I learn well by seeing an example and figuring out what’s going on rather than watching teacher led demonstrations or some other method. I’ve found Go by Example to be the closest thing to my favourite technical manual, the venerable Advanced Bash Guide. For me it’s a great quick reference to understand how apart of the language works when I first encounter it.
Author Archives: Gabriel
Password Best Practices
I’ve been doing a bit of research for a small project to update project management practices and to refresh my knowledge of 2019’s best practices.
This is a pretty decent high level summary of how to approach password strength.
Tienanmen Square on r/AskHistorians
There’s an interesting thread explaining some of the internal politics that were underneath the deadly Tienanmen Square protests 30 years ago in Beijing.
It’s worth a read, if only to better place what happened in the Chinese context.
I’m Inactive on Mastodon
I’m not much for social media, but on the off chance you want to connect with me, I do have a fairly inactive Mastodon account.
I may not reply immediately, but I do check in from time to time.
Using ssh-agent with Windows Subsystem for Linux
Update: I’ve since revised these instructions in this post.
This is fairly basic, but you never know what might be useful to somebody!
Due to the fact that WSL doesn’t bootstrap itself with a normal init/systemd process it can be a bit frustrating to work with SSH keys.
Thankfully the ssh-agent command is designed to set up an environment for key management without much hassle. The trivial method of doing this is to insert the following command into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile script:
# start ssh-agent eval `ssh-agent`
This will initialize a socket to manage your keys and you can then use the ssh-add command as you would on a normal Linux system.
For completeness, stick the following in your ~/.bash_logout script:
# unset ssh-agent ssh-agent -k
This will remove the socket and unset the environment so that your keys don’t remain loaded after you close your WSL session using exit or CTRL-D.
Linux
Halbstark
Don’t use ETS
The EFF has just published an article about why nobody should be using ETS. This is particularly timely given the recent finalization of TLS 1.3.
NPR Throughline – The Forgotten War
I just listened to the recent NPR Throughline podcast called The Forgotten War (S1:E03).
It’s an excellent summary of North Korea’s geopolitical history and how it relates to today’s news. I don’t think there’s anything that I would call new (if you’re interested in the topic), but it’s an excellent introduction that presents a reasonably serious overview of the topic without being heavy handed or simply propaganda.
I’m going to listen to the other podcasts this week, but so far I’m impressed at their choices of topics and this first episode (for me, third episode overall).
Using Certbot with Route 53 in Manual Mode
I’ve just written a quick and dirty guide on how to use Certbot on Debian 9 with Route 53. This is useful if you are trying to manage wildcard certificates and don’t want to, or can’t, screw around with managing the current state of the Route 53 plugin on Debian 9.
Without further ado: quay:wiki – Let’s Encrypt Usage Notes