2015 — 24 February: Tuesday
I need another web server. This is a great shame.
Explain!
The Chancellor of the Exchequer here in Technology Towers doesn't accept cash for questions,1 more's the pity. Indeed, he even reminds me that (in light of today's final settlement of last month's whopping [a technical term] credit card bill with the annual house and contents insurance on it) there is now precious little cash left in the coffers until the next IBM pension payment shows up. So the austerity measures that are now in place hereabouts rule out any grandiose IT expansion plans.
However, it wouldn't break the bank were I to simply get hold of another Pi2 and hang it off a spare Ethernet port, would it? Like most of my first ideas, that lasted for as long as it took me to realise that there are no longer any spare ports on my 8-port Gigabit switch down here. (The last one was snaffled by the network colour inkjet printer.) I shall dodge, for now, the question of what Big Bro will be able to plug his laptop into when he and Mrs Big Bro are next over here.
But wait! I spy, with my bleary little eye, my little Raspberry Pi22 and it gives me an idea. It's far from overwhelmed by the task of running the lighttpd web server — which is all I ask of it — and it struck me that if I could pop a copy on BlackBeast, running it as a service, I would probably never even notice3 it was there. So, yesterday evening, as the first step of a Proof of Concept, I installed lighttpd on BlackBeast where it started itself up quite automagically...
...and will be (when I sort out the little matter of file permissions and ownership of any files placed in /var/www) open for business.
Actually...
... I meant explain "why". [Pause] Oh. My bad.
Meanwhile...
... some visible proof that at least I managed to grant some permissions:
As for "why?". Well, the Pi2 is a superset of my external 'molehole' presence. I thought it might be fun to host another local webserver I can poke and prod and try out a few experiments on, in private, without running any risk of mucking up the working systems. My current level of "webmastery" is Neanderthalic. But I hear tales (not least from my own son) that things have moved on quite a bit since the mid-1990s. We shall see.
I love...
... Jewish humour. There's a flash of such wit buried in the rather earnest piece on satire here. Source and snippet:
Outside of the meeting halls, of course, humor thrived, as samizdat, as oral culture, as the irrepressible truth beyond the pretense. The transmission of anekdoty — jokes, but literally anecdotes — remained a crucial form of resistance.
Not surprisingly, many of these jokes focused on the sort of humor beloved by Jews, typically embodied in the figure of a certain Rabinovich. It is existential humor: tragic and hilarious.
One joke in particular tells the whole story of the idiocy of
regimes of seriousness, and of the redemptive power of humor as a response. An Odessa census taker knocks at Rabinovich's door. "Does Rabinovich live here?" he asks. Rabinovich replies: "You call this living?"
Mr Smith includes a wonderful link to a piece on Robert Crumb. And, speaking of idiocy, I needed to "fix" three character mishaps in that text snippet as originally lifted from the Chronicle web page.
Some hours...
... and a wintry shower or two later, I'm back in Technology Towers. Brrr.
Hah!
Close inspection of the URL in this snippet of a recent web browser window running not a million miles away from the one now being typed into...
... will show that I've now successfully replicated my external variant of 'molehole' — Server Side Includes and all — running on an automatically started webserver right here inside BlackBeast. Cool. My thanks to my two Linux gurus who, between them, have helped me puzzle out various issues of file permissions, lighttpd configuration, and rather a lot else in the past nine days or so.
Waiting...
... on my doorstep was the book I'd mentioned by Wendy Cope:
I like the way I can fire up the GIMP and scan images directly into it. None of the Windows programs I could afford could do that. [Pause] I've just been informed that Paint can (and DVD Profiler). Well I never! [Pause] But then I only very rarely used the GIMP on Windows. Xara and Fireworks were my main graphics tools in that rapidly-fading environment :-)
As the evening...
... progresses, I've been trying out combinations of 'autohide' on the top and/or the (new) side panel while listening to "Lizard" by King Crimson. (An interesting mix.) I thought I'd hate autohide but it's rapidly grown on me. The top panel is akin to the Windows Taskbar. The side panel is holding my current pinned subset of useful programs. Relocating them away from the top panel has, as a beneficial side-effect, solved the mystery of the disappearing minimised windows. These turned out to have been squeezing themselves into about two pixels' worth of overlooked "gap" between a couple of pinned icons — no wonder I couldn't spot them.
Meanwhile, it's also proving nice having 'localhost' back online at my fingertips. I last hosted a local webserver as a service courtesy of the XAMPP package back when BlackBeast was a 6-core AMD device. I never got around to reinstalling it after the incident of the toasted CPU because, by then, Brian had kindly set me up with my initial Raspberry Pi running lighttpd. XAMPP was a very heavyweight (and lazy) way of getting the Apache server, and a lot of gorp, on the PC. I didn't use, or need, the other three components (MySQL, PHP, and Perl).