jerrac

I just found myself trying to define configuration language for a tool that would then write the given configuration into a configuration file of whatever format I set. So I was configuring configuration to configure configuration... When that thought occurred to me, it made me stop, and think "this is ridiculous".

I mean, the problem I want to solve is real. Configuring containerized applications is always annoying. Currently I either end up baking the configuration into the image, or using a pre-script to convert environment variables into the configuration I actually need before the app starts. Usually via bash scripts... (Or I have to decipher which method the official image uses. If they have one.)

My idea was to just have a little rust tool in my containers that would take the contents of environment variables and turn them into whatever format (toml, yaml, ini, etc.) the app needs. The problem was how do I represent all the different kinds of values you can have in a language? Lists, key/value lists, associative arrays, maps, etc...

Figuring out how to do that, well, isn't that just yet another configuration language?

And that is why I'm posting this question. Has any real effort ever been put into standardizing configuration languages/syntaxes?

If so, why'd they fail? If not, why not?

Hey, just a shot in the dark, but does anyone know of any good photo product sites, like Shutterfly, that have user interfaces that are elderly friendly?

My mother likes to get cards and other things using her photos, but she is continually having horrible experiences with the sites she's tried. And every time I go to help, I find UI's that are just not well designed. Sometimes I have to switch her over to Chrome, other times nothing makes it better.

Today, Walmart's site wouldn't even let me try to log her into her account in Chrome, just kept showing me "are you human" pages. And in Firefox, their photo app is clearly not working very well. The preview for the Christmas card was tiny until I switched her system font size from 150% to 100% scaling. Then it got bigger. And Firefox console was full of security warnings.

Shutterfly is not very good either, she consistently has to redo entire projects (that take her hours to put together) before it works, and it's hit or miss on if it works in Firefox or Chrome.

Are there any photo printing services out there that have UIs that: A) Work. B) Were designed with the elderly in mind?

Thanks!

Anyone have any recommendations on some good articles or books about federation and/or decentralized systems? Specifically, how do you design/architect and develop them?

Systems like Mastodon, bittorrent, ipfs, SAML, etc.

My web searches so far have turned up mostly surface level marketing type posts about why they are a good idea. Not much about building them, or how to think about building them.

I have some ideas I think might work well in a decentralized manner, and I'm trying build up my understanding of the concepts.

Thanks!

Long story short, I'm very tired of certain pitfalls in some of the most popular log and metric aggregation tools. So I figured I'd ask here if anyone wants to share some that aren't well known.

Ideally ones that do both logs and metrics in the same system, or are at least easy to get the logs and metrics pieces to work together.

Why do you think they're underrated? What is your experience using them?