Just a regular Joe.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • You have an opportunity. Give him a pre-installed Linux and a terminal, along with a page of commands that he can run to do neat things… including starting the GUI to watch his favourite (ideally pre-downloaded) videos, running some demos, etc.

    Don’t make it too easy, but not too hard (2 you said? Can type a few characters though…)… Add to it over the years, unlocking the power, and guiding him to discover more by himself.

    Kids won’t become tech savvy if we hand everything to them on a silver platter, with touch screens, controllers, and flashy games. It can be bland and boring, until they do something.

    It might just be the most life changing gift they ever receive.





  • I have two apparmor profiles targeting shell scripts, which can run other programs. One is “audit” (permissive with logging) and the other is “safe” (enforcing).

    The safe profile still has a lot of read access, but not to any directories or files with secrets or private data. Write access is only to the paths and files it needs, and I regularly extend it.

    For a specific program that should have very restricted network access, I have some iptables (& ip6tables) rules that only apply to a particular gid, and I have a setgid wrapper script.

    Note: This is all better than nothing, but proper segregation would be better. Running things on separate PCs, VMs or even unpriviliged containers.


  • Temporal is MIT licensed and comes with multi-tenant security features and its durable execution model is solid and scalability is phenomenal. They upsell to the cloud offering and the default OSS auth plugin is intentionally limited (you might want to develop your own if you self-host). You’d probably only look at the Temporal UI when debugging.

    Windmill is very cool, but it is only suitable for trusted teams due to its security model. If you want to be able to develop scripts and workflows in the web browser and run them together with trusted colleagues, on a schedule etc., then windmill might just be for you!



  • https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8367/is-the-term-open-source-a-trademark has a discussion about this.

    The short story is that the OSI failed to obtain a legal trademark in the US for the term “open source” (software), resulting in many opportunistic companies and individuals adopting the term popularized by the OSI (which was founded by Eric Raymond, Michael Tiemann and Bruce Perens).

    There was controversy at the time due to it being a business-friendly spin on the ideological “free software”, and I personally avoided using the term for many years as a result. Even without a trademark on the now generic term of Open Source, there is still value in the OSI brand and its stamp of approval on a license.

    Those who want to be crystal clear, should probably always say OSI Approved Open Source License.

    Now, I’m off to have a Nescafé Approved Coffee.



  • It is possible to wrap something like python into a single file, which is extracted (using standard shell tools) into a tmpdir at runtime.

    You might also consider languages that can compile to static binaries - something like nim (python like syntax), although you could also make use of nimscript. Imagine nimscript as your own extensible interpreter.

    Similarly, golang has some extensible scripting languages like https://github.com/traefik/yaegi - go has the advantage of easy cross compiling if you need to support different machine architectures.