Notices by Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp), page 2

I'm extremely pleased to launch Run Your Own Social: How to run a small social network site for you friends.

This is a guide book to running a small, tight-knit federated social network server. It comes from my year of experience running Friend Camp. It's focused largely on SOCIAL solutions, though it does touch on the technical.

I've tried to keep it technology-neutral, and it should be a pretty easy read for anyone who's been on the fediverse for a while.

https://runyourown.social/

Yesterday I learned that virtual machines go all the way back to the 1960s (in this it's case multiple computers emulated on a bigger computer where a certain user gets access to the emulated computer but not the main one, and it was even called a virtual machine at the time)

As I say in the blog post, it's important to remember that most of what we have today in computing we also had in the 60s and 70s. It is just all much cheaper and faster now.

https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-109

My @365-rfcs blog where I read one RFC for each day of 2019 is back after a several month hiatus! You can subscribe directly on fedi at the above account

I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media.

This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large.

You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page!

https://www.patreon.com/tinysubversions

Happy to announce that my RSS-to-ActivityPub converter now detects MP3s from podcast feeds and makes them into attachments that render directly in Mastodon 2.9.2+

https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

Happy to announce that my RSS-to-ActivityPub converter now detects MP3s from podcast themes and makes them into attachments that render directly in Mastodon 2.9.2+

https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

It's June 27th, which means it's the 23rd anniversary of Houston hip hop legend DJ Screw's "June 27" freestyle. I traditionally celebrate this day by listening to June 27 on loop all day. It's 35 minutes long and my favorite freestyle ever.

https://youtu.be/DZeu29nOwjw

Shout out to one of my all time favorite internet things: this collection of images of novelty baby clothing on zazzle but with the default model switched to an adult.

https://babyfeud.tumblr.com/

Okay so, recipe. Cut the napa cabbage lengthwise, coat it in oil and salt and pepper. Grill each piece for 3 minutes on each side. Chop up into little pieces. Make a Cole slaw style sauce (many recipes available online but I like mayo + mustard + apple cider vinegar in equal proportions) and mix it all together. Incredible on its own or as a condiment on sandwiches

At the advice of my farmers market I'm attempting grilled napa cabbage

What heretical software features can you imagine that would never fly at a growth oriented company but could totally work on free open source social media?

For example, algorithmic timelines are one way to deal with information overload. But what if instead your software offered suggestions for people to unfollow (this person posts a lot and you hardly ever interact with them)? Not necessarily a good idea but it's an idea we could implement that would NEVER happen on Twitter, Facebook, etc

Paul Baran: also apparently doing the xkcd thing 50 years before xkcd

Full paper: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3638.html

New conspiracy theory

"How do you teach people how to debug [...] code? From what I can see, no one even tries to teach it, and textbooks, if they mention it at all, bury it in the back pages. Some people are very good at it, but many people who should be good at it can't seem to do it at all."

-Mort Bernstein, System Development Corporation, at the RAND Symposium on Computing, Nov 1971

A year ago I tried learning ActivityPub, and more or less failed. I was confounded by a spec that was so abstract I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Turns out I was missing some key things.

I have written a guide to learning about ActivityPub that I wish existed a year ago when I first set out to learn how to write social media servers that conform to the spec:

https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/

The next time someone tries to use mathematical induction around you, just admonish them for making a slippery slope argument and move on

I'm at #csvconf in Portland, OR, and just saw a good talk about basic bash commands that you can use to clean up data sets, ideally line-based, well formatted data like CSVs or log files. I didn't know about the `cut` and `tr` commands!

$ echo "MyCity,MyState,IWant:TheThingAfterTheColon,MyCountry" | cut -d',' -f3 | cut -d':' -f2

--> TheThingAfterTheColon

Here's the full talk with all the example bash commands.

https://github.com/nickcanz/csvconf2019/blob/master/csvconf_2019.pdf

If you've been following the walkout at Riot Games, you might be interested in what happened in 1998 when developers at a Canadian game studio threatened a walkout. (Spoiler: working conditions were improved.) I wrote about it for Vice Games (formerly Waypoint) today.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjvjex/in-1998-jagged-alliance-developers-threatened-a-walkoutand-it-worked

Hacking on the Friend Camp fork of Mastodon is so fun. I'm currently rendering Article activitypub posts inline and working on a way to get inline images both looking nice and proxied locally so user IPs aren't exposed externally.

The attached image is from a write.as blog post I made with inline images. I'll probably do like Pleroma does and collapse all Articles behind their "title" in the style of a CW.

I've upgraded my RSS to ActivityPub converter to use an actual message queuing system (beanstalkd, in this case). https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

One thing to note:

For six months this ran and mostly worked off a janky `for` loop and timer, no queue. I am extremely glad that I didn't attempt to engineer a "scalable" solution until I needed it, because I probably never would have launched it in the first place if I had (I've never implemented a message queue before).