Get a mix of old-school internet, hands-on tech advice, and deep thoughts from a systems engineer on topics ranging from pseudo-terminals to the latest tech. Also, you'll have fun reading it.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #39!
This issue includes a new short story. The idea behind this story came from a Capture The Flag (CTF) game I was playing a few weeks ago. One of the flags could be obtained using a reasoning similar to what is presented in the story. It also seems to be a potential security issue often overlooked in projects starting to use Kubernetes.
I won’t go into much detail now; I would prefer you to read the story, and we can discuss it after you’ve read it. But I would like you to apply what you learn from the story to other aspects of your day-to-day life. Question what you think, and you might be able to catch a glimpse of something that wasn’t obvious before.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #38!
Have you ever wished for magic to exist? If it did, would you notice it?
Maybe magic does exist, just in a different form than what you expected. Not in potions and spells, but in technology.
It seems far-fetched, but our technology mirrors aspects of magic. Instant communication
across long distances. Spells in the form of commands in a terminal. Programs as spirits doing our bidding.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #37!
I’ve been thinking about the age old disputes between engineers. Everyone has a preference on how the world should work. Some people prefer Chrome, others FireFox. Some people prefer vim, others are wrong. You know what I mean, there are fans and there are FANS.
Way back when, when I was a young lad who enjoyed listening to the sound of my 56k-modem attempting to connect to the “Information Superhighway”. That is what the Internet was called back then, for the uninitiated. There was one such debate, “should you use bash or should you use zsh?”
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Hello, and welcome to issue #35!
Have you been paying attention to all the AI craziness going on out there? It surprised me how fast the Stable Diffusion project is progressing. If you have not been following the craze, let me summarise. Stable diffusion is an AI model, open source that converts text to image. You give it a text prompt, and it generates an image. It is crazy. Play with it when you get a chance, or at least read the Stable Diffusion Public Release.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #34!
I haven’t been able to write much lately, but I’m still around. I’ve continued learning and exploring different technologies. In the last few months, I’ve spent some time doing DevOps work in AWS, helping write some Python Azure functions and even some Apex development. As you can tell, all over the place. But most of all, surviving the rainy season in Central America.
As part of my work, I had to design a client’s network. And because I love doing networking stuff, and I wanted to refresh my knowledge of subnetting. I ended up creating a subnetting Calculator. You can find it here:
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Hello, and welcome to issue #33!
It has been some time since the last issue of the newsletter, but here we are again. A lot of new and exciting things have been going on around the Tech world. For example, the release of Apple’s M1 Chip, and all the positive reviews. It’s a shame that I won’t be buying one just now. I had an emergency and had to get a new computer a couple of months back, so I’ll have to wait a little bit longer.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #32!
How are you doing? I hope everything is going well wherever you are. Things seem to have been settling down around here, so I’ve got more time to write. I completed my guide on macOS network programming in Swift. It covers three main frameworks:
- BSD Sockets
- Apple’s Network.framework
- SwiftNIO
With that, you should be able to build a wide range of network applications in macOS. As always, my guides are “pay what you want”. Including $0.00, so they are free, but if you find them useful and want to support me, you can buy them. Networks is a topic I always found fascinating, it is at the core of the Internet. But network programming also touches other areas like security, system administration, software engineering, and telecommunications. So it is a broad topic, but super fun to explore. Have a look at the guide and build some network applications, I bet you’ll have fun.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #31!
I’m still amazed by how the Internet has become such a fundamental part of society. I wonder what the world will look like 100 years from now. And all of this runs on protocols created decades ago. It’s truly fascinating.
As you can tell, many of the posts I write are related to networks, and this week is no exception. I believe that we all have some responsibility to try to make the world a better place, and we, as technology enthusiasts, can make it better by building the infrastructure for future communication. So maybe I can give back by teaching what I’ve learned about networks. Hopefully, all of us can be part of building a better future.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #30!
Sometimes I feel a little nostalgic of the “good old days” when the command-line received so much love. I still believe that it is the most useful tool if you want to increase your productivity. Using graphical interfaces feel sluggish compared to a fine-tuned terminal interface. Typing is faster than moving the mouse across the screen, especially if you have a big monitor. So when everyone is so excited about SwiftUI or React, or any other graphical interface framework, I go back to working on the command-line.
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Hello, and welcome to issue #29!
I hope you are well where ever you are. These are weird times we live in, a lot of terrible news around the globe. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make it better. Make sure you help improve your little part of the world, sometimes small gestures have a big impact on people’s lives (including our own).
These last few weeks, I’ve been busy working on a few open-source projects, trying to give back to the world of open-source. And having a good time doing it. The following are some of the project’s I’ve been contributing to. And a tool I’ve open-sourced for everyone to use:
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