2026-06-02 Smaller projects
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During the beginning of the pandemic I stopped my Aikido practice and
slowly it dawned on me that my body is like a harbour full of ships
about to sail.

And indeed, that ship feels like it has sailed.

Sometimes I sit down at the computer and think, I'm gona compute some
stuff. And then there's nothing. This project? Done. That project?
Done. I can tinker with sysadmin stuff? Maybe, but the server move is
done. Check out OpenBSD? Nah. And then there's that creeping feeling
that maybe I sat down at the laptop because that's what I used to do
to shut off and relax and now there's just nothing to do. Like an old
person who repeats the movement of what they once loved, but now it's
just emptiness inside. No spark. No creativity. And it doesn't feel
like having achieved zen, either. It's just … bland.

It only happened a handful of times but I don't like it.

I guess I'm trying to learn what it means to grow old.

I reassembled the rig and started wondering about the space
requirements. The apartment is small.

Some synthesiser stuff on the floor. About five pieces and a mixer.

I started working on a weird little web proxy. A small project. I
wanted to fork Aki's oddauth. It's a reverse proxy that adds basic
authentication for a single user to certain paths.

Assume you want to run Oddμ and you don't want to run nginx or Apache
as your reverse proxy. You'd need a piece of software that acts as a
reverse proxy an implements basic authentication. Aki's oddauth does
that for a single user.

What I wanted, though, was to extend it to have multiple users for
various prefixes so that you could give each user their own directory
to work with. Something that would work for sites like the new
Campaign Wiki. Every user gets their own directory. You can extend
that pattern to every artist getting their web space, for example.
Like the portfolio platform Bliptown.

So that's the little project I was working on: a copy of oddauth for
multiple users and multiple directories. And then I also added support
for the target service being a Unix domain socket instead of a host
and port because I've started doing that for many of my services.

I'm also not sure how many people would run a web services without
nginx or Apache as reverse proxy. Do you? Why? I guess if you run Oddμ
with OpenBSD's relayd to provide TLS and not much else?

Anyway, a small project. I liked working on it and now it's done.

#Oddμ #oddauth