Dynamic Waltz

After my PHP-driven, bloated-as-hell nightmare of an insecure website succumbed to the evolution of sanity and died a long-awaited death, the choices laid out before me were:

1. to use a web development framework for dynamically generated websites: generally I tend to suffer from the NIH syndrome and I tend to dislike frameworks for imposing some arbitrary software design on me (albeit sometimes well-done). I also started to dislike the idea of having to launch a server-side process just for the sake of serving a single page.

2. to use a web development framework for statically generated websites: comment sections would either still need to pass through some dynamic part (which renders the whole "let's go static!" approach pointless) or be handled by some third party service like disqus (which pretty much goes against my no-pointless-javascript-in-the-Web attitude — I guess iframes have somehow gone out of fashion these days).
   Also, frameworks.

In the end I came to a "Fuck it All" conclusion, abandoned website building for good, and turned the ayekat.ch web experience into what resembles the current about section. The time for expressing my narcism in pretty CSS designs (and re-designs every 6 months) was spent on more useful things, and life has gone on surprisingly well for the past year.

However, after an attack of insanity, I decided to make a pretty website again. Also I stumbled over

python

… yes, I can already hear you whimper

oh no, here it goes again…

There truly is some sort of hype around this language, and I kept away from it for the mere reason that most people advocating it used arguments comparing it with C. I may also just have hanged around in the wrong part of the web, though.

Anyway, I started using it, and I concluded that

• the language is very nice. It is definitively better than PHP (but that isn't a huge accomplishment), but also trumps shell scripts when the task becomes a little more complex than a naive automation. It allows you to do many things without much fighting with the syntax, and provides lots of functionality straight out of the box without any need for installing additional OS packages; however

• its module system is pretty archaic. It looks like it might have worked well in the past, but now it seems more like some mechanisms that were hacked together to make the whole thing work. Also, all imports seem to be resolved at the working directory of the top level file, which pretty much throws modularity out of the window: using if __name__ == '__main__' checks (which I find pretty handy for developing a certain component) becomes utterly useless if used in a module; also, at any given time a module down the line may break if it tries to import a file that happens to have the same name as a file in your own project.
  … although, I have to admit that C's #include statements are not the pinnacle of intelligence either (and " and <> may not always behave very intuitively).

But we are not forced to modularise our code (in the sense of python) for a simple website, are we? Yet the nagging question remained: static or dynamic? Rationality pulled me towards static website building (why would I need a comment section, anyway? the last comment I got was an XSS attempt anyway), so

$ sloccount cgi

SLOC    Directory       SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
366     cgi             python=366

CGI.

Because. Fuck. It. I had fun. It's my personal emotional link to the good old days when the Web was not shit yet. It compiles markdown to HTML, handles requests for static files (images, CSS, PDFs) and defines the HTTP header on its own. If it wasn't a launched process for each request, I'd be almost proud.

Then again, it's a bloody website. Why are we even talking?

waltz

Named after both a dance and an actor coming from a particular country to the East of mine, I am on a new server. We all are. "We" is a small group of people who have all been very excited by the delightful, frequent and unannounced server downtimes and I/O issues at our former host filemedia.de, such that we collectively decided to try out something less exciting by default.

Age, I guess. It's not good for the heart.

Since I'm not known for blogging (or if, then not for blogging particularly well), the direction this blog will take is yet unclear. Perhaps I'll tell you a lot about exciting technical things I've recently discovered. Perhaps I will also just post failed attempts at poetry. Or jokes. I might tell you about the weather in Switzerland, and how the political and economical relationship to the European Union looks like to a totally uninformed cave dweller. I might just post photographs of cats because I happen to have taken a shitton of them. Or maybe just remain dead. Perhaps I'll discover that, statistically, this place is more dead than Sun's open source projects after Oracle happened, and just archive and remove the published nonsense. Some older posts may appear, perhaps the future event prediction timeline based on dystopical books (and how the World has changed ever since I posted that back in 2009), if I happen to find it somewhere. Or maybe I'll make a new one.

Until then, I wish you a very nice rest of the summer.