Robert Alexander

I build open source software as a hobby and share ideas and progress here. I am a father, husband, software developer, and hiker. You may know me through US Digital Service, Amazon, NVIDIA. I've lived in NY, TX, CA, VA (USA). He/Him pronouns.

Statements are my own and do not represent the positions or opinions of my employer.

#fedi22 #Linux #RSS #DevOps #Freelancer

Robert Alexander boosted:
Blake Watson :prami:bw@social.lol
2025-07-04

There’s never been a better time to learn HTML… because I made a few minor updates to HTML for People.

Rolling your own website is hugely rewarding. It’s hard to explain but there’s a real sense of agency and control. If you feel trapped by corporate platforms, here’s your way out.

htmlforpeople.com/

Robert Alexander boosted:
Gavin ShoebridgeKiwiEV@mastodon.nz
2025-06-29

Here's the absolute weirdest electric vehicle you've ever seen.
It was called the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway in the UK, and it's an elevated tram which ran on submerged (at high tide) tracks.
It started running in 1896 but was knocked out of action a week later by a storm. It was rebuilt and ran for 5 years, carrying thousands alongside the beach for no immediately obvious reason. 😄
It's long since gone but the fact it actually existed is surreal.

old tram on submerged tracks
Robert Alexander boosted:
Will McGuganwillmcgugan
2025-06-22

I wrote a blog about "Fixing Properties".

Title is little clickbaity. Properties aren't really broken per se!

willmcgugan.github.io/fixing-p

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-10

@Extelec I found that the day one experience at bsky was quite poor. Filtering and block words didn't seem as powerful as Mastodon. Slow loading times, frequently errored. Right now my Bluesky account does nothing but direct people here.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-10

Huh, my bsky discover feed looks completely different today. I wonder if they only build recommendations daily or something. Significantly improved... but I don't think it's for me.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-09

It also doesn't do block word stemming, so I need to block every variant of each block word. This is a lot of work... Now I'm getting NotEnoughResources error on Bsky. Did I block too much?

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-08

Oh, I get it. No one on bsky uses alt text on their images so the text-based filters don't work.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-08

The first day experience with Mastodon was great. I picked an instance that related to my interests and my feed was immediately interesting. I'm on day two at bsky and my block list just gets longer and longer. Honestly not enjoying it.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-08

Ugh, generative AI art is such a trigger, they are too uncanny valley for me. I've started using inspect element to delete them so I can continue reading. They really make web pages worse.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-08

I like the feed discovery capability on feedland.com. When I subscribe to a new feed, I usually find that someone else already added it. So I take a look at their subscriptions, and suddenly I have a couple more feeds. It's not polished, but there's enough people using feedland that it's a powerful discovery engine.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-01

I can name a branch `";echo${IFS}hello` and poorly constructed workflows will run the hidden command and print hello.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-12-01

Git branch names support a really wide character set! Troubling for command injection risk, but kinda cool to make cool branch names.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-11-07

Looking at moving some domains to Cloudflare, but can't because they are on the public suffix list. Cloudflare thinks I'm doing something silly.

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-10-31

I'm perpetually annoyed with cloud provider web consoles. They are full of missing features and poor UX. I generally like Digital Ocean's web console, as they seem to only add features that their web console can support. Constraints sometimes improve user experience.

Shaking my head at this GCP issue right now

Screenshot of a warning dialog that states the load balancer uses features which are not supported by the UI right now. Please use gcloud or REST API.
Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-10-29

It feels surprising that CAs can send the random challenge for email-based DCV without encryption. I just confirmed with one of my test domains that has STARTTLS disabled. But it also makes sense: you shouldn't need a valid TLS cert to get a cert, and it's consistent with ACME HTTP, which also doesn't use TLS. I kinda wish they'd at least use opportunistic TLS to prevent passive eavesdropping.

Form requesting a TLS certificate for a test domain over email. Showing the admin@b.audit.alexsci.com address selected.
Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-10-10

Stats on MTA-STS adoption by the top 100k domains: 417 are enforcing, 373 are testing, 7 use a mode of none, and ~125 appear to have MTA-STS per their DNS records, but their web server has connection issues (unreachable, expired cert, etc).

Full list here: github.com/ralexander-phi/mta-

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-09-30

Had fun this weekend messing with #SMTP downgrade attacks. It's unfortunate, but email largely still runs on opportunistic TLS, and so many SMTP connections can still be downgraded to unencrypted. I was able to get several password reset emails downgraded, raising concerns about account takeover risk. Kudos to #Gmail, #MicrosoftOutlook, and #Protonmail for leading the way towards securing email in transit using MTA-STS.

Here's the blog post:
alexsci.com/blog/smtp-downgrad

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-09-28

Just signed up for an outlook.com account (for testing some email things) and one of the Outlook welcome emails landed in the junk folder. Good spam detection I guess..?

Robert Alexanderrobalex@indieweb.social
2024-09-20

Fun error message of the day, seen in Postfix:

221 2.7.0 Error: I can break rules, too. Goodbye.

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst