@underlap@fosstodon.org
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underlap

@underlap@fosstodon.org

Husband, father, grandfather, follower of Jesus, but very much a work in progress.

Retired software developer, visiting lecturer, IETF editor. Likes repairability. BTW I use arch.

Hobbies: reading, blogging, running, sailing.

Delighted to live in Winchester, UK. Involved in a local church.

Banner: Derwent Water
Profile picture: Dorset coast

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underlap, to random
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Just watched an inspiring presentation on IndieWeb from 2019: Take Back Your Web by Tantek Çelik @tantek.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBLob0ObHMw

underlap, to random
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After my recent spate of unfollowing, my home timeline has nearly stalled. This is probably a good thing...

underlap, to random
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I highly recommend the Guardian Quick Cryptic for anyone wanting to get into solving cryptic crosswords. Today's was fun, for instance.

https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/quick-cryptic/6

underlap, to random
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To maximise the interesting signal to noise ratio on my Mastodon home timeline, I intend to unfollow some accounts, or at least add filters.

I think the best approach to finding a community is to spread the net wide early on and then tighten it later.

My goal is to spend reducing amounts of time checking my home timeline.

underlap, (edited ) to random
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Just set up webfinger so "AT mastodon AT underlap.org" is an alias for my mastodon account on fosstodon.org. (I can't post the actual account because mastodon replaces it with the account it refers to!)

Thanks to https://guide.toot.as/guide/use-your-own-domain/ and https://stolley.dev/posted/getting-webfinger-to-play-nicely-on-nginx/

underlap, to random
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Is "release early, release often" as good a policy for personal blog posts as it is for software?

Certainly writing helps clarify your thinking, but what about the publication step? Is publishing a post and responding to feedback an essential step in finding out what you have to say on a subject?

Discuss.

underlap, to random
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Added a diagram to post: Blocking AI web crawlers

https://underlap.org/blocking-ai-web-crawlers

underlap, to random
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I've amalgamated two previous posts on blocking AI web crawlers: https://underlap.org/blocking-ai-web-crawlers

underlap, to random
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@cory Do you have any pointers to evidence that some AI web crawlers are ignoring robots.txt? I think you mentioned such an example somewhere, but I forget.

underlap, (edited ) to random
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My NGINX robot access module is now complete and running on underlap.org. To see it in action try the following (but make sure to specify https:// before underlap.org):

curl -A "GPTBot" https://underlap.org

(should produce a 403 error)

https://github.com/glyn/nginx_robot_access

underlap, to random
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A couple of days ago, I had an idea for a useful utility and so today I thought I'd have a go at starting to code it. It felt like chiselling granite. Why should that be?

New post: Starting a new programming project, https://underlap.org/starting-a-new-programming-project

underlap, (edited ) to rust
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Here's the beginnings of a small project to create a NGINX module to enforce the rules in robots.txt, for AI web crawlers that ignore the rules.

New Post: NGINX robot access, https://underlap.org/nginx-robot-access.

underlap, to rust
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TFW you find a crate that does more than one you were thinking you'd have to write from scratch and it is understandable and properly tested. 😃

underlap, to random
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Some half-formed thoughts on a topical subject: Single user instances
https://underlap.org/single-user-instances

underlap, (edited ) to random
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Roll up, roll up! Get your AI-shunning robots.txt here: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

underlap, to haskell
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Adding Haddocks to Haskell code is deeply satisfying. I like the British humour too.

underlap, to random
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As someone who stores their dotfiles in a git repo of their home directory, I was horrified when I accidentally typed git clean -dfx into the wrong terminal window.

Fortunately, it was so slow, I managed to ctrl-c apparently before damage was done.

Afterwards I ran with the "dry run" option git clean -ndfx to see what it would have deleted. Quite a lot! (I have a backup, but restoring would be time-consuming.)

underlap, to haskell
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1/3 In today's functional programming class we covered file IO in Haskell.

I repeatedly emphasised that for small files, it is much easier to read and write whole files using a single function rather than opening the file, using the file handle, and then closing the file.

underlap, (edited ) to random
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What's your opinion of strong typing (in programming languages)?

Boosts appreciated.

underlap, to random
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Added an important cornerstone to my blog: a creative commons license.

I chose non-commercial for consistency with my attempts to exclude AI scrapers in robots.txt.

https://underlap.org/license

underlap, to random
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@cory Thanks for publishing your robots.txt. Have you considered putting it in a git repo so it's easy for others to contribute changes, commit logs are captured, etc.?

underlap, to haskell
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Non-deterministic behaviour in a specification can be a headache for testing. This updated post explores the non-determinism in the JSONPath RFC 9535, describes how the Compliance Test Suite is being upgraded to deal with non-determinism, and shows how non-deterministic tests can be generated automatically. There's also an "explosive" challenge for Haskell programmers.

https://underlap.org/testing-non-determinism

underlap, to haskell
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There are plenty of descriptions of Haskell's do notation as syntactic sugar for stringing together sequences of operators such as >>=.

There are also "laws" that define the semantics of the do notation.

But I haven't found any decent description of how to use do notation as if it was a first class language construct. That would be especially useful for beginners.

Anyone know of such a description?

Boosts appreciated!

underlap, (edited ) to softwaretesting
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New blog post: Testing non-determinism

https://underlap.org/testing-non-determinism

If you prefer code to verbiage, start with the testcase generator https://github.com/glyn/jsonpath-nondeterminism

underlap, to haskell
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After my recent crash on arch, the system installation of ghc is so badly broken that I'm temporarily using i3 instead of xmonad. Not having a massive dependency for my window manager feels good, but I love xmonad and would like to get back to it.

If only I could nuke the ghc install and get back to sanity. I've tried reinstalling ghc and all the Haskell libraries to no avail.

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