I find that it's easier to organise this README in a
"question-answer" format. Questions are marked with "Q:", and answers
with "A:".
Q: Who are you?
A: I am Alexander Arkhipov, a Unix hacker from Moscow.
Q: How can I contact you?
A: finger arkhipov@alearx.org | grep -o 'Login: [^ ]*' |
sed 's/Login: \(.*\)/\1@alearx.org/'
You can use the output for both finger(1) and mail.
Q: Do you have a PGP key?
A: Yes, it's at ftp://alearx.org/pub/pgp/ -- pick the latest one.
The pub directory is also mirrored on http and gopher.
Q: What services does alearx.org provide?
A: Most services are at alearx.org.
There is a mail server running. I publish news via finger (but
also http and gopher). I publish some files to the ftp server (but
also http and gopher). The http and gopher sites are almost
identical. You can clone my git repositories via anongit (see the
/git/ directory on www or gopher site).
I also maintain a boring site with a blog and a resume at
pro.alearx.org.
Q: What language(s) do you speak?
A: Russian is my native language, but I speak English fluently. I
generally don't read email in Russian -- English is the language
of computing. I also speak a little bit of German.
Q: Do you maintain any "public" accounts elsewhere?
A: I am called alearkh on github. The rest that you might be able to
see either exist for stupid reason, or not needed anymore.
Q: What's up with news/* filenames?
A: The oldest file is called 9999.YYYY-mm-dd, and the latter ones
reduce the first number by one. This way they can be sorted
alphabetically, and I am very unlikely to ever run out of
numbers (and even if I do, I can archive them and restart).
Q: What's up with your domain names?
A: I got my first domain name, and started my first open-source
projects when I was finishing my university. At the time I allowed
another student to convince me that a good "internet identity"
would be a unique, easy to pronounce string (even if meaningless),
such as those people from reddit or whatever would use. I ended
up making a website at the domain mcflexy.net. In a short while,
however, I decided that I should instead allow my (real) name to
speak for itself, but still didn't want to embed my name into a
domain name because:
1) I've got a pretty long name
2) Most shorter versions I could think of at the time were taken
So instead I decided to register something that'd read as an
English word or phrase, and finally came up with mineeyes.cyou.
I would regret the decision almost immediately, as I discovered a
lot of spam filters had no trust in .cyous.
At the time I didn't have a lot of money to begin with, and
transferring them was becoming a huge problem (it was 2022, and my
"benevolent" government forbids me from naming the Ukrainian event
that broke out then). It wasn't too long, however, before I
graduated from my slave camp, and was hired into another, at which
point I at least managed to get my bitcoins together and start
thinking. I registered manpager.net (named after the environment
variable MANPAGER), and put a notice that mineeyes.cyou is going.
I also realised at later point that I transferred way too much
bitcoin (unless I just wanted to renew one domain for the next 20
years), so I registered a few I thought may be useful later.
I was happy with the situation for a while, but then I had to
register on github to participate in a project. Github required me
to give my user a name (and not just a mail address), but all my
favourite names for Unix users were already taken, and I didn't
want to name my user "manpager"! I came up with "drjfaust", as in
"doctor Johann Faust", but I wasn't happy with it.
Eventually the idea of catenating first X letters of my first name
with first Y letters of my surname occurred to me. The method also
has some flexibility, and can produce funny results. 3 for both X
and Y seemed to be a good number, so I registered alearx.org (.net
was a mistake -- it's a TLD for ISPs and the like), and changed my
github user name to alearkh. The x in alearx is substitute for
Greek chi.
That pretty much concludes the story up until now.
Q: What do you call your Unix users?
A: I usually name my main user aa for my initials. Most of the other
users, that I might maintain to drop some privileges for certain
tasks, are usually given short names like "tim" or "jean".
Q: What do you call your hosts?
A: I distinguish between the name(s) by which the host is known on the
local network, or among friends via /etc/hosts, and the
publicly-known FQDNs, which are set up via DNS, but also matter
with web and smtp servers.
The "local" names are short Unix "words", such as "manpager",
"cflags", "ex", &c. The FQDNs are just whatever makes sense, while
being short and memorable.
Q: What about copying your works?
A: When I first began programming, I was perplexed by copyright.
("license my program!? it's not a book, or something, you know")
Then there was a period during which I was extremely confused, and
now I am just mildly confused.
Inspecting existing licences I stumbled upon BSD0, which removes
the attribution clause from the normal BSD licence. So I decided
to deal with the issue by just putting that into COPYING for each
of my projects. Many still are distributed this way.
Later I discovered that the copyright laws don't allow me to
reject my right to sue people who'd forgotten to attribute my work
to me, so from that point I decided to instead use OpenBSD's ISC
licence. I also discovered that further complications arise when a
project includes files from different sources, so instead I now
have a licence-comment at the top of each source file.
Now I believe that some of the text files I publish via gopher may
be subjects of copyright, so I now also have a small notice at the
bottom of such files.
Q: What sort of Unix do you run?
A: Mostly OpenBSD, though I'd like to get Linux on a separate
machine.
