About this Platform / Website

This section is about questions with regards to this website/platform itself.

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous questions about this website/platform go into this subsection.

Why do you also refer to this website as platform?

Because it is a lot more than just the visible part the visitor gets to view with his webbrowser. In essence, it is my desktop system (workplace) which extends into the net plus a bunch of services hooked into that stream of information which lets information bounce between the net and my desktop. There is a lot more under to hood than just a little bit of XHTML — I am constantly working on tying together a bunch of services into a software solutions stack... This platform is a long-term project of mine and so it is going to grow into something really nice and sophisticated.

The amount of Information here is incredible. How much is it?

Well, if we were looking at some book instead of this digital thingy then the book would have 104454 lines or ~2321 pages — those values are almost realtime values i.e. they get calculated automatically anytime I publish this page.

The maths is simple and goes like this: number_of_source_code_lines_in_total / 45 = number_pages. I choose 45 simply because I think it is a good estimate for the number of lines on a random DIN A4 page. If we would take into account images and pictures (which I did not) I think multiplying the total number of pages with some factor of 1.08 i.e. 8% would pretty much provide us with a very realistic page number would this be a book and not a web-accessible type of digital work. So, finally we are talking about around 2506.68 pages in total on my platform / website.

To come up with the above values I used/embedded cat /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | wc -l and echo "`cat /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | wc -l` / 45" | bc respectively. Adding the notion of images and such stuff is done with echo "(`cat /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | wc -l` / 45) * 1.08" | bc.

20 biggest Pages

Before we take a look at actual numbers let us clarify what we are talking about. We are talking biggest as in most content on a wiki, pim or blog page e.g. the number lines, words, characters etc. per page. It is important to understand that we are talking about wiki, pim or blog pages now, not about the number from above — which was about how much pages a paper book would have would we print all the contents from my website onto DIN A4 pages.

In total there are 97 wiki/pim/weblog pages on my website/platform, knowing which ones are the 20 biggest is just nice... Actually, that is not hard to determine. I used a one-liner to gather the information: wc -l /home/sa/0/0/{ws,pim,blog}/local/*.muse | sort -nr -k1 | grep local 2>/dev/null | head -n20 | cut -d '/' -f1,8 | cut -d '.' -f1 | sed s%/%% | sed "s%_%-%g" > /home/sa/0/0/misc/gnuplot/top_20/top_20.dat.

As can be seen, there is no magic involved in the process, just a little CLI action to gather the information and write it into a data file (top_20.dat) so I can pick it up with gnuplot. After feeding the information from the data file into gnuplot, below is what it looks like. As for the former example, all data (total number wiki pages and plot) is updated automatically i.e. they always show up to date information.

The Screenshots and their corresponding thumbnails, how have they been made?

Well, for an all-screen screenshot in general I use the tst respectively tsw command which are aliases in my .bashrc. For others I used e.g. scrot -s -t 50 page_possesion.png. There is also some information on how to split one large image available.

Sometimes it happens I need to take a screenshot of the whole page even if it does not fit into the screen. So what do I do? Taking the first screenshot, scroll down, take the next one, scroll down again ... , finally stitch them together which might take me an hour overall or so. Well, that is the stupid way to do it. The smart one is using an Iceweasel/Firefox add-on.

Operating System, Editor

DebianGNU/Linux, GNOME and GNU Emacs.

Your Site is fast. What did you do?

Let me quote a user here:

When I click a link on your site, the page shows before I even lift
the finger of my mouse button. What did you do?

Well, nothing special. I use my own hardware which is located in a datacenter. Then I use LXC and Nginx rather than for example something slow like VMware and Apache. Most importantly however is the fact that my site is static HTML i.e. there is no logic/data tier involved.

Commerce

This subsection is used to gather questions with regards to commercial subjects towards this website/platform.

What is the brilliant business idea behind all this?

There is none. I just thought it was a good idea.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.
      — Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850)

I am enthusiastic about science/technology and its interplay with nature and human societies around the world. That is why I do what I do. Money to me is just a tool, you need just enough to pursue your dream. Mine is about freedom, peace and the AEP (Autonomous Expedition Platform).

Are you getting paid to write/manage/host this platform?

No

About Markus

Stuff people tend to ask me about...

Did you study?

Yes. I got a masters degree in electrical engineering as well as one in computer science. However, all information I put on this website/platform has barely anything to do with what one learns when visiting a technical university.

In other words, all information that can be found here is what I taught myself over the years — non-formal knowledge which I learned through self-education. For example, they do not teach Unix OS administration on technical universities across Europe. On the other hand, what they do teach you are the mathematical foundations needed to design a compiler.

Why Debian?

I want self-determination. I am not 8 years old anymore therefore I do not need somebody (corporate entity, state authorities, etc.) to tell me what to do, how to do it, when to do it and with whom. Other operating systems enforce all that on their users, Debian does not. It is a free operating system for free-minded people made by free spirits all over the world — a community effort without corporate or state intervention of any kind. Business-wise it also makes total sense since it does not create vendor lock-ins.

Are you a Programmer or a System Administrator?

Well, both actually. Aside dealing with Linux I do a lot of Python programming. I like to automate things... I do this since 16 years now that is also why I started business/legal/investment related things a couple of years ago because after more than 10 years of tech it kinda gets boring... but that is probably true for anything... doing both, tech stuff and business stuff is great.

Do you know about Networking?

Amongst other things, I work in environments with several thousand servers where we use Juniper gear for exterior/interior routing in/between autonomous systems. So yes, I know a trick or two up and down the OSI stack.

What about Databases?

As everybody else, I worked mainly with MySQL and PostgreSQL in the past. However, I have now become a total MongoDB and neo4j fan. It allows to scale horizontally quite easily — many off-the-shelve nodes made into a giant cluster. MongoDB feels a lot more Googley... Map/Reduce anyone?

Are you a technical writer or what urges you to write?

You are probably asking because of this platform?! Well, as a side effect for other work, I got paid for my technical writings in the past but I also did/do a lot for the FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) community which I do for ideological and fun reasons only. Those occasions where I got paid, the writing was simply an accompanying thing to the main work I did.

My motivation for this website is to take notes for me in the first place and after several random occasions where I got good feedback, I simply started to expand my efforts and finally I ended up with the current website.

I think, writing is some passion of mine — one either likes it or not. To me, writing comes quite naturally since I have to do it for my job anyway and then there is academia where one also writes down his thoughts so others can understand them and provide feedback.