Best Review I Have Currently Seen on Nvidia Ampere

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Wednesday, September 2, 2020.

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Don't Say One Year of Experience Required if You Won't Train

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, September 1, 2020.

I have been dealing with the issue of many people wanting one year of experience with tool A, but they won’t train you on the differences between tool A and tool B, which I do have experience on. But they need someone with experience? A person with one year of experience in a tool isn’t an expert on the tool. They are a moderately experienced beginner. Also, since Tool A and Tool B do the same job, the differences in how those tools work is maybe a week or two of adjustment, not a whole year of adjustment.

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Update to TLS 1.3 With Apache

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, August 31, 2020.

I moved this site to TLS 1.3 a few weeks ago. So far, it has been working great if I use a web browser. Unfortunately, no one has updated Curl to work with TLS 1.3. The is a major issue because Curl is the HTTP client library du jour for C or languages that use C’s Foreign Function Interface. Unfortunately, TLS 1.3 only breaks nearly all applications that use a web callback or WordPress’ APIs.

To add TLS 1.2 back as an option

#Add below the SSLCipherSuite for TLSv1.3
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384

#Add +TLSv1.2 to the end of the SSLProtocol line
SSLProtocol -all +TLSv1.3 +TLSv1.2

Apache
TLS

Post Schedule Change

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Sunday, August 30, 2020.

I am going to move the post schedule from daily to Monday through Friday.

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Dont Leave Web Server Performance on the Table

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Saturday, August 29, 2020.

If you followed the WordPress Install Guide you are leaving performance on the table for your website. The WordPress Install Guide defaults to Apache’s mod_PHP which is definitely leaving performance on the table.

Here is how to fix that in Ubuntu 20.04:

install php-fpm: sudo apt install php-fpm
disable mod_php and mpm_prefork: sudo a2dismod php mpm_prefork
enable mpm_event proxy_fcgi and setenvif: sudo a2enmod mpm_event proxy_fcgi setenvif
enable the php-fpm configuration file: sudo a2enconf php7.4-fpm
mark apache2 as a manually installed package: sudo apt-mark manual apache2
remove mod_php: sudo apt purge libapache2-mod-php*

That takes care of the general Apache configuration. The next configuration adjustments need to be done at the vhost level. Substitute the correct information for YOUREMAIL, YOURDOMAIN, and WPDIR, and you are good to go.

<VirtualHost *:443>
Protocols h2 http/1.1
ServerName YOURDOMAIN
ServerAdmin [email protected]

DocumentRoot "WPDIR"

<Directory "WPDIR">
    <FilesMatch "\.php$">
 #Proxy php files to php-fpm
        SetHandler  "proxy:unix:/run/php/php-fpm.sock|fcgi://localhost/"
    </FilesMatch>
    Options All
    AllowOverride All
    DirectoryIndex index.php
    Require all granted
</Directory>

#Protect the uploads directory.
<Directory "WPDIR/wp-content/uploads/">
    <FilesMatch "\.php$">
        SetHandler  none
        Require all denied
    </FilesMatch>
</Directory>

#snip extraneous stuff
</VirtualHost>

Apache
PHP
Performance
WordPress

Use Apache's mod_usertrack to Get Analytics Without Sharing Data

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, August 28, 2020.

First a major caveat, I still have Jetpack installed to simplify a few tasks like reducing comment spam. Until I have a replacement for everything it does, it will still track visitors.

You need to know how many people are interacting with your site and where they are interacting with it. Without some form of visitor tracking, I couldn’t be sure what my most visited post types are.

However, right now, website analytics is dominated by a group of companies that view everyone as a product, not the customer. Google, Facebook, and others all offer analytics for site owners, but you, the site owner, don’t control the data, they do. So how do you respect your visitors’ privacy and get useful analytical data for your website? The answer is to host your own. I haven’t made the full jump to a self-hosted analytics software yet, but I am choosing to log some extra data that will make that move easier in the future.

The most basic information I use for analytics is the access logs that Apache makes. The “combined” log format logs the remote IP address, the timestamp of the request, the final response code, the size of its response, the referer, and the user-agent. Apache also includes a couple of extra items for backward compatibility. There are two pieces of information that would complete the analytics picture, which vhost responded, and a cookie to tell if one client made multiple requests.

Apache’s mod_usertrack adds the cookie and adding the vhost is simple. I also decided to add mod_unique_id as well.

To make these changes, you need to enable those modules. For Ubuntu version 18.04 and later sudo a2enmod unique_id usertrack; sudo systemctl reload apache2 will do the trick and reload Apache, so the changes take effect. If you aren’t using Ubuntu, double-check how to enable Apache modules on the Linux distribution that you are using.

After mod_usertrack and mod_unique_id are enabled, they need to be activated and attached to the logs. The following configuration snippet will do that.

#Add configuration for user tracking to the log file
<IfModule mod_usertrack.c>
	CookieDomain .www.rrbrussell.com
	CookieExpires "2 weeks"
	#Requires >=2.4.42
	#CookieHTTPOnly on
	#CookieSameSite Strict
	#CookieSecure On
	CookieName Apache
	CookieTracking on
	LogFormat "%v:%{Apache}C %r %t %{UNIQUE_ID}e" usertrack
	CustomLog "${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/clicktracker.log" usertrack
</IfModule>

You will need to modify the CookieDomain, CookieExpires, and log destination to suit your system but this basic config will get you started. It outputs something like the following.

vhost             :tracking cookie        the request                              Timestamp                    Unique request identifier                                 
www.rrbrussell.com:689e322a.5adf4e2bd2d78 GET /2020/07/openwrt-on-x86-64/ HTTP/2.0 [28/Aug/2020:14:17:29 -0500] X0lYSSUCdg@45i0GT-H@qQAAAAE

I will write more on this topic in another few days. Until then.

Analytics
Apache

Another Quick Cash Grab in Blog Writing

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, August 27, 2020.

Blog Writing: How To Write Successfully, Writing To Sell and Increase Profits by Maxwell J. Pods read by Leigh Ann Haga.

I do not have any other copies or formats of this book to compare the audiobook against. There are a lot of word choice and usage problems in this audiobook. Most Americans would call someone who reads websites, books, or other forms of written language a reader. She consistently uses words like perusers instead of readers or subscribers.

Another example that stood out to me was. “Attempt to think of a lot of thoughts consistently and store them in an article schedule, spreadsheet, or some other spot you can catch notes.” (I had to go over that sentence about four or five times myself just typing it out here because I kept subconsciously correcting the phrasing.)

The author did an adequate job of laying each chapter’s content out in a reasonable way. However, I am worried about the overall order in the book.

If I only look at the chapter titles, the book appears to be laid out reasonably. However, I didn’t get a good sense of connection between the chapters. I noticed this problem more in the later chapters.

This book is not a howto book. It varies widely in the number of pieces a topic gets broken down into. None of the issues get covered in any suitable depth, though.

My overall score is shoddy. I do not suggest getting this book.

Needs Images Moved
Book Reviews

Second Two Weeks Posting Challenge

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Wednesday, August 26, 2020.

During the previous Two Weeks Posting Challenge, I missed one of eighteen days that it covered. I missed six of the sixteen days covered by this period.

Why did I miss those days? A lack of good topics to write about and a combination of not sitting down to write. I do not want to turn this blog into a political blog. However, divisive politics keep cropping up all the time.

Talk Later

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Working the Polls Today

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, August 25, 2020.

If you have an election in your area today go vote.

News

Supporting Older Programming Languages

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, August 24, 2020.

In general, No, No, No!

I have been mulling this question over because of recent discussions I am following about Java, WordPress hosting, and Python 2. I will start with Java. Java has become the modern COBOL in a lot of ways. An extremely verbose language designed around one programming paradigm. Excluding the inherent problems of OOP, and Java’s verbosity, Java has one other major issue version rot. Java 8 has been end of lifed for a bit now and a lot of people are now learning that all of the ABI compatibility prior to version 8 comes with a load of technical debt. Most of the language syntax improvements that help with Java’s verbosity required ABI incompatible changes in the runtime and incompatible changes to the language syntax between Java 8 and 11. This means you can’t run Java 8 code on the Java 11 libraries and you can’t recompile that code with the Java 11 compiler either. To make matters worse Oracle now plans to allow such breaking changes about every 2 years now.

Both the Python 2 to Python 3 migration problems and the PHP5 to PHP7 migration mirror the issues with Java 8 to Java 11. Though, they have generally been better handled, especially the Python change. The Python authors released code that makes most of the syntactical adjustments automatically requiring a human for the areas that can’t be cleaned up by a computer. Yes, the ABI of the language changed but unlike Java 8 to Java 11 there is a migration tool that allows most python 2 source code to be migrated without a complete rewrite.

I am not as familiar with the details of the PHP 5 to 7 transition as I am with the Java 8 to 11, and Python 2 to 3 transitions. What I do know is that it has been in the works for a while. From the perspective of a programmer using the language PHP 7 isn’t a massive change. From the perspective of extension creators and hosting providers, it was a big deal initially. We are now 6, almost 7, years past this change and a lot of hosts still run PHP5.

I will have more to say about this topic in the future but for now have a good day.

Programming Languages