Just very briefly – it seems that I managed to fix the Strathspey server memory issue by merely changing the configuration of the application server (Gunicorn) such that a Django worker process is preemptively shut down and replaced with a fresh new one after it has served 250 requests (or so – Gunicorn adds random “jitter” so that not all worker processes are cycled at the same time). The number of requests used to be unlimited, such that the worker processes would grow over time until they consumed most of the memory in the machine.

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The year is getting off to a great start already since early today the main server process on the Strathspey server crashed (i.e., was killed for lack of available memory) and I didn't notice until just now. This is especially aggravating because during the last few days I spent quite some time installing and configuring infrastructure to ensure that I do find out about that sort of thing as quickly as possible. Bother.

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It's 2025! Who would have thought? What I'm going to try this year is to blog something (however small and inconsequential) every day. I've been keeping a streak on Duolingo going now for over a year, so this should be doable – on Duolingo at least you can take a 90-second word-repetition lesson and that will keep your streak going, so I ought to be able to post at least a few words every day just for kicks.

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Web server security is an ongoing issue these days. Fortunately thanks to Let's Encrypt getting good-quality X.509 certificates for HTTPS is no longer a problem, but we still want to keep our servers up-to-date with the latest developments. For HTTPS-based web sites, the free “SSL Server Test” offered by Qualys' SSL Labs is a very helpful resource that lets you assess and optimise how your HTTPS server serves its resources. The test scrutinises your X.509 certificates, evaluates your server's support of TLS versions and possible vulnerabilities, checks through the available key exchange mechanisms and reports on the available cipher strength. All of this is compiled into a report-card type grade; obviously what you want to see there is “A+”.

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Unfortunately I don't have enough spare money to buy an actual grand piano (nor the place to put it; it would probably have to double up as a dining table). But the next best thing seems to be Pianoteq by Modartt. This makes your computer sound like a grand piano (the actual piano keys and pedals being provided by my existing digital piano, which hooks up to the computer by USB), and not by playing sampled notes from real grand pianos either, but by actually calculating the physics of an actual grand piano in real time. Wild. And it even runs natively on Linux!

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With the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in full swing, “social distancing” is the order of the day. Since we're not allowed to get together with our friends and family, video conferencing is surging, and one popular free tool for that is Jitsi Meet. We've had a bunch of video chats on Jitsi Meet and have always been wondering whether the server(s) provided by Jitsi and shared by presumably thousands of conferences are a bottleneck that impacts the conference user experience. Here's how I've set up a private Jitsi Meet server on a Hetzner Cloud virtual machine.

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Season 12 of The Big Bang Theory is now on Netflix! It's the final season (boo) but I suppose we can always start over at the beginning.

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Golden rice, which is rice that has been genetically engineered to contain very high levels of beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A), is now officially approved as safe to grow and eat in the Philippines. This will hopefully help reduce illness, blindness, and death in children from vitamin-A deficiency, which is a big problem in the Philippines. Golden rice has been developed as a non-profit humanitarian project.

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I gave myself a new camera for Christmas! When I found out that Olympus had a special offer on the PEN-F kit I couldn't resist, especially given that the PEN-F is no longer being manufactured and it's unlikely that there will be a successor model.

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Finished sets for 41 dances for the Central Germany Branch's Easter workshop at the Kuckucksnest. (There are actually 42 dances on Alice's list but she still needs to send me the original tune for a new dance that she wrote herself.) 160 tunes altogether. Hope I can find some time to practice that stuff before Friday!

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