Majic

Well, it certainly has been a long time since my last blog post. I almost find it funny how the last entry was about the move to Sweden, and then nothing.

It has been high time to bring a change to lack of content, so here we go again. :)

For me, New Year usually does not bring about any big changes. At the end of the day (or year), it is still another moment in our lives, another day in many.

This New Year was, at least somewhat, different. I finally brought to conclusion my project of bringing all of my infrastructure to use Ansible. Took me a while. As I gaze through the git logs, all the way to the first commit, I find it baffling that the date listed is November 8th, 2014. A little more than two years. But it is finally done, and I think the base is solid for any possible future upgrades.

There are some things new, and some things old. On the mail front, it is still the reliable trio - Postfix, Dovecot, and Roundcube. For XMPP, I have switched away from venerable ejabberd in favour of Prosody.

File sharing has moved from ownCloud to its younger brother Nextcloud. Hopefully that one will stay true to the Free Software principles, and keep building a healthy community without closing down the software.

Code repository is hosted in Kallithea, issue tracker is still The Bug Genie.

And the old Drupal 6 has finally been killed-off, together with Gallery2 and integration between the two. It has been replaced with Django Wiki and Django Blog Zinnia.

For those who pay attention to details, it is evident that there has been a big shift from PHP towards Python. In the last couple of years I have really started to enjoy the language. I like its constructs, design, and find a big pleasure whenever I run into term Pythonic. Nowadays it has started to point to me something minimalistic, designed for common use-cases, yet extensible when needed.

Plus, I get applications I can work on much more easily, without having to dig into strange constructs, loops, and arrays of PHP.

Some of my most visited pages, belonging to Free Software X.509 Cookbok, have been moved into the Wiki. This was a bit of a botched effort, an attempt to just get them out there and working so the content would not get lost. In the months to come, I will probably revisit the Cookbook, update it, and start moving into direction that I wanted to take in the first place - using X.509 certificates on the end user system as much as possible.

Apart from my own infrastructure, I have begun to do some small contributions to other projects as well. For start, this effort will be centered to web applications that I use on regular basis. And in the future, we'll see.

Things are finally moving, and 2017 will be fruitful for sure.