An Anti-Logging Protest That's meant to be a pun on protests against companies cutting down trees, but given logging is a topic that probably gets above-average representation in the local media, and that people reading Gopher likely think just shy of according to their own computer's instruction set, it was probably missed. Indeed I am talking about logs from computer software, more specifically internet server software. But actually I'm not quite finished whinging (I've since discovered that there's a silent "h" in that word, made me look pretty stupid before I suppose) from last week, so first: ------------ Geeze, I noticed today that it has now been three months and I never did manage to get damn OpenSSH to compile. The bloody thing just won't accept OpenSSL libs in a non-standard directory. I mean you'd think that something as big as that would be alright in a slight edge-case like this, wouldn't you? Though it probably is just me doing something stupid, hence I stopped shy of joining the mailing list and bringing it up. I think the next step might be editing the configure script though, at least to show where it is looking. Seemingly I can change where it looks for the headers, so long as they are in a directory called "include" within another directory that has _nothing else in it_, add another file or directory in there (such "lib", which is what I want it to find next) and suddenly it can't find the headers anymore either. Of course the configure script is pretty incomprehensible because it is generated by autoconf, though I vagely remember battling through a similar situation once before. The annoying thing is that I really don't give a stuff if I were to use the insecure encryption supported by my ancient OpenSSH to talk to this server, if only it would let me. Traffic analysis alone would give away all of the info needed to compromise my anonymity is someone was really that keen to find out (which I'm sure they're not), and I don't give a stuff if someone does have the account and wipe it out. I've got local copies of everything anyway, my internet is too slow for writing these posts over SSH to be much fun ("has the connection dropped?", "is my keyboard broken?", "oh wait, no there's the text coming now"). It's more likely that the server will just go down one day never to be seen again anyway. I feel the same way about most of this HTTPS stuff on the web of course too. I don't give a stuff that someone can see me requesting a page like "Types of Fruitcakes" from www.allaboutfruitcakes.org (where one's intentions are clear simply from the still-visible fact that one is visiting the site in the first place), so why should I suddenly need to mess about so much trying to support this encryption when I'm not using the software on this system for anything that I need encrypted? Because once again I'm a tiny minority trying to cling on to the tails of big society. Where everyone wants the latest fancy software anyway, and works hard so that they can afford to keep upgrading to the powerful hardware reqired to run all of the fancy features, and considers it reasonable that they then work hard to figure out how to do what they were doing before using all of these fancy new features that now have to be used. Yeah, I'm grumpy. I should just stick to my transistors, and op-amps, and discrete digital logic. A good old circuit diagram, and an oscilloscope to show you what's going on. That's still fun. Except everyone's using microcontrollers now, so I'm out of the loop with that as well. I don't know, why do I bother? Well I wont, I'm crossing off making another attempt at OpenSSH from this weekend's tasks. No wait, that was only to make it easier to submit these posts via SFTP, so I should cross Gopher off instead. Well yeah, but then I've already ignored reason once by starting this phlog so I guess if you've shot yourself in the foot once then you might as well do so again just to show you meant it. Actually there is one other way. Hmm, hold on I'll just jump over to the ideas section with it. Be back in a tick... ------------ Phew, I really can't keep anything short. That's something like two hours down the drain in getting that idea down, no wonder I shy away from documenting the more complicated ones. Anyway, what was this meant to be about? Oh yeah... actually it's more complaining about using someone else's Gopher server. You can't get to the access logs! Presumably this is because they cover everyone and you'd be able to see traffic to other people's Gopher holes. But I'm sure it would be a pretty easy script to use Grep to separate them out into per-user log files, just by looking at the home directories in the request paths. But then I thought about where access logs had got me with my websites. Working hard checking over text, formatting it nicely in HTML (good plain handwritten HTML without any CSS or Javascript), taking photos, drawing diagrams, editing them, scaling them down, keeping note of the resolution to pop in to the "width" and "height" attributes so that the page loads nicely on slow connections like mine. Then I come back in a month and the viewing figures are lost amongst the noise from crawlers and myself when I first checked it was loading properly. "Oh, the search engines will pick it up eventually I think", but either they don't or nobody's searching in the first place. The view counts just stick down in single-digits, some months maybe never getting a view from anything even trying to resemble a human. Before I started making my own websites I assumed that every useful webpage that I was looking at on the web got lots of views. After all, this was late enough that pretty much everyone seemed to be on the web. If one person thinks it worth writing a full page on a factual topic relating to a specific interest, even if it might be a bit obscure you'd expect there would be plenty of like-minded web users who would at least visit the page. But no, It's clear to me now that a lot of the small personal sites that I visit must get bugger-all traffic. It's probably why many go offline just because the service hosting them is discontinued, the author saw that hardly anyone was viewing the site anyway so it wasn't worth going to all the trouble of setting it up somewhere else. Either that or I am putting up stuff that people really, _really_, REALLY, don't care about, in spite of my best efforts. But I don't really believe that I'm _that_ much of an outlier. So here I am on Gopher. The fact that I'm here means that I'm jumping a new leap into obscurity. I kind-of suspect that paradoxically the average views for pages in my Gopher hole might be higher than for my personal website, simply beacuse there's less content on Gopher as a whole for Gopher-lovers to look at. But maybe that shouldn't matter. Maybe to consider that is really to miss the point in the first place. I'm here because I like Gopher (not least because it doesn't demand encryption), and to say things that I want to say, knowing well that they're often not popular opinion. Overall whether that attracts or repels people, it's what I'm here for. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I tried to be popular on the Web, and people ran away. Now I've got on Gopher, and I'm dug in to stay. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Feel free to copy that little rhyme. It's probably even more apt for those refugees from Facebook and Twitter etc. I gather that those services also make a big deal of views, or "likes". - The Free Thinker