What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I wanted a place to journal wines and share with friends, so I made one: Chateau St. Émilion.

You're the second to see it. My sister was the first.

Personal logs are private to yourself and the groups you share them with. Guest reviews and articles are public. The web site is for fun -- don't take it too seriously, but if you'd like to contribute a guest review or article, let me know.

(Yes, I know the name is pretentious. Also, I'm a programmer, not a designer, so please cut a little slack.)

I'm attempting to monitize my side project (first time, wish me luck!). It's a daily work tracker I've always wished existed - offline, no data in the cloud (unless you want it), no account required, day focused, automatic movement of tasks not completed, power-user friendly, and infinitely nestable/collapsible. I know a lot about software, a little bit about running a business, but nothing about the nitty gritty stuff it takes to actually launch a product.. so that's been fun figuring all that out. If you want to check it out:

Edit : url redacted for future Googling privacy

If anyone would like the "pro" features just message me here or DM and I'll send you a code to make it free (feedback much appreciated!)

Since I've been laid off, I finally have time to work on my static website generator called Markerator. It ingests markdown files, and images, and spits out a website that is pure HTML and CSS, no javascript. I recently added Open Graph support so that links appear correctly as cards when shared on social media, and am just about ready to push a big set of changes that add unit testing, as well as user-definable pagination for the News/Updates/Blog pages.

My next steps are to document the CSS format so that people can add their own themes, as well as come up with some more default themes that ship with Markerator. Once that is done, I'm going to write some more documentation that walk users step-by-step through using it, as well as how to automate deployment using Github actions. That'll be the 1.0.0 release.

I'm finally feeling inspired again. If you want to see what Markerator can produce, I use it for my personal website, Bengineering. Markerator probably isn't ready for primetime yet, but I'm finally getting there. Check it out if you're morbidly curious.

For work I’m tryna make a replicable Azeroth core deployment that uses llm backends for player bots so we can pull data from the eks cluster and the llm interactions.

The state of building secure software is rife with pitfalls. It's super easy to forget some flag or config, unintentionally leave some door open or not act quickly enough on the latest CVEs. You can even do most things right, but due to the tech stack you build on having vulnerabilities attackers can exfiltrate data in unexpected ways or gain a foothold to execute arbitrary commands in your infrastructure.

Over a few months I've been building a stack for secure software. It strictly limits what you can do and locks down the execution environment. At the core sits an orchestrator that listens for https connections. It sniffs the connection for the domain to pass the connection too and starts a VM in tens of milliseconds that's associated with that domain. The VM processes the request and sticks around for a few seconds (since requests are often "bursty") after which it gets stopped.

The app VM is very limited; no file system and no network stack (the request/response is mediated over vsock). Each app runs on boot without any other binaries installed so you'd have to pull off a hypervisor escape from within a unikernel in order to gain the a permanent foothold. The VM boots with certificates it uses for the https-connection so the orchestrator only ever sees the encrypted traffic. I ended up needing to make calls to external services so for that I mediated the calls through the orchestrator. The orchestrator checks an app specific allow-list to see if that ip/host is explicitly trusted before setting up a TCP connection. So the app is prevented to talk to anyone which you haven't explicitly allowed.

The above approach works great for stateless servers! But, most apps need a database. You could set this up via allowing connections to an external db, but I figured it would be nice with a similarly locked down approach to persiatence. So I ended up creating a small Linux application that starts on boot and launches postgres. This VM has access to an encrypted disk, but again no network. Instead it just runs on the same host as the VM app. The app-db communication is mediated over vsock (needed a small patch to postgres for this), which incidentally removes all network latency! I ended up setting up an encrypted export of the WAL and feed that asynchronously into a standby postgres on another node. That way data loss is unlikely, but I'm not sure if I should keep this part. The redundancy is nice, but it's quite a bit of code necessary to mediate the transfer and also a bunch to handle failovers etc... I might end up slimming the whole project down a bit.

Still working on my proof of human project, one part is easy, the key management is hard :(

I got sidetracked by problem on my homelab network and then used some AI to slop out a DHCP/DNS and Zeroconf integrated service. Adding NTP next. It's actually been a bit better than I expected.

I have a large collection of 320 kbps mp3 files that I sync to my phone every now and then with a bash script using ifuse and rsync. It's a 64 GB Iphone, and I'm running out of space. I've talked about the Opus encoder before, to encode mostly spoken material (Star Trek TNG episode audio at very low bitrates), but it achieves much better quality than mp3 at low bitrates for music as well, from what I read basically transparent at 128 kbps VBR for most purposes. I did some transcoding tests to see if there was any noticable loss at this bitrate and was again very impressed by its performance.

So I made a script which goes through all my mp3 files and transcodes them using ffmpeg, placing the transcoded files in a separate, mirrored directory tree. The original files I have almost all embed album art as well (mostly thanks to Picard), which I couldn't get ffmpeg to transfer, but I could extract it with ffmpeg and then attach it to the new Opus files using a tool called opustags for dealing with opus metadata. I've not figured out how to get replaygain metadata transferred correctly or if ffmpeg deals with that automatically, so I guess that's one last piece of the puzzle.

I get the nagging urge to source flac versions of my library, but in practice I don't think the re-encoding matters for my purposes. Listened through Swan Lake from these new encodings today and couldn't tell the difference from my mp3 sources.

I am using VLC on the Iphone which has a very annoying issue with bluetooth headphones though. At the beginning of a new track it will cut out a second or so of audio. They're aware and it seems it'll be dealt with by the next version, but they don't release often. Moving those files over to foobar2000 now to see if that does better.

I use a similar syncing script for photos. My ideal situation is something like back in the Palm days when all the documents you wanted to transfer between the PC and PDA were synchronized in one step.

Forever working on my rsync script to make sure my laptop, desktop, and servers all have the most updated files. Typically works without an issue but before recently I have been manually upsyncing and downsyncing.

I've continued the backporting of one of my Minecraft mods from last week, though this has been slowed by me making a new mod for TiMaSoMo (which I'll talk about more in the update topics for that). I'll be spending the weekends working on that mod, and the week days working on this one.

I finished the port to 1.21.11. It's all working just fine, but the biggest challenge is yet to come. I've had a taste of it so far, but 1.21.1 was released an entire year before 1.21.11 so there were a lot of changes to the game, and lots of them in rendering. I'm going to be saving those for last. Mostly my process is picking a file and then trying to get rid of the compiler errors one-by-one, and I don't know how many there are in total since IntelliJ isn't listing more than 101 problems in the problems tab.