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Add About, OpenSource and thank you for reading

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Reynir Björnsson 2020-12-15 19:49:40 +01:00
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@ -41,4 +41,7 @@ With the the office I plan on working from there just about every weekday.
I am a social being and thrive around other people.
I look forward to coming to Frontløberne daily and share the space and ideas with the lovely people there.
[About this site](/LearnMore/About)
This site is written using MirageOS. You can read more [about this site](/LearnMore/About) and how it works.
Thank you for reading,
Reynir Björnsson

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---
title: Tiny Imaginary Computers
author: Reynir Björnsson
---
This website is running as a *Mirage unikernel*.
A traditional application is one or more programs that run in an operating system on a computer alongside other programs.
A *unikernel* is a program that is also an operating system.
That sounds boring -- an operating system where only one program ever runs?!
And that is correct, this is often not what you want.
Luckily, modern machines have the capability to run many *virtual machines*.
This provides some benefits:
- A virtual machine is well isolated from other virtual machines.
You don't have to worry about one application messing with the files of another,
or a malicious application sending the private bits from another application somewhere where it doesn't belong.
- You know what your application needs from the operating system, so you can leave out the things that are not needed.
This simplifies things, makes the operating system much smaller.
Furthermore, it's a big security benefit - every bit of code is a potential security issue.
Only a few years ago it was a huge problem for many people because their virtual machine had a vulnerability in the virtual floppy drive!
- The program is self-contained.
All that it needs is packaged up in the unikernel.
In traditional software you often have a number of dependencies that you need on your computer in order to run the application, and they all need to have a compatible version.
This website is using a *library* called [Canopy](https://github.com/Engil/Canopy) that a guy I met in Morocco and later Leipzig wrote.
The first thing it does when it starts is to fetch files that are under *version control*.
This means the files have a log of what was done, and every change is tracked.
You can go back in time if you regret a change!
I made the files public on a website hosted by my friends [data.coop](https://data.coop/).
Whenever I push new changes there Canopy makes sure to get the latest updates.
You are welcome to take a look at the history: [https://git.data.coop/reynir/frontloberne](https://git.data.coop/reynir/frontloberne)
Canopy knows how to make the simple text files look pretty in your web browser.
On the same machine I run another Canopy instance which serves a technical blog at [blog.mirage.reyn.ir](https://blog.mirage.reyn.ir/).
At the moment I'm only running a few other things, but I could easily run 100s of instances.

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---
title: Open Source
author: Reynir Björnsson
---
Open source is a philosophy of sharing knowledge and know-how.
You share how things work, be it software, beer recipes or how to grow oyster mushrooms from spent coffee grounds.
You are free to read, inspect and modify the code (recipe) in any way you like.
In some cases, extra conditions apply such as you have to share back any changes or improvements you have made if you're not using it just for personal purposes.
In other cases no conditions apply.
Pretty much all my work is released as open source.
It is something I believe in.