Honeypot.net

meta

Jul 1, 2023 ∞

Happy 25th birthday, honeypot.net!

In times of yore, my friends gave their computers cool cyberpunky names so that they sounded cool at LAN parties: “Hey, can you toss me an Ethernet cable for suntzu?” “Sure. Here’s the switch I’m using for chaosium.” My Amiga had a few hard drives to store all the, ahem, public domain music files that we traded around. I don’t know what prompted me to think of it as the honeypot full of music, but it stuck, and I christened it honeypot to be one of the cool kids.

I was working at an ISP and handling domain registration tasks for our customers. It struck me as a great idea to one-up my friends and turn my computer’s name into a full-blown domain name. The .org TLD didn’t feel right because I wasn’t an organization, and definitely didn’t identify with .org’s non-profit connotations. .com also felt wrong because I wasn’t some boring company that had decided to hop on to the Internet to see what the fuss was all about. .net had just the right about of geek cred, so honeypot.net it was.

It was the custom to have a cool and vaguely menacing desktop wallpaper to go with our cool and vaguely menacing handles. If you’ve seen “Hackers”, you’re familiar with those ideas. Here was my pre-honeypot.net background:



That wasn’t good enough to show off my new domain, so I replaced it:



I needed to change things a bit when I acquired a second computer. Instead of using the whole domain name for a single host, I decided on a whim to give each one a name from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories. First, Pooh was my childhood stuffed animal best friend, and I still like him. Second, Pooh loves honey, as in a pot of it – a honeypot. Finally, it was an ironic pushback against the scary hacker imagery that was common at the time.

When I registered honeypot.net, about 2 million domains existed. Today there are about 700 million. I wish I’d gotten on the Bitcoin or Apple stock bandwagons that early.

Happy 25th birthday, honeypot.net. We’ve had fun.

Feb 5, 2021 ∞

Automating this static website

I use the Hugo website generator to create this website out of a bunch of Markdown fils. A lot has been written about this approach, but the main advantages are that the site can load quickly even when it’s serving a lot of traffic, and you don’t have to worry about bugs in the blog software when there isn’t any. The downside is that you can’t post to it as easily when you’re out and about on a mobile device.

I wired up a nice little workflow for making it as easy easy to post here with my iPad as to a Wordpress site:

• I write the blog post in Markdown in the Drafts app.
• When done, I run an action that triggers a Shortcut which adds it to a Git repo in the Working Copy app, commits it, and pushes it to my Gitea server.
• A cron job on the web server runs a git pull from Gitea, runs Hugo to generate the site, then copies the output to the web server.

So the plumbing is a little more complicated than just opening a website form and clicking a “post” button, but from the user’s perspective it’s every bit as simple. iOS and iPadOS are starting to get a nice ecosystem of Unix-style “do one thing and do it well” tools that can be strung together with scripting.

Jun 30, 2018 ∞

Happy birthday to me!

I registered Honeypot.net on July 1, 1998, so today is its twentieth birthday. We’ve had fun, little domain. Here’s to twenty more!

Dec 15, 2016 ∞

Rebooting

I started this blog twelve years ago. I always meant to update it regularly, but… life intervenes. After recently coming back to it, I decided it was due for a good cleaning. There were lots of old articles about things I no longer care about but that people on the Internet keep visiting and linking to. I kept them. But there were also a lot of opinion pieces that I no longer agree with. Their disposition was a harder decision. The possibility of deleting them felt dishonest, like I was denying ever holding those beliefs. Conversely, this blog isn’t a diary (I have a separate one of those) or a public record (I just write stuff every now and then).

I won’t ever apologize for opinions I’ve had but discarded. If we’re a product of our environments, then our ideas must surely be the result of the people around us and the things we were taught. We don’t often get much say in these until later in life. However, many of my opinions have changed greatly through time, usually after meeting new friends or reading new viewpoints and considering my own beliefs in the light of new information.

Additionally, while reading through those old posts, I realized that a lot of them were phrased a lot more strongly, perhaps harshly, than I’d ever actually felt about the subjects involved. In person, I can cheerfully discuss great differences with just about anyone. I’m excited and energized by tracing back to the roots of our dissents and looking for common ground in even wildly different worldviews. And yet, reduced to written word, a lot of the things I would have said with a smile over a shared meal came across as, well, angry and mean.

Given that I now disagree with many of the ideas I’d described, and that other posts inaccurately conveyed a stridency I never felt during their writing, I’ve deleted large swaths of old content. If I won’t apologize for my opinions, I will for how I might have expressed them in ways that hurt, angered, or belittled.

And with that, let’s begin this experiment anew.

Oct 22, 2008 ∞

Just Get Home Already

While waiting for Jen to return from a conference, I thought about calling her to get her estimated time of arrival, or her ETA. I realized she might be might be pretty far away still and thought I better ask for an estimate of the accuracy of the estimate, or meta-estimate: her META. Hey, neat! META can be a recursive acronym for “meta-ETA”, so it also references the nature of the acronym itself, sort of making META a meta-acronym, which truly makes it both meta and META.