One of the reoccurring questions I hear from new DokuWiki users again and again is "How do I add some automatic navigation?" //

Fixed Navigation

I believe, for a new wiki, you're better off with no automatic navigation at all. In fact it may be counterproductive to the nature of a wiki.

The beauty of a wiki is the interconnection of the various topics. Linking might be the main property of a wiki. //

Here's how you do it. You simply create a page named "sidebar" and put a list of links in it. Of course you can also use headlines or other formatting to make it more accessible. You can influence the order of your links by reordering your list and of course you can give each link an individual name. It's all standard wiki syntax. No magic and all under your control. //

A somewhat better approach would be the navi plugin. It it allows you maintain a central list of links (using the standard list and link syntax). It outputs that list's sub lists collapsed or opened based on what page you're currently on.

You still fully control the order and titles of your links and it's still very wiki like.

The Template Approach

An alternative approach to make the navigation a bit more dynamic while maintaining full control over its content is to use a template that offers some more sophisticated navigation mechanisms.

One example would be the sprintdoc template. Again, the navigation is created using a sidebar page as described in the fixed approach above. This time however, headlines in the sidebar are treated special and automatically create collapsible sections. It even lets you add icons to make the sections more recognizable. //

Automated Listings

So what if you really need an automatic list of pages in a namespace? I would recommend looking at the simplenavi plugin. As the name suggests, it's really simple. It creates a nested list of links to the pages it found.

I would recommend not using it as the main navigation, but to combine it with the fixed navigation approach and only use it in the sidebar of deeper namespaces.

Alternatively the nslist plugin is a good way to add list of sub pages in the current namespace. This could be used to create automatic indexes on a namespace start page.

This course is everything you need to prepare for your written test and earn your pilot certificate, with online ground school, FAA test prep, and real-world training - all in one easy-to-use package. -- $299

We have the best tools in the industry to help you pass all three tests required to get your Private Pilot certificate (FAA knowledge test, checkride oral and checkride flight). In fact, we guarantee that you'll pass all three tests or you're entitled to a full refund. No one else is willing to make that guarantee, that's how confident we are in this course.

The Trilogy Nobody Wanted¶

Let me be real about what this three-part series documents:

Part 1: A cloud provider deletes a decade of work because of a broken verification process and a Java parameter parsing quirk. Support gaslights the customer for 20 days.

Part 2: One human inside the machine fights the bureaucracy, escalates to the CEO, and restores the account. Hope restored. Faith in humanity renewed.

Part 3: That human gets fired. The systemic issues remain unfixed. The machine continues.

This is the arc of modern tech. The system breaks. A human fixes it despite the system. The system removes the human. Repeat.
The Real Lesson¶

In Part 2, I wrote: “My trust isn’t fully restored. What is restored is my faith that even in massive corporations, one person can make a difference.”

I still believe that. But I’ll add a corollary: the difference that person makes is often inversely proportional to how long the corporation keeps them around.

The people who challenge broken systems, who go off-script, who escalate when the template says “close the ticket”. Those people are threats to institutional inertia. They’re expensive. They’re inconvenient. They make leadership answer uncomfortable questions.

And eventually, they get optimized away. Just like a “low-activity” AWS account.
A Note to AWS¶

You don’t need me to tell you this, but I will anyway: Tarus Balog was worth more to your reputation than any GenAI keynote. Every developer who read my story and thought “maybe AWS isn’t so bad after all”? That was because of him. Not your PR team. Not your marketing budget. One human being who decided to do the right thing.

You’ll replace him with someone who hits KPIs and doesn’t ask uncomfortable questions. And you’ll wonder why developers keep building exit strategies from your platform. //

To AWS: You had a human circuit breaker. You removed it. Good luck with the next cascade failure.

To everyone else: Keep your backups distributed. Keep your exit strategies current. And if you find a Tarus inside your cloud provider, thank them before the system optimizes them away.

Songs of Praise
Robert Prizeman
Songs of Praise. Toccata For Organ

Remember my article about AWS deleting my 10-year account? The one where support gaslit me for 20 days while claiming my data was “terminated”?

Here’s the plot twist: My data is back. Not because of viral pressure. Not because of bad PR. But because one human being inside AWS decided to give a damn.

This is that story.

I’d done everything right. Vault encryption keys stored separately from my main infrastructure. Defense in depth. Zero trust architecture. The works.

My security posture was textbook—protect against compromise by ensuring no single failure could take down everything. What I hadn’t protected against? AWS itself being the single point of failure.

I built a hardened bunker with multiple escape routes, only to have AWS drop a nuke on the entire complex. //

You might be thinking, “What are the odds they target me?” But that’s the wrong question. I thought the same thing—with my level of exposure and contributions, surely they could just write my name down and not bother me with stupid verification requests about whether I exist.

But you’re not being targeted—you’re being algorithmically categorized. And if the algorithm decides you’re disposable, you’re gone. //

After 20 days of appeals, AWS support finally responded with this gem: “Because verification wasn’t completed by the due date, your resources were terminated.”

But here’s the dilemma they’ve created: What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.

This isn’t a system failure. The architecture and promises are sound. AWS doesn’t lose data—they have backups of backups of backups, stored in vaults that last far longer than the stated 90 days, where no rogue AI script can reach.

What’s happening here is simpler: teams in MENA are trying to cover up a massive fuck-up. Restoring data from those deep vaults would require explanations. Incident reports. Post-mortems. “Why did we have to open the vaults?”

Their entire communication strategy screams: “He’s nobody. He’ll give up soon. We won’t have to report this up the chain.” //

Lessons Learned¶

1. Never trust a single provider—no matter how many regions you replicate across
2. “Best practices” mean nothing when the provider goes rogue
3. Document everything—screenshots, emails, correspondence timestamps
4. The support theater is real—they literally cannot help you
5. Have an exit strategy executable in hours, not days

AWS won’t admit their mistake. They won’t acknowledge the rogue proof of concept. They won’t explain why MENA operates differently. They won’t even answer whether your data exists.

But they will ask you to rate their support 5 stars.

The cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business. And when their business needs conflict with your data’s existence, guess which one wins?

Plan accordingly.

Halleluja on "Es ist uns ein Kind geboren", Kantate BWV 142 from Infinite Games. Concerto No. 1 For Piano, Vibraphone And String Orchestra
Arash Safaian

Cool URIs don’t change n’est plus respecté. Cette idée qu’une URL ne change jamais est géniale. Un contenu, accessible une fois, est accessible toujours. Et s’il change d’adresse, une redirection correcte est faite pour ne pas déranger les internautes.

C’est une bonne pratique que j’applique pour les sites d’organisations que je gère. Mais je ne me vois plus l’appliquer sur mon blog personnel.

De toutes façon, les moteurs de recherche s’en fichent pas mal de mes pages. Et la «valeur» n’en est plus une. Franchement, je ne me vois pas faire ce genre d’effort pour Google et compagnie.

Quant aux internautes, il y a plein de possibilités de conserver un contenu qui serait important:

une sauvegarde simple de la page complète par son navigateur
une sauvegarde par son agrégateur de flux RSS et Atom (par exemple Inoreader)
une sauvegarde dans la fameuse WayBack Machine (je conseille de créer un compte et d’installer une extension de navigateur ou une application)
Certes j’ai cassé un contrat, mais tout existe pour que cela ne pose pas de problème. J’assume, même si ce choix m’a fait cogiter un certain temps. Tout est sauvegardé et je peux toujours fournir un contenu précis sur simple demande. Il n’est pas impossible que je remette en ligne certaines pages utiles.

Le vrai problème, c’est que plein d’autres contrats ne sont plus respectés, par des entreprises bien plus importantes que ce bon vieux Nicolas Friedli.

What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.

What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.

There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.

In theory, the domain name space owner owns the domain name space and therefore all URIs in it. Except insolvency, nothing prevents the domain name owner from keeping the name. And in theory the URI space under your domain name is totally under your control, so you can make it as stable as you like. Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running. Then why are there so many dangling links in the world? Part of it is just lack of forethought. Here are some reasons you hear out there:

We just reorganized our website to make it better.

Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign. //]

Why should I care?

When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. They might have made links from regular web pages. They might have bookmarked your page. They might have scrawled the URI in the margin of a letter to a friend.

When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. They also are frustrated - emotionally and practically from accomplishing their goal.

Enough people complain all the time about dangling links that I hope the damage is obvious. I hope it also obvious that the reputation damage is to the maintainer of the server whose document vanished.

So what should I do? Designing URIs

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment.

URIs change when there is some information in them which changes. It is critical how you design them. (What, design a URI? I have to design URIs? Yes, you have to think about it.). Designing mostly means leaving information out.

The creation date of the document - the date the URI is issued - is one thing which will not change. It is very useful for separating requests which use a new system from those which use an old system. That is one thing with which it is good to start a URI. If a document is in any way dated, even though it will be of interest for generations, then the date is a good starter.

In the mid-’90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves promised to tame the chaos, each with its own suite of quirks, charms, and flaws.

The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were inferior. It’s that they reflected a different Internet entirely, one where directories mattered, crawling was still an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of “search” had not yet hardened into a single dominant interface. //

“Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was,” Friend said. “Back then, if you typed a question into AltaVista, the odds were stacked against you if you were looking for anything specific. You’d receive 40,000 results that would leave you just as confused as shouting into a crowded room.”

Compared with Google’s once-user-friendly UI and more relevant results, combing through an AltaVista results page required patience and genuine skill that was honed over time. But AltaVista did accomplish one important thing: It set the expectation that search should be immediate. That expectation proved decisive. Once users experienced a search engine that could quickly sweep a huge index, they stopped accepting sluggish, partial systems as sufficient. AltaVista didn’t win the search war, but it clarified the rules of engagement.

“The conquest of space is worth the risk of life,” said Gus Grissom.

FreezePage is a free service for taking online snapshots of web pages.

With FreezePage you can freeze web pages so they can be recalled in their exact form at a later time or date.

Web pages change all the time, but with FreezePage you can be sure they stay the same.

How long are frozen pages stored?

From the moment you enter our site, you have your own personal account. When you freeze pages, they are automatically saved to your account as "My Frozen Pages".

To save space on our system, we require that you use your account regularly, i.e. that you log in or visit any page on our site. If you don't, we will delete your account and frozen pages in it.

• If you are an unregistered user, you must visit our site every 3 days.
• If you are a member (sign up for free), we only require you to log in once a month (every 31 days).
• Premium Users are, of course, not subject to this requirement.

It took two years and cost $5 million—but the results are absolutely spectacular. //

HOUSTON—Following the completion of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar restoration, NASA’s historic Apollo Mission Operations Control Room 2 (“MOCR 2”) is set to reopen to the public next week. The $5 million in funding for the restoration was partially provided by Space Center Houston, but the majority of the money was donated by the city of Webster, the Houston suburb where the Johnson Space Center is located. Another half-million in funding came from the general public via a Kickstarter campaign (disclosure: your humble author was a backer).

For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere’s Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.

Ars was invited to view the restored MOCR 2 last week as the final finishing restoration touches were still being applied. We conducted some interviews and shot some photos while technicians and construction workers bustled around us, hammering and screwing the last bits and bobs into place.

This is the unique story of observing a total solar eclipse for no less than 74 consecutive minutes. On the summer morning of June 30, 1973, the Sun rises on the Canary Islands. But it is strangely indented by the Moon. The eclipse of the century has just begun. From the west, the lunar shadow rushes to the African coast at a velocity of over 2000 kilometers per hour. Astronomers on the ground will enjoy seven short minutes of total eclipse to study the solar corona - too short for Pierre Lena and seven scientists who board the Concorde 001 prototype, an extraordinary plane to become the first commercial supersonic aircraft. With André Turcat as chief pilot and a crew of five, at 17000 m altitude, the aircraft remains in the lunar shadow for 74 minutes, a record time of scientific observations not yet beaten and allowing for exceptional measurements. ////

Epub, PDF

Fitted with telescopes, the plane did our longest imaging of the Sun’s corona. //

The Concorde Prototype 001 at the National Air and Space Museum of France in Le Bourget, with a map of Africa painted on it. The map depicts the aircraft’s path in the shadow of the total solar eclipse of June 30, 1973. //

“In 1970, the Concorde 001 prototype flew supersonic for the first time,” Léna told Ars. “The newspapers were full of these results. By 1972, I thought it was worth trying to approach André Turcat, the chief of test flights at Aerospatiale in Toulouse, and ask him about the possibility of using the 001 prototype to follow the June 1973 eclipse. He was very interested.”

With his plan accepted, Léna began organizing experiments for the historic flight. Flying at nearly 17 km above the Earth’s surface had many benefits. “Flying very high in the stratosphere had several advantages, including no humidity, which meant an excellent infrared transmission of the solar light.” //

With the shadow moving east at a slightly higher speed than the Concorde’s Mach 2.2, the scientists had 80 minutes of observation time in the totality before the aircraft fell behind the eclipse’s shadow. However, due to headwinds, that was reduced to 74 minutes, which was and still continues to be an astonishing achievement. “No one has achieved even half of it during the past 53 years,” Léna said.

Following this remarkable eclipse chase, the Concorde 001 landed in the Chadian capital of N’Djamena (then Fort-Lamy). “After we landed, a partial solar eclipse went on for an hour and a half or so. There were people (celebrating) on the streets with music as they were very happy to see us. It was a very special moment in my life,” Léna said.

Foster Family Farm

The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox
·
Mike Rowe just made Bill Maher's audience gasp. He says young men aren't volunteering, joining clubs, or doing anything productive because they're spending 2,100 hours a year staring at a screen.

It's actually even worse than he said: the average Gen Z adult spends ~9 hours a Show more

11:52 PM · Aug 7, 2026

That is essentially a full-time job. The standard 40-hour workweek amounts to about 2,080 hours per year.

Rowe's statistic appears to derive from economist Nicholas Eberstadt's research into prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work. Eberstadt has studied federal time-use data showing that these men spend extraordinary amounts of their days watching television, movies and other screens while participating comparatively little in work, volunteering, religious activities or other parts of civil society. //

Researchers found that teenagers between 13 and 18 were consuming an average of eight hours and 39 minutes of entertainment screen media every day in 2021. //

The Common Sense researchers identified the pandemic as a turning point. Their report notes that young people spent more time at home and away from friends and activities, while remote learning placed students in front of computers for hours. Importantly, the study's screen-time figures excluded the additional hours spent doing classes and homework online.

And the increase wasn't simply a continuation of an existing trend. Between 2015 and 2019, entertainment media use increased only 3 percent among tweens and 11 percent among teenagers. Between 2019 and 2021, it jumped 17 percent in only two years for both groups. A broader scientific review reached much the same conclusion. //

Nine hours spent consuming digital media are nine hours that cannot all be spent playing baseball, working a summer job, talking around a dinner table, dating, reading a book, attending church, volunteering, joining a club, learning a trade or simply hanging around with friends.

That gets to the deeper point Rowe was making. The problem isn't merely that young people are looking at screens. It is that screens have become extraordinarily efficient substitutes for participation in the real world.

Eberstadt's description of disconnected men is striking precisely because it isn't principally about technology. It is about withdrawal.

“The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines.” //

Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
40,965
Companies don't just change their culture. One doesn't simply take a ponderous, deliberative engineering house and suddenly see them moving at warp speed. It takes time and experience to know when to push a risk and when not to.

Attempting to change the behavior of a company overnight is likely to lead to ill effects like blowing up your only launch facility during a static fire because you decided you wanted to test some new engine configuration before totally validating it on a test stand. //

Zacharot Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
13y
181
It may have been the valve that initiated the issue. But to be perfectly clear, the hazard they are working with is liquid oxygen. It takes so little to set it off, and it's self combusting. People have died from underestimating how volatile liquid oxygen is. Multiple rockets have been lost to valving or cracking liners, or anything that can generate heat around liquid oxygen. If they are still modifying valves at this stage, I worry that they lack the knowledge or experience necessary for rapid re-use. They certainly are not correctly characterizing the risk.

Edit: Downvote as you please, but New Glenn isn't operating under the same methodologies as Starship. It's a top down design. It worked out of the gate. It's Old Space manufacturing. They do not have the operational capacity to trial and error in the field. Sure, things go wrong and you fix them, there are always lessons to learn. But Blue Origin is not new. Those lessons should be years behind them at this point. If you seriously think "oh, they are of course fixing it, and learning, and understanding the risk", then you missed the point that the de-risk phase was before they built it. They are not hardware rich. They do not iterate to fix. As noted, they have to make modifications in-place. Maybe that works this time, but it's a huge red flag to everyone banking on New Glenn being reliable. It should not be an oxygen valve causing total vehicle and pad loss. For a company as mature as this, that's egg on face levels of execution.

lurknomore Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
3,581
mjuarez1977 said:
This bit stuck out to me.

Is it possible that after such a massive conflagration, literal ball-of-fire hundreds of feet into the air, they actually found the oxygen valve that failed, the actual hardware, somewhere in the debris, and somehow confirmed it had an anomaly prior to the explosion? I honestly can't see how that's possible.

Or is this more like "we have telemetry that showed the explosion started at an oxygen valve, and we confirmed with other oxygen valves we have that it needs to be redesigned"?

That threw the credibility off for me. Even after SpaceX showed how good companies can be at finding the needle in the pile of melted rubble, the wording made the rest sound, to me, like a "trust us dear customers, we/you can rush back to the pad" statement.

This is a setup guide for hosting a Linux dedicated server for Unturned. It references the official documentation located on the GitHub repository, which should be used first with this page serving as an optional supplement.

All multiplayer servers are hosted using the Unturned Dedicated Server app, which will be installed and updated through Valve's SteamCMD tool for the purposes of this guide.

The Commands.dat file tells your Unturned server what map to use, what to call itself, how many players can join, and other settings.