Back in Business

Hello there, I’m Back in Business (jak EPMD!) - only after three years of effective inactivity I decided to re-active this blog again. As I really did not prepare any content ¹ , I can only start with some small notes.

Disaster and Recovery

So in September 2018 I found out, that my server where the 123k project runs did not respond any more. I went to the fabulous Hetzner site and found out, that it just does not boot any more because of ZFS file system corruption. This was not recoverable - I saved a snapshot of the whole thing. So if some ZFS developer wants to know what happened to this special file system - you’re welcome. I myself did not investigate too much and just setup a new server (so I do not know if I was hacked or the underlying hypervisor had a hickup).

But unfortunately I really lost data. The well curated descriptions of my bike rides for the whole 2018 season were lost. I was able to recover the tracks itself from the raw GPX data, but I ended up with several tours with placeholder names and descriptions on the site. So just in case you wondered.

To bring you those news I wanted to write a blog post and noticed that my whole setup with github-pages and Octopress and everything encountered a severe version of bit-rot.

Welcome Hugo

So as the Octopress project coincidentally also started a longer break (no relevant activity for the last three years) I gave up… and just 5 months later I found time to restart the whole blogging bullshit with the now popular Hugo.

The content itself aged pretty good of course and the new tooling concept incorporates only one binary installed via snap - so let’s see how the next generator will be named :)

Wipu Quo Vadis?

So apart from the way-point feature I did not add anything new to the site. But I continued to really use and enjoy it. Especially because it really works. Here are the top-features I use:

• I find (new) places I want to visit because of my coverage map.
• I plan and execute geohashing campaigns (ok, to be fair - last year only one really)
• I enjoy clicking through descriptions of old rides (embarrassing I know)

So I think I will continue to support my site also in 2019. But to keep things interesting (technically) I want to try one thing which grew upon me. It really nags me every time I click on a route. I always ask myself, if it would be possible to stream the track-points to show them incrementally on the map. This would provide a better ‘feeling’ for larger tracks for the existing use-cases and maybe could be a foundation to build more experimental new use-cases on top of it Something like running calculations which produce more points over a longer time because they are complicated but could not be generated a priori like the coverage.