PayPal's cart functionality is broken & GMail is noticeably lagging. (GMail also has an insane number of background activity for a single tab. I guess that's why people use clients.) Plus roads were hella congested (& this place is already famous for the World's Worst Driversᵀᴹ) so I guess it's officially the holidays.

I got my router's webUI working through https with a valid domain qualified certificate though, which is pretty cool. Still working on ansibling the network, but there's over a decade of technical involved in that, so it'll be a progressive thing.

I'm working on setting up a new system to demo projects, but dunno how long that'll take. Also planning a session of Honey Heist with friends. Life is certainly getting busy enough these days.

Forgot to mention this, but while I was working on some NTP stuff for my network, I plugged pool.ntp.org into the address bar & got redirected to this: https://cdn.maxhost.io/Ribs.mp4

Wow. What the hell? Sometimes the internet is a beautiful place, but I still have found no explanation for this thing or why it exists.

til; IEC 61850 exists. Of course there's an international standard for substation / grid device communication & reporting. I just hadn't heard of it before. Was reading over their TISSUE (Technical Issue) database user guide & actually found it to be somewhat interesting, particularly the state machine description.

Y'all read Ted the Caver yet? Read it a long time ago, back when AngelFire websites were normal & I had a GeoCities of my own. Good stuff. Probably birthed the "creepy-pasta" movement for the internet.

EDIT: 20251223 This repo has been deleted. I'm working on migrating to Codeberg.

I published a chunk of software, OnCall (v2), written for work. It uses basic-ass PHP with builtin packages because the environment hosting it is a dark-site, which prevents the easy inclusion of any libraries or frameworks that would have made this much easier, i.e. Django. The application itself is a ground up replacement for a predecessor written by the co-worker who trained me up on our Linux foot print, but has since been unable to maintain it due to their workload. As such, the database design, attribute names, and even layout are heavily influenced by this predecessor. I tried to follow the original as much as possible to encourage ease of use for employees while adding functionality, such as being able to make edits directly through the web app and building the entire schedule template system.

It's the first bit of PHP programming I've done in quite a while (about 12 years or more?) so is messy as hell, but it's functional. Technically the project is under active maintenance and development, but realistically that's entirely dependent upon having enough free time to actually work on it. Future developments will be ported to this public version for as long as I maintain the project.

I've also been writing up a few API clients for relaying metrics and alerts from our appliance based systems (Rubrik, Nutanix, HPE Synergy/Composer2) over to our Prometheus monitoring system. Due to the dark-site infrastructure, we have no access to public tools and I don't want to trust community maintained projects (which would require requesting security audits for every updated release and manually applying said updates). I've been writing these in PowerShell script predominantly because most of our systems run Windows Server (goddesses help me) so I try to make things that can natively run on the jumphosts with both access to the target appliances and the Prometheus ingestion. I'll work on porting those over to public distribution.

fnord