Roadrunner Twice

So if you have access to an Apache2 server that allows .htaccess overrides and has mod_actions turned on, you can make a single CGI script take over the whole URL hierarchy for an entire site. (Or just for a subtree of it, although the app would need to be aware and ready for that.)

In short, you make a new directory called __internal (or something) at the top of your site, and put your CGI executable in there with a filename of my-app.cgi (or something). Then you make TWO .htaccess files.

The root-level .htaccess disables special handling for bare directories, then tells the server to unconditionally use your CGI script to handle every URL pointing into your site, without consideration for whether a path would otherwise aim at a file on disk.

# Root-level .htaccess file
Options -Indexes
DirectoryIndex disabled
Action my-app "/__internal/my-app.cgi" virtual
SetHandler my-app
AcceptPathInfo on # that's the default, but still

That CGI path in the Action directive needs to be a URL path pointed at somewhere reachable on your site, rather than a path on disk. That's kind of odd, and it hung me up for a while when I was trying to get this working! But the upshot is, we now need a second .htaccess in that __internal directory that un-does everything we did in the root-level .htaccess so that the server can actually resolve that script. (Otherwise you end up in a recursive loop and the site doesn't work.)

# .htaccess file in /__internal
Options +ExecCgi -Indexes
SetHandler None
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

Ta-daaaa! Now your program can handle all the top-level routing for your site, using CGI vars like REQUEST_URI to reconstruct the original request and do your routing. (And don't worry about needing to keep __internal private or anything, it just needed some kind of weird name to avoid trampling on any of your app's real URL paths.)

---

( A lengthy digression on the nature of Script Soup )

I run Eardogger.com, the web's favorite unpopular bookmarking tool for binge-reading webcomics. It's about four years old, and it's currently built on Typescript, Node.js, the Express web framework (with some add-ons), and PostgreSQL.

I've been rewriting the whole thing in a new Pile of Stuff — Rust, the Axum web framework (and the Tokio + Tower + Hyper ecosystem it's built on), Sqlite, and my experimental FastCGI/HTTP reverse-compatibility layer. (Yup: this was the secret endgame for that whole project.)

All features are complete. I've got the rewrite deployed in realistic hosting to do some soak testing, and it's working amazingly well. Most of the remaining to-dos are either rewriting my integration tests, or ancillary stuff like backup jobs, release scripting, and data import scripting.

A rewrite, huh? 😒

( yeah dude )

Also it was fun, right?

Haha yeah, it totally was.

Axum is really nice to work with! It combines some of my favorite parts of Express (Eardogger's old framework) and Bevy (the game engine I've been working with on another project). And the way it's able to give strong type guarantees to handlers (despite being flexible and comfy to work with) means the code can inherently represent a bunch of assumptions that otherwise I would have to remember somehow; that should be really nice for future maintenance after I haven't touched it in two years.

I'm doing the database stuff in sqlx, which is mostly pretty great. I'm using the compile-time-checked query macros; it's true, they add some significant extra build weirdness, but once again, it's all about the maintenance — those automatic checks let me skip a huge amount of otherwise-manual testing. During development, it caught a ton of bugs and schema problems before they could even take root.

For templates I'm using minijinja, and it's all right. I've never met a template language I love yet, so it's par for the course. I investigated a lot of alternatives, and I think the design constraints of this one seemed easiest to live with.

And using busriders makes it feel like I'm somehow beating the system. 😛 I love it.

Here's the code for the rewrite, if anyone's interested.

As I think I might have mentioned a whole bunch of times, I've got An Amount of ADHD and can go long periods without that being a major problem — well, I mean, it's an underlying fabric to everything that happens, but that's not a problem per se, that's just the field you play the game on. But if conditions line up in the right way, I can definitely kick off a cascade of maladaptive chaos that leads to what looks and feels like a fairly serious mood disorder.

In Hallowell and Ratey's Delivered From Distraction, they devote two memorable chapters to some notable processes that can reliably cause that exact kind of mood cascade. Because of how important those are, they unfortunately were completely justified in deploying some deeply annoying mnemonics for them:

• "SLIDE:" Self-attack -> Life-attack -> Imagining the worst -> Dread -> Evasion
• "SPIN:" Shame / Pessimism / Isolation / No-creative-outlet (yes, I feel the same way about that acronym abuse as you do)

The first one is a linear, causal process, and your response should be to aggressively interrupt it in stages one or two without any care given for looking silly; if it reaches stage three, you've got a serious problem on your hands.

The second one is subtler and more interesting — it's four seemingly independent but actually mutually-reinforcing negative forces. If any one of them gets out of control, it'll feed and empower the others, and any two together have their strength amplified... but conversely, taking steps to reduce one of them will slightly disempower all the rest, so if you're in the middle of a nasty cascade, you can go after the weakest link and it'll clear some more psychic space for you much faster than seemed possible.

Anyway, I first read that book back in like 2018 when I was dealing with the fairly major mood cascade that led to me getting diagnosed with ADHD, and when I hit that SPIN chapter I was like "oh: that sounds like a checklist but in reverse."

So then I started this practice of walking the anti-spin checklist in my notebook every morning. I haven't always kept it up; I've dropped it for long periods, and then picked it back up again when I've noticed my mood wobbling on a larger scale than I prefer it to. Unfortunately, it absolutely helps a lot.

Here's how you do it: one bullet point per anti-item.

• Nice: You have to say one something nice about yourself. Nope, no back-handed self-deprecating bullshit! You have to actually compliment yourself in the same way you would complement literally any other person you allow in your life!
• Grateful: List three things you're grateful for. They do not have to be profound.
• Social: Write the last time you hung out with friends or family that you do not live with, and your next scheduled hangout w/ someone. (Phone counts.) If there's nothing in the surrounding three day period, you must text someone to start scheduling something before continuing.
• Creative: Write the last Messing With Some Project time you had, and also the next time you're planning to mess with some project. Interpret "creative" generously, not according to received hierarchies of art worth.
• Exercise: Yeah, it's not in the acronym, but it should be. When's the last/next time you're getting out to breathe hard and move around like a jackass to no good effect? Don't take more than a day or two off. (And again, reject received hierarchies of worth re: what counts as exercise -- this isn't about "working out," it's about not going out of your mind.)

I warned you this practice was annoying, and this sort of thing shouldn't be necessary at all, but alas, being a fundamentally nonrational animal who nevertheless experiences consciousness and intellect is some complicated shit and a whole bunch of things that shouldn't work... very much do. I hate this and also love it, and hopefully hearing about it is of some use to you.

Someone remind me of this plan next Christmas season, but I wanna get a pair of tape players and

• Tape the “repeat the sounding joy” line from “Joy to the World” on deck 1
• Play it back to tape it onto deck 2
• Tape that back onto deck 1 after the original copy.
• Play all of tape 1 and record it after the end of tape 2
• Play all of tape 2 and record it after the end of tape 1
• REPEAT THE SOUNDING JOY

We've got some people painting our house, because the guy we hired to fix some caulking and flashing up there told us this was pretty much the last year before the current paint job started peeling. And also Ruth's always wanted a purple house.

(I eventually wanted a purple house; naturally there was a saga about paint colors first. I, having seen some nasty-looking purple houses in my time, was initially skeptical. So I said I'd go for it if she could point out an existing house with the exact purple she wanted and got me to agree that it looked good, so we could match that color and skip the whole mindgame hell where it's impossible to imagine what a 3x4" paint chip will look like covering a whole wall. She'd actually found the house she was looking for years ago and lost it, but eventually RE-found it up on N. Skidmore. [We think. The timeline on the paint job doesn't quite match up, but if that's not the same house then we have no idea what the hell happened with the original.] I sent them a card in the mail asking them to text us about paint. This totally worked.)

Anyway, they're out there painting today. But before they could paint, we needed to tear down this pergola thing, which was... I don't even know how to explain what a baffling position it was in, it would take like half an hour and a bunch of speculation about what our lot was used for before it was subdivided, but, just take my word for it, it was completely outrageous.

INTERLUDE: What is a pergola?

Well, it's this motherfucker.

So on Monday we borrowed the neighbor's sawzall (thanks Jim 😭🙏🏼), chopped through the 4x4s, and then spent the entire evening — lo, even unto the dark of night, past last call at the local brewpub so we couldn't even let someone else handle the victory dinner and beer — taking out bolts and cutting through countersunk wood screws to separate the legs from the top.

Anyway, we triumphed. We were concerned we were gonna be stuck with it once it was down, but I put a freebie post on Craigslist and someone came and put it in a damn minivan two hours later. Amazing.

EXTERIOR OF HOUSE, WITH SHOUTED SPEECH BUBBLE EXTENDING FROM INTERIOR:

Successful demolition project, Dracula!!!

So I had a somewhat sketchy craigslist adventure the other day. Or rather, the lead-up was sketchy in one way, and the punchline was sketchy in an entirely different and much more hilarious way.

I was buying a video card, and the seller said they could only meet at their house (which was out in goddamn Tigard) and at an inconvenient rush-hour-hell time. And actually that part was Especially Strange. Their exact words were: “Although I would love to, I can't meet anywhere besides my place.” ???????

Ruth reminded me that I was being an idiot by ignoring the prime craigslist directive (meet in a public place), which I was, but I was pretty sure it was fine? But she did have a point, so I brought a friend for backup.

Well. We get out there and knock on the door, and a kid answers, I’m figuring 13-years-old-ish. And he’s like, “Nick?” And I’m like “yup. Sam?” looking behind him to see who else is home. And he’s like “here’s the card, should all be working fine, feel free to email me if you need help w/ drivers or anything!” And I’m like... “cool beans, here’s that $60, pleasure doing business. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼”

Anyway I’m about 100% sure listing stuff before you’re 18 is against the TOS, and he definitely scheduled that annoying meeting time so his parents wouldn’t be home, lmao! I kind of admire his moxie, but I‘m also debating texting him to suggest having some backup of his own around if he has to sell something out of his own house again. On the other hand, given what I remember of living in the burbs, probably he’s a mid-level weed baron or something and doesn’t need my input.

VICTORY!! I got Windows installed, got drivers and updates taken care of, got Steam installed, and managed to play like five or ten minutes of Hyper Light Drifter. At which point it was WAY past my bedtime.

What did I learn this time? I learned that it is ✨basically fucking impossible✨ to use a Mac or Linux system to turn a Windows ISO into a bootable USB installer drive. Give up. Do not try. Do not get clever. Ask a friend with a Windows box to do it for you.

I had a valid ISO! This should have been a cakewalk! But I spent all evening on it and failed A LOT.

( ...a lot. )

But anyway! It's done!

BTW, Ruth was able to get me a really cheap copy of Windows from the employee store, thank u Ruth!! 😭 Taking everything into account, including the Car2Go trip for picking up the tower to begin with, I ended up spending $123 for a working gaming PC. AN ALL-AROUND SUCCESSFUL ENDEAVOR.

So last week's adventure in home maintenance was that the toilet was running almost constantly. Well, I say "last week" because that's when I finished fixing it, but it had been running for like a WHILE.

Now usually when the toilet keeps running intermittently (which is what ours was doing at first), it's the flapper, so I went ahead and replaced that. But no dice: the fill valve itself was failing. So, ok. I hadn't replaced that before, but I was familiar with the theory and I'd seen my dad do it. (And Dad is a person of many talents, but he isn't handy with plumbing, so I knew I wasn't getting in over my head.) Step one is, turn off the water with the shut-off valve down by the wall.

The water would not turn off.

So then I had to turn off the water to the entire house and replace the busted shut-off valve, which absolutely qualifies as "over my head." RAD.

Anyway, I did it. The worst part was removing the old compression fitting once the valve was off; there was some kind of silicone sheathing on the copper, and it dug into that so there was no hope of sliding it off. I didn't want to run a Dremel in there, so I had to take a hand file to it. Which sucked. Eventually I prevailed, tho.

Here's the unwanted knowledge I gained THIS time:

• Now I know where our main water shut-off is. God damn that thing is hard to twist.
  • (Note to future Nick: gotta turn it a full 180°, so the arrow points backwards into the incoming pipe. 90° is only half closed.)
• There are two main types of shut-off valves: the screw-type, which are harder to use and which inevitably self-destruct by eating their own washers, and the quarter-turn type, which are fine and mostly indestructible. Why would you install the screw-type? I DON'T KNOW, but someone did it anyway.
• There's also multiple ways to attach a valve to a pipe: compression fittings, and "push-on?" which I think is also maybe called "shark bite?" Oh, and also solder-on. I didn't quite trust the push-on type and was kind of in a hurry, so I just went with compression fit again, because it's the standard and it seemed simple and straightforward and reliable enough. I was still kind of amazed when it worked without leaking on the first try, tho.
• Copper pipes are designated by their nominal internal diameter ("ID"), which by the way is not their ACTUAL internal diameter and which you can't measure very well in the first place. But a given ID corresponds to a predictable outside diameter ("OD") because standards. So, I measured the pipe by using a crescent wrench as a calipers, and it was 5/8" around, which meant it was a 1/2" pipe. The valves at the hardware store are usually labeled by the ID of the wall pipe, and then probably the OD of the fill pipe (which was 3/8" for my toilet thing, but then I had to get a replacement fill pipe anyway because the old one was too rigid to fit between the shut-off valve and the new, longer fill valve stem, so really I could have gotten the valve and the pipe at the same time and had it be whatever).
• Here's the relevant See Jane Drill video. Basically you screw it on as tight as you can by hand, then wrench it for at least another half-turn.

What's even been going on!! Well, the guys we hired to refinish the downstairs floors did their thing while we crashed at Ruth's parents' place, and it turned out gorgeous. So then we got to move back in, basically.

I've got the stereo/TV industrial complex set back up, which goes a long way toward feeling like I'm not in a campsite. I didn't have it set up before because we were going to have to move out of the downstairs again anyway, plus some of the cables weren't long enough. Anyway, I got those cables, and while I was at it I upgraded from Dad's old speakers (salvaged from a now-dead Sharp all-in-one unit from sometime in the '80s, when "all" meant turntable/radio/cassette) to some really nice bookshelf speakers the Wirecutter recommended (THEY SOUND GREAT).

I basically spent a whole evening wrapped in wires, but 1: fun, and 2: worth it. I think Ruth thought the whole procedure was kind of ridiculous and didn't really want to hear about it, but that's okay, everyone needs a Thing that no one else wants to hear about. I just like having a nice-sounding stereo is all, and the limited amount of money I'm willing to sink into it means it's going to be a bit of a hodgepodge, and also I like hodgepodges.

Back to the construction work: we had some shenanigans with finding tools. Our neighbor needed his miter saw and compressor back, so we borrowed some from a friend's dad, and that saw turned out to be totally insufficient for what we needed. (It was a really short single-bevel job, so, basically impossible for cutting baseboards in a cramped bathroom. You could maybe do it badly if you had unlimited room on either side, though.) So we were at a standstill for a while, and then we were on vacation in Newport for four days. But anyway, our friends Robert and Raye loaned us exactly the kind of monster saw we needed, so we are Back! In! Business!

I've been posting on Mastodon a bunch. I'm @nfagerlund on the mastodon.social instance if anyone else here's riding the ol' pachyderm! I feel like I've mostly been using it for shitposting/night-tweets. Anyway, this fragments my mode of Kickin' It In Cyberspace even further than it was already fragmented, and I guess we'll see how that works out. But Twitter the company has been pissing me off so much that I've started to get real nervous about how reliant I've been on Twitter the space-for-hanging-out-with-my-buds, so it was time to shake things up a bit.

OK, where did I leave off, here?

• The upstairs floors are fucking done, holy shit!!!
• The stairs are cooling their heels for a bit.
• We've installed baseboards in the office and the landing!
• Then we had to basically move out of the house again, because we hired some guys to re-do the downstairs floors. Ruth and I are crashing with her parents, and our housemate is at his gf's place.

Fucking... remember how I was talking about order-of-operations problems? To get ready for the floor bros, we had to get all of the furniture out of the downstairs. The only place to put it was the garage, but the garage was filled with boxes of stuff that belongs in the bedrooms and office. So we had to get that out and into the upstairs, but if we did that before finishing the floors and baseboards in the office, we'd be creating another whole move-around problem for ourselves later. So we were sort of on a time limit to finish the office, basically; if we failed, oh well, but we'd reduce the total work if we could manage it.

And we did it! But, baseboards, tho. A whole nother set of finicky skills to learn on a time limit. IDK if I have the patience to retread all the stuff I hinted at on Instagram over the past few, but basically baseboards are way more important than I ever thought in terms of making a room look normal. If you're installing wood floors to replace carpet, you have to take off the existing baseboards with a wonder-bar (pro-tip 1: if you're also painting, do this before LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE. pro-tip 2: use a stud-finder to decide where to start malleting the crowbar in, and pull forward instead of levering back), and then if they turn out to be MDF garbage instead of wood, you'll probably have damaged them too much to re-use and will have to get new ones. Plus, if you're doing wood floors you definitely want quarter-round "shoe molding," which you probably didn't have if you're coming from carpet.

VIDEO BREAK: Here's some stuff I found really helpful.

• Leah explains how to cope, which is kind of a mind-blowing trick. Watch this even if you're not gonna go deep on this, it's neat.
• Leah does a scarf joint.
• A guy who might be Ned Flanders IRL goes fucking DEEP. Check out the insanity of the Collins coping foot at 12:00. Hell no, buddy.
• This one is actually a bummer because Leah mislead me about how to do an acute angled outside corner! Dividing the angle by 2 to get the miter is wrong, because the miter is the difference from 90°. In other words, if you measure an 88° corner, you need to set a 46° miter for each piece, which will result in 44° angles (half of 88°) on the wood. So basically, the thing she says to do to get the miter for obtuse angles is what you should always do. Still, the tip about needing a locking protractor is 👌🏼.

Anyway, in case it wasn't clear, you have some wacky-pants math ahead of you if you're doing anything but nailing up the previous boards.

HERE IS A FUN WORD PROBLEM.

( Trig ahoy, fuckheads )

I had to figure out how to calculate that on the big obtuse angle leading into The Fucking Triangle, and it was something of an adventure.