In the The High-Risk Refactoring article there is this concise Addressing Risk checklist to keep in mind when refactoring.
During past refactorings (also low-risk ones) I often used almost the same guidelines to help me and can only recommend you to do the same:

✅ Define constraints. How far should I go.
✅ Isolate improvements from features. Do not apply them simultaneously.
✅ Write extensive tests. Higher level (integration) with fewer implementation details. They should run alongside changes.
✅ Have a visual confirmation. Open the browser.

❌ Do not skip tests. Don't be lazy.
❌ Do not rely too much on code reviews and QA. Humans make mistakes.
❌ Do not mix expensive cleanups with other changes. But do that for small improvements.

(via)

Please Blog — a plea for less Big Web and more Small Web and an encouraging article to write your own blog. It also touches on the part about writing on your own domain (so to keep your content yours and not be at risk of a third-party commercial 'social' service going away).

Don’t wait for the Pulitzer piece. Tell me about your ride to work, about your food, what flavor ice cream you like. Let me be part of happiness and sadness. Show me, that there is a human being out there that, agree or not, I can relate to. Because without it, we are just actors in a sea of actors, marketing, proselytizing, advocating, and threatening towards each other in an always vicious circle of striving for a relevance that only buys us more marketing, more proselytizing, more advocating, and more threats.

(discovered via Thomas Gigold)

Added and ads.txt file to the blog. The idea is to avoid that someone can sell fake advertisment space for this blog.

As I don't use any advertisment here the content of the file is pretty basic:

contact=https://blog.x-way.org/about.html

ldapauth is a Node.js script which I have been using for the last 12+ years mostly unchanged.

It started its life in a LXC container, eventually was moved to a Docker container and recently ended up in its own repository on GitHub.

The functionality it provides is not extraordinary, but helped to bridge a gap where no other product was available.
It talks LDAP one one side (although limited to handle user lookup requests) and on the other side connects to a MongoDB database where the information is stored.

It emerged out of the desire to have an easy way to manage individual user accounts for my home WiFi. I already had MongoDB running for some other personal project and simply added the list of users there (including the UI for managing them).
Thus the missing part was to get the WiFi accesspoint to lookup user accounts in MongoDB.

Of course WiFi accesspoints do not directly talk MongoDB, but rather some other protocol like RADIUS.
A freeradius server was quickly setup, but still couldn't talk to MongoDB at the time. Thus comes in ldapauth, which takes LDAP queries from freeradius and turns them into MongoDB lookups so that in the end the WiFi accesspoint receives the user accounts :-)

Not sure if this is particularly useful for anyone else, but at least here it did provide good services (and continues to do so).
Current score is that it has survived three different WiFi accesspoints and has been running on 5 different servers over the time.

Hilltop Hoods - Laced Up

Some vibes from Australia ❤

Some time ago I used an online tool to generate some QR codes with a contact URL so I can put them on my luggage.
Now I got a new bag and need a new QR code for it. As I don't remember the online tool I used years ago, I decided to write my own tool.

Thus say hello to qr-bag. It's a commandline tool written in Go to generate QR codes for URLs with a little logo in the middle.
The code for it is mostly a wrapper around the go-qrcode library which does all the heavy lifting.

Just discovered the text-decoration-color CSS property and added it to the style on the blog:

a:hover {color: #454545; text-decoration: underline; text-decoration-color: #26C4FF;}

This causes that when you hover over a link in a post, the underline is not in the same boring gray as the text but lights up in a nice color :-)

(not to be confused with the hacky colored underlines in the righthand navigation bar, where I use a colored border-bottom to achieve a similar effect since 2002)

It's time again to do some cleanup of my blogroll before the links start to turn into 404 errors :-)

Removed:

• Veni, Vidi, VISA
• gru.gq
• BrewDog
• mdlayher.com
• Inliniac
• To Linux and beyond!
• The Lone Sysadmin
• eklitzke.org

Following in the trend of replacing tables, I've revived the old statistics page.
Now using less markup as it is built with <div> and CSS only (the display: inline-block; property was particularly helpful).

(the Jekyll/Liquid templating to generate the data for it looks quite horrific though…)

Over the last couple weeks I slowly replaced the various <table>-based layout elements of the blog with more modern HTML elements.
And finally this afternoon the work was completed with the last <table> element gone.

Visually there should be almost no differences, but in case something looks strange just let me know :-)
(and yes, style-wise everything is still using the pixel-based layout from 2002, one day this might change as well…)