I decided to leave my job (Principal Software Engineer) after 4 years. I have no idea what I want to do next, so I’ve been having loads of chats to try and work that out. I like working in mission focused organizations, working to fix problems across the stack, from interpersonal down to the operating system. I enjoy “going where I’m rare”, places that don’t always…
I’ve spent a bit of time playing with vxlan - which is very neat, but also incredibly insecure by default. When using vxlan, be very careful to understand how the host is connected to the internet. The kernel will listen on all interfaces for packets, which means hosts accessable to VMs it’s hosting (e.g., by bridged interface or a private LAN will accept packets from VMs and inject…
I’ve been hacking on a project on and off for my LAN called DNSync . This will take a DNSMasq leases file and sync it to Amazon Route 53. I’ve added a new feature, which will create A reccords for each MAC address on the LAN. Since DNSync won’t touch CNAME records, I use CNAME records (manually) to point to the auto-synced A records for services on my LAN (such as my Projector,…
While setting up my new network at my house, I figured I’d do things right and set up an IPSec VPN (and a few other fancy bits). One thing that became annoying when I wasn’t on my LAN was I’d have to fiddle with the DNS Resolver to resolve names of machines on the LAN. Since I hate fiddling with options when I need things to just work, the easiest way out was to make the DNS…
In the spirit of blogging about some of the code i’ve written in the past year or two, I wrote a small utility library called go-haversine , which uses the Haversine Forumla to compute the distance between two points. This is super helpful when working with GPS data - but remember, this assumes everything’s squarely on the face of the planet.
A few weeks ago, I hacked up go-wmata , some golang bindings to the WMATA API. This is super handy if you are in the DC area, and want to interface to the WMATA data. As a proof of concept, I wrote a yo bot called @WMATA , where it returns the closest station if you Yo it your location. For hilarity, feel free to Yo it from outside DC. For added fun, and puns, I wrote a dbus proxy for the API as…
A while back, I found myself in need of some TLS certificates set up and issued for a testing environment. I remembered there was some code for issuing TLS certs in Docker, so I yanked some of that code and made a sensable CLI API over it. Thus was born minica ! Something as simple as minica tag@domain.tls domain.tld will issue two TLS certs (one with a Client EKU, and one server) issued from a…
I’ll be at HOPE 11 this year - if anyone else will be around, feel free to send me an email! I won’t have a phone on me (so texting only works if you use Signal!) Looking forward for a chance to see everyone soon!
A while back, I found myself in need of two webservers that would terminate TLS (with different rules). I wanted to run some custom code I’d written (which uses TLS peer authentication), and also nginx on port 443. The best way I figured out how to do this was to write a tool to sit on port 443, and parse TLS Client Hello packets, and dispatch to the correct backend depending on the SNI…
Back in 2014, Mako ran a Boston Iron Blogger chapter, where you had to blog once a week, or you owed $5 into the pot. A while later, I ran it (along with Molly and Johns ), and things were great. When I moved to DC, I had already talked with Tom Lee and Eric Mill about running a DC Iron Blogger chapter, but it hasn’t happened in the year and a half I’ve been in DC. This week, I make…
paultagskitchen : Ingredients 1 tsp soylent 1 tsp simple syrup 1 oz Palo Cortado sherry ½ oz Rosso Vermouth ½ oz Campari Assembly Combine Soylent and Simple Syrup. Create what I’m going to start to call “Soylent Syrup”. Enjoy that one, folks. Add ice to a rocks glass, pour Soylent Syrup over ice. Add Sherry, Vermouth and Campari. Stir. Garnish with an orange twist. Big thanks to Matthew Garrett…
Oatmeal Raisin Cookies : paultagskitchen : Ingredients ¾ cups soylent 1 ½ cups rolled oats ½ cup sugar (white & dark brown) ¼ cup flour ¾ cup raisins ½ tsp baking soda & powder ½ tsp salt 1 stick butter (roomtemp - NOT melted. Don’t even try that. Stop. You. I see you.) 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla Assembly Combine butter,…
Hello, World Been a while since my last blog post - things have been a bit hectic lately, and I’ve not really had the time. Now that things have settled down a bit – I’m in DC! I’ve moved down south to join the rest of my colleagues at Sunlight to head up our State & Local team. Leaving behind the brilliant Free Software community in Boston won’t be easy, but…
Slowly, but I’ll be in by Tonight, PST (early morning EST!) Hope to see everyone soon!
I’ll be there this year! Talks look amazing, I can’t wait to hit up all the talks. Looks really well organized! Talk schedule has a bunch that I want to hit, I hope they’re recorded to watch later! If anyone’s heading to PyGotham, let me know, I’ll be there both days, likely floating around the talks.
I’ll be giving a short talk on Debian and Docker! I’ll prepare some slides to give a brief talk about Debian and Docker, then open it up to have a normal session to talk over what Docker is and isn’t, and how we can use it in Debian better. Hope to see y'all in Portland!
Why oh why are they so hard to write? Even using the built in modules it is insanely hard to debug. Playing a bootsplash in X sucks and my machine boots too fast to test it on reboot. Basically, euch. All I wanted was a hackers zebra on boot :(
Hello, World! For those of you who enforce my Sundays on me (keep doing that, thank you!), I’ll be changing my Saturdays with my Sundays. That’s right! In this new brave world, I’ll be taking Saturdays off, not Sundays. Feel free to pester me all day on Sunday, now! This means, as a logical result, I will not be around tomorrow, Saturday. Much love.
More hardware adventures. I got my Dell XPS13. Amazing. The good news: This MacBook Air clone is clearly an Air competitor, and easily slightly better in nearly every regard except for the battery. The bad news is that the Intel Wireless card needs non-free (I’ll be replacing that shortly), and the touchpad’s driver isn’t totally implemented until Kernel 3.16. I’m currently…
A few interesting things happened after I got a macbook air. Firstly, I got a lot of shit from my peers and friends about it. This was funny to me, nothing really bothered me about it, but I can see this becoming really tiresome at events like hackathons or conferences. As a byproduct, there’s a strong feeling in the hardcore F/OSS world that Apple hardware is the incarnation of evil. As a…