toddsundsted

this happened today:

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/

i don't disagree with their approach at all, but since the change was designed to just work for newer clients, and since older clients are, well, older, and since the change happens on servers but it impacts their clients, it was hard to see this coming until it hit.

in my case the fix was easy—upgrade openssl and rebuild—but reading the threads about this change highlights how disruptive the expiration of a root certificate can be, especially as older clients, which may not be as easy to upgrade, proliferate. 

#letsencrypt

what a difference one line of code makes!

commit fe18dc5 moved the line @saved_record : self | Nil = nil from the module Ktistec::Model::InstanceMethods into the macro Ktistec::Model.included.

that single change cut the build time in half and reduced the memory required to build by about a third. you can be sure the improvement came as a surprise!

but really, it wasn't just this change itself—although it introduced the biggest improvement—because after all of the subsequent refactoring, simply moving the line back didn't increase the build time again.

the build time also improved slightly after other subsequent commits. and several of those commits introduced changes that reduced the amount of macro generated code. and that's the key insight: macros reduce visible boilderplate but don't reduce actual code that needs to be compiled.

i'm still investigating, but clearly the original placement of the line resulted in the generation of a lot of redundant/unnecessary code!

TL;DR if you're planning on using macros in crystal, check your build times before and after your changes—i'm sure there's a corresponding commit somewhere in the past that introduced this problem and i didn't catch it!

#ktistec #crystal

i logged in to my twitter account yesterday... my last two tweets were in 2018, then only one in 2017—so i haven't exactly been active. but i have to hand it to all of my old tweeps who are still active and keeping it together over there!

:birdsite:

it seems like people talk about activitypub everywhere except on the fediverse.

日本語を勉強している

whoa! there are two instances...

https://fedidb.org/software/ktistec

#ktistec

the first thing i wrote on my sinclair zx81 was a space shooter in basic that used print at to move ships around the screen. it was so laggy it was impossible to play. i didn't know z80 machine language. the last thing i wrote on my zx81 was a z80 disassembler—by then i'd learned machine language and had rewritten the space shooter, as well as written a text-based adventure game (in basic). i learned a lot about programming for $99.

rip clive sinclair

#zx81 #sinclair

building ktistec is still an endeavor—both in time and in space. i have work ahead of me to reduce the build footprint—since starting this project, i've learned that some combinations of the crystal language features i used to recreate rails magic (macros, named arguments and inheritance) are hard on the compiler.

in any case, having exceeded the capacity of the tiny linux vps that hosts epiktistes, i set out to build a statically linked executable on my laptop (macos mojave) that i could deploy to my vps (linux centos).

the official instructions, using docker and alpine linux, are here. to get it to build, i had to install the static libraries for sqlite, and to get it to run on my vps i had to specify the location of the openssl cert file, which is loaded at runtime and doesn't match the location in alpine linux.

tl;dr the steps

• build (i haven't automated any of this yet)
  1. docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/workspace -w /workspace crystallang/crystal:latest-alpine sh
  2. apk update && apk upgrade
  3. apk add sqlite-static
  4. crystal build src/ktistec/server.cr --static
  5. exit
• run (after copying the executable to the vps)
  • SSL_CERT_FILE=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt ./server

#ktistec #crystal

i'm on a serious they might be giants bender...

#tmbg #joinus