki , the wiki engine that underlies Wandering Thoughts (this blog), is fifteen years old. That makes it my oldest Pythonprogram that's in active, regular, and even somewhat demanding use(we serve up a bunch of requests a day, although mostly fromsyndication feed fetchers and bots on a typical day). As is usualfor my long-lived Python programs, DWiki 's not in any sort of activedevelopment, as you can see in its github repo , although I did add a

Somewhat recently I saw people saying negative things about commonalerting practices, specifically such as generating some sort ofalert when a TLS certificate was getting close to expiring. Thisgot me to tweet something :

We don't have 'your TLS certificate is X days from expiring' alerts totell me that we need to renew a certificate; we have them to tell usthat our Let's Encrypt automation broke, and early enough that we haveplenty of time to deal with the situation.

(All of our alerts

One of the things I've been worried about during the current longlength of working from home has been upgrading my office workstationto Fedora 32. Upgrading my home machine is straightforward ( at onelevel ) because I'm here right in front of itand I can probably sort out anything that goes wrong (althoughthat's complicated by my home machine being my Internet gateway).I'm not in front of my office workstation, so either I was goingto have to make a trip in

After a great deal of painful experience with the combination oflocal configuration tweaks combined with vendor upgrades, manysystems and people have adopted an approach of splitting monolithicconfiguration files apart into multiple snippets that sit in adirectory. One of the latest I've run into is Fedora with sshdconfiguration ,with is especially relevant to me because I've been customizingmine for years (and carefully re-merging my customizations aftervarious upgrades). However, there is an important thing to bear inmind when setting up such

We're in the process of getting various pieces of new hardware here . In fact we've actually been in thisprocess for months and months. Well, sort of. Part of what's made thisprocess take so long is that we've run into an inconvenient aspect ofgetting physical hardware that I hadn't even considered before, whichis that it has to be delivered to us.

Under normal circumstances getting hardware delivered is easy andI don't think much about it; we order

I upgraded my home machine to Fedora 32 earlier this week . Everythingwent smoothly, except that afterward various web pages looked justa little bit different in my Firefox. After poking around and finding a handy Firefox font related thing ,I discovered that Fedora 32 had changed what the standard system'serif', 'sans-serif' and 'monospace' font names mapped to fromDejaVu (in Fedora 31) to Bitstream Vera (in Fedora 32). The twofonts are very close ( DejaVu

I recently tweeted :

VMware over 'ssh -X' is surprisingly chatty even when iconified, tothe tune of 200 KB/sec inbound. Maybe I need to investigate someremote desktop thing I can detach from and reattach to.

(I'm now keeping some VMs running full time.)

(The primary reason I'm keeping a VM up all the time right now isthat it's our only Ubuntu 20.04 test machine and we need experiencewith that . As far

We have to do something about our Python 2 programs, especially onour Ubuntu machines where Python 2 may be gone entirely in Ubuntu22.04 (which is now less than two years away, and we move slowly).One way to keep Python 2 programs running is with PyPy, and PyPycan potentially also be used to speed up Python 3 programs (well,long running ones). Thinking about various things to do with PyPymakes me curious as to what versions of it I can use on

On Linux in specific and Unix more generally, there is a notion ofdefault system fonts that are known by the magic names of 'serif','sans-serif', and 'monospace'. What these magic names map to isdetermined by a complicated pile of decisions that are spread aroundthe system in the form of Fontconfig ( also ). These decisions aregenerally fairly opaque and hard to peer into unless you're relativelyexperienced with command line tools.

Unless you configure it otherwise through Preferences, Firefox