krakissi.net

Way back in 2015 I low-sided my Honda. The damage was minor enough that I fixed everything myself, except for a tiny gap between the cowl and dash surround that wouldn't close up. I could press on the cowl, and it would kind of snap together...but a few miles down the road it would pop apart.

Fixing that little gap means removing the dash surround... no big deal, you just need to remove the windshield and mirrors, and the fairings around the headlight. Of course, those fairings don't come off without removing the ones bridging the tank and dashboard... and those don't come off without removing the entire side fairings and turn signals.

With the whole machine apart, it was just a matter of bending the tube structure the cowl sits on with a screwdriver about a quarter of an inch. It took an hour to get to the point where I could do the actual one minute job I set out to do.

After an amazing five year run, it's finally time to close Krakchat.

It's kind of unbelievable that it lasted as long as it did. The mythical "krakchat2," which seemed to be in development and Coming Soon™ for ages has now been out a year longer than the original chat lasted. KC2 introduced MySQL as a database, to replace the completely unreliable and broken sqlite3 implementation. It also introduced a chat API with crude JSON interfaces, replacing even more crude query parameters. Some may even remember the earliest KC, in which everybody was just an IP address and couldn't set their username at all.

At its heart, Krakchat was always just a science project. I wrote it in college in an attempt to learn about AJAX/XHR and web development best practices. Along with Kraknet, it helped me to get my first real job in software development.