Descanso Gardens are ridiculously photogenic at any time, but on a slightly overcast spring day?

I write a lot of short stories which I then fail to get published anywhere. My idea of what makes a good story is apparently well out of step with what the reading world finds interesting.

My stories often start with an image or phrase that pops into my head. In some cases, this seed grows rapidly in the first writing session. In other cases, it sits fallow for a long time. Stories tend to accrete slowly over time – it often takes me several writing sessions to even know what I’m writing about. Sometimes they never resolve and a chunk stays unfinished. Other times, the characters or stories let me know where they want to go, and I finish them. It’s not a fast process. Most stories end up taking months to write at a few paragraphs a week.

When I’m in “the flow” when things are developing quickly, I’ll often awaken late at night with scenes or entire paragraphs bubbling up in my mind. If I rush, I can commit them to paper in the morning, but often I’ll let the specifics fade away. I suspect my semiconscious mind is busy world-building, and that will add depth to whatever specifics I end up writing later.

A long PDF was to be printed, but only the text was important. As it was full of images, it seemed like removing the images would save a whole lot of ink.

It turns out ghostscript has some very nice filters for removing classes of content from a file. You can very simply remove text, images, or vector objects without changing the rest of the layout.

For example, to strip vector and images from a PDF, you can use:

gs -o text-only.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERVECTOR -dFILTERIMAGE pdf-with-pictures.pdf

If you don’t have ghostscript installed but use Docker, there are containers that make it easy:

docker run --rm -v pwd:/app -w /app minidocks/ghostscript gs -o text-only.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERVECTOR -dFILTERIMAGE pdf-with-pictures.pdf

The Department of Water and Power is doing work near the office, and over the weekend, there was a sustained power outage. I came in Monday to shrieking UPSes and had to power up the firewall and a few other machines. It was the normal stupid kind of stuff.

We have a few virtual servers out in “the cloud,” and we use point-to-point VPNs to make them seem local to our network. Those VPNs also needed restarting.

Through the course of the day, however, one VPN connection kept unceremoniously disconnecting. Looking at logs on the various servers was unenlightening. Everything was running normally, other than the surprise disconnects.

In the evenings, I’ve been watching the old Grenada TV/Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series, so I had to apply Holmes’ deductive process. The virtual servers had experienced no changes except being disconnected, so I needed to focus on the firewall. The firewall had experienced no change, except being restarted. What could have happened?

I finally found a configuration that was incorrect (it was a netmask that was insufficiently restrictive, allowing devices not on the VPN to collide with VPN IP addresses). I fixed the netmask, and the VPN has been up and stable ever since.

But how could this be? It had been running properly literally for years. It had to be something to do with the power outage. But if that had corrupted the configuration, it wouldn’t have been a single IP netmask changing. “[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The bad configuration file could not have been in use.

The best theory is that the configuration file had been (accidentally?) modified at some point in the past, but never loaded. When the firewall was restarted, it loaded this modified configuration for the first time.

This is a WordPress site, first created in 2003. Why I created a WordPress blog site when I was involved in the CMS Made Simple project back then, I don’t recall.

I maintain a handful of other sites running on WordPress too. It was a lot of work until I discovered the wp command-line tool (thanks Beau!). I was able to lock down permissions of the WordPress directories, and have a nightly script that would update WordPress and all of the plugins to make sure I was up to date and (moderately) secure.

One of these WordPress sites I maintain is for an organization. The site has gone through a lot of evolution. I originally built it with a Perl-based system called “Scribe” that I wrote in 2002 or thereabouts. It used a markup-based templating system, CVS to maintain versions, and published static HTML from CGI scripts. Later, I was working on the CMS Made Simple project as part of the core team, so I ported this site to CMSMS. Eventually, I left the CMSMS project, and in 2017 I decided to migrate the site to WordPress (based on the fantasy that other people would join me and maintain content on the site). I was busy, and paid an overseas development firm to port the site for $300. The language barrier made the project difficult, and I ended up rewriting a substantial portion of the code.

This morning a security update resulted in one of the site’s plugins throwing fatal errors and taking the site completely offline. I eventually had to manually poke around in the database and modify JSON strings to resolve the problem (and disable the broken plugin).

I started reflecting on the overall functionality of the site and how it’s used. Maybe it’s time for me to move away from WordPress and go back to some static generating strategy. I hear good things about Jekyll. Of course, this would also probably involve a site redesign too. Ugh. Well, more to evaluate and think about.