busybee fluffy rambles

So, yesterday I finally got my prescription for gabapentin/Neurontin, as another attempt at managing my fibro symptoms. Took my first dose at 9 PM, and felt very tired and dizzy by 11 PM. Then still managed to not fall asleep until around 3 AM (I was definitely wide awake at 2, and my smart bed thing says I didn’t fall asleep until 3 so that seems believable).

I slept pretty okay although I had vivid dreams about unpleasant stuff, as always seems to be the case when my neurochemistry is being tampered with.

Woke up at 8 AM, couldn’t actually peel myself out of bed until half past 9, and I felt wobbly/dizzy/tired all day.

Pain was okay in the morning, but at 2:40 PM or so I had a flareup. It cleared up with a snack, though, and I kinda-sorta managed to get some actual work done, ish.

Went home at 6, had dinner, not sure where the past two hours went but I’m really tired and sleepy right now and also flaring like a matroncopulator, and it’s time for my next dose. Maybe I’ll sleep better/longer tonight and feel better tomorrow.

I’m working on improving some of the https-related security in Authl, in particular making it so that if a site is configured with https, then it’ll only send the security cookie over https. This reduces the chances of a certain kind of possible security issue, but it also means that if you normally access the site with http://beesbuzz.biz instead of https://beesbuzz.biz it’ll show you as being signed out, and if you click the “log in” link it’ll ask you to sign in again even if you were already signed in.

I have a fix for that in mind, but it might cause a potential redirection loop problem in some cases so I’m not going to implement it until I’ve determined the scope of the problem and figured out if I need further workarounds.

Update: Fix is implemented and being tested on this site. Authl and Publ updates pending other folks trying it out.

For the last few years I’ve participated in a thing called Novembeat, started by my friend Paul. Whenever I tell people about it they’re never sure how to find out more, though, because there’s no website.

So, I finally fixed that.

So, one of the things with the Isso migration is that I finally came up with a better way of handling thread IDs to keep them actually-private. And part of that is the mechanism to rehash them.

Which is good, because I keep on accidentally leaking the dang secret sauce. The first time was when I updated my sample templates with the comment hash generation (and I accidentally left the HMAC key intact), and the second time was when I started building a new Publ-based website and decided to start with my actual app.py as the basis, HMAC key and all, never mind that I later ended up removing about 90% of the beesbuzz.biz custom routes and the Authl config since they’re not actually needed for this site. Yeesh.

Anyway, whatever. Someday I’ll learn my lesson (and maybe I’ll even go so far as to make the HMAC key not even be checked into code!), but today is not that day.

Now Twitter is an option for logging in to this site. See the Authl release announcement for more information on that.

I’ve released a new version of Authl that has direct login support for IndieAuth. Also as of v0.1.6 it supports discovery via WebFinger, which should at least have Ryan a lot happier.

If you don’t know what any of the above means, this update probably doesn’t matter to you. 🙃

Just some miscellaneous things that I don’t feel are worth getting their own entries.

• For the last few weeks I’ve been trying only using shampoo on occasion when I feel that my hair is truly dirty, on the theory that hair does a good job of self-regulating its moisture when it’s not being disrupted constantly. I’m finding that my hair is, as such, much more lustrous and also doesn’t tangle as easily. But it still feels greasy all the time.
• Today (Saturday) I finally had the courage to go into Patchwerks and I managed to not completely destroy my wallet or make any regrettable space-chewing purchases. It’s a fun shop, and I played with a bunch of neat things including some modular and semi-modular gear, and I got to nerd out about my SIDstation with the folks who were working there (and one of the other customers talked about his MonoMachine as well). I ended up buying a couple of Pocket Operators, specifically the PO-20 Arcade and the PO-35 Speak. They’re both fun to play with.
• The new Rocko’s Modern Life special (Netflix) was just as frenetic and dissociative as the original show was, but it also had a really good message. Also, yay, positive non-metaphorical trans representation in cartoons!
• She-Ra season 3 (Netflix) was amazing and intense and I watched it all in one sitting. Hopefully Netflix lets this show keep going.
• So is Infinity Train (Cartoon Network), which I watched the first half of. The Cartoon Network app for Apple TV is complete garbage though, especially for serialized content. It’s as if they never even test the thing at all.
• I wonder if HBO Max will be worth it just to get a better CN viewing experience.
• I keep forgetting how badly bulleted lists work for blog posts.
• Huh, HBO Max is going to have a Dune prequel series called “Dune: The Sisterhood,” about the Bene Gesserit presumably in the years leading up to Paul’s birth. Interesting.
• I should have been in bed two hours ago. I wonder if this is why I’m always having fibro flareups these days.
• Oh and I’m back to using my CPAP again. It seems to be helping for now.

As far as I know, all of the comments have been restored and mechanically updated to work correctly. It’s pretty neat that I actually have comments dating back to 2003, that have survived four separate comment systems! (Movable Type, phpBB, Disqus, and now Isso.) And some of the oldest ones hadn’t been visible for years, since I never got around to migrating them over to my comics section before.

I also now have a script to automatically rehash the thread IDs in case the HMAC key leaks, as it did yesterday when I accidentally forgot to redact it from the sample templates repository, oops. I doubt anyone saw that but now it doesn’t matter if they did.

I do want to make a final migration script to try adding thread nesting to comments which quote other comments. I have a good idea of how to do it but it’s gonna be tricky and since Isso apparently uses oldest-to-newest sort on comments I don’t know how useful it’ll be, anyway. But I like doing that sort of thing.

I also have automated backups of my comment database, as well as having it checked into a git repository so I can do simple checkpointing whenever I do something funky with a migration (and it means I can also run the migration on my local machine instead of having to worry about hecking something up in production). And of course since Isso runs as its own systemd unit I can easily take it down while I’m doing a thing. (If you ever notice my comments completely vanishing for a while, that’s probably what happened. Unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to show a reasonable message when that’s what’s going on.)

So, now I feel a lot more confident in the privacy and longevity of my comments. Which is good because I have a lot more private stuff to talk about. 😛

Because my original import from phpBB to Disqus got botched, and the Disqus to Isso import lost a bunch of useful information, I ended up just going back to my old phpBB database and reimporting it directly into Isso. It mostly went well but there’s a few things that I need to go back and fix. This is my TODO list:

• Unescape <a href> stuff that got converted to <a href> (example) DONE
• Defunge the weirder bits of BBCode where e.g. [quote] turned into [quote:abcde] so it didn’t get converted to HTML (example) DONE
• Clean up some older comments where I was a lot more accepting of Problematic Things (not gonna link to any but yeah they’re there) done, I think
• If possible, reparent comments based on [quote]s (way easier said than done, I’ll probably have to do that manually)
• Update: generate a new comment secret key and fix the thread IDs, because I made an oops DONE
• Looks like when I did the reimport of phpBB stuff I accidentally removed some of the earliest Disqus-based comments (example, also) so I’ll have to do a bunch of reconciliation for that, fun fun… DONE

Also some of my earliest journal comics had comments posted via Movable Type’s comment system rather than phpBB, so I’ll want to also migrate those over (which I never got around to doing back when I was still using Movable Type to run my website); back then I just had “native” MT comments rendered in the MT template, which was Good Enough and I figured I’d get around to fixing it later. Well, it’s later. And that’s done. Even though I’m up way later than I meant to be. Oops.

Oh, and since I set up monsterid for the default avatars I feel like I should try to track down the email addresses of the folks who were posting to Disqus and fill that stuff in wherever possible.

I promise at some point I’ll get back to blogging about stuff other than the website itself.