This is just a quick post but imho still pretty neat. If you are a postgresql user you probably know about the commands with \ to inspect your database server e.g. .

mirrorbrain=> \l mirro*
                                  List of databases
    Name     |    Owner    | Encoding |   Collate   |    Ctype    | Access privileges 
-------------+-------------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------------
 mirrorbrain | mirrorbrain | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | 
(1 row)

mirrorbrain=> \dt
           List of relations
 Schema |  Name   | Type  |    Owner    
--------+---------+-------+-------------
 public | country | table | mirrorbrain
 public | file    | table | mirrorbrain
 public | hash    | table | mirrorbrain
 public | marker  | table | mirrorbrain
 public | mirror  | table | mirrorbrain
 public | pfx2asn | table | mirrorbrain
 public | region  | table | mirrorbrain
 public | server  | table | mirrorbrain
 public | version | table | mirrorbrain
(9 rows)

mirrorbrain=> 

So far … nothing new … right?

I’m happy to announce that mdds 0.12.1 is now out. You can download it from the project’s README page.

There are primarily two major changes from the previous release of 0.12.0 as explained below.

multi_type_vector

One is that multi_type_vector now has a new static method advance_position to increment or decrement the logical position of a position_type object by an arbitrary distance.

static position_type advance_position(const position_type& pos, int steps);

The implementation of this method has been contributed by Markus Mohrhard.

flat_segment_tree

Another major change in this release is with flat_segment_tree. Previously, flat_segment_tree had an unintentional constraint that the value_type must be of numeric type. In this release, that constraint has been officially lifted so that the user of this data structure can now store values of arbitrary types with this data structure. The credit goes to David Tardon for adding this nice improvement.

Other than that, there are no other changes from 0.12.0.

mdds on GitLab

Incidentally, the mdds project now has a new home at gitlab.com. The new URL for the project page is now

https://gitlab.com/mdds/mdds

If you need to include a project URL, be sure to use the new one.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!

Since 26th December 2005, I’ve been runnning this blog with Wordpress. At the time there were little alternatives and finally I had got hold of a host (Dreamhost, at the time) that supported PHP and MySQL without being overly restrictive. 10 years later, things have somehow changed.

The issue

The main reason lies in how Wordpress has evolved over time: no, I’m not speaking about the subjective “bloat”, but the fact that it’s been moving towards a full-blown CMS, which is not what I have in mind to run my blog. Also, performance with many plugins had somehow worsened, in particular when accessing things like the administration interface. Not to mention that plugins itself are still somewhat fragile, and upgrade could still cause harm to your whole site. Lastly, the mere fact that I had to use plugins to lessen the performance impact was off-putting.

It wasn’t just Wordpress, of course. In the past years I’ve found myself unable to write long texts in a browser (and hoping that they won’t get lost in case I accidentally close a tab) and also the way I write posts changed. I much prefer a specialized editor (like this one I’m using) to compose the posts I write.

An alternative is found

So I went and loooked for alternatives around. I’ve looked at Ghost, and while it was reasonably appealing, there weren’t many themes that wanted this page to be like I wanted to (and I wasn’t convinced in handing out money for a premium theme before I was sure it did what I wanted). So I turned to static engines, and for now at least I went for Jekyll, which is what made the page as you see it today.

The learning curve wasn’t particularly steep, and with the help of some tools I was able to convert all the posts from dnenogumi.org with little effort. I also took the time to update some very outdated sections. What took most of the time in the migration was keeping links “WP-compatible”, that is preserving the structure of the page (more or less) as it was before to prevent many 404s, in particular for feeds which are aggregated on Planet KDE. With the aid of (many) plugins and a few tweaks to the nginx configuration, I can say that most of the structure should be in place.

As for the theme, I went for Feeling Responsive by Phlow, but not verbatim. I had to make changes (in short, a fork) because it was meant originally for portfolios and certain features I needed were not present by design. What I did was to clone the repo and hack in whatever I needed.

Deployment

I use my own GitLab instance to host the repository (now private, I’ll make it public the moment everything is up and running), coupled with micro Flask application that fires off the rebuilding to a script running to my server. I also wrote a couple of programs to make a new posts and commit the data (or to make new drafts).

All that glitters is not gold

A bad note is comments: I had to go for Disqus unfortunately, as even when I managed to set up Discourse, the complexity of the platform was overwhelming for me, which required only comments for a blog, and nothing else. That, and the reliance on Docker, which meant another PostgresQL server running (I have already one up which powers my GitLab instance. I’m really not happy about it. Should you know a better solution, let me know!

Should you find issues with the page, also let me know. I’ve been testing this for a while but of course I didn’t manage to find everything. In particular now the “Gallery” is gone, and I’ll still need to experiment for plugins to auto-create thumbnails and so on.

Credits

Of course this leverages on work of other people, which I feel they’d be credited:

• The aforementioned Phlow for the theme;
• Melissa Adkins for her work on banner images and typography.