captainepoch's log

About donations for Husky, and other FOSS projects

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

During my time being the maintainer of Husky a lot of people asked me where they could donate money to support¹ the work I do in the application, and every single time I replied that I do not accept money for working on one FOSS project. Most of the time people reply back, saying they will wait just in case, in the future, I change my mind. This is the reason I decided to write this.

NOTE: this is my personal take into this topic, and you are free to (not) agree with my opinion.

It is just one Android application

I am not a big contributor to the FOSS ecosystem as a whole. I may have contributed in the past with some input in an issue or a small PR changing a couple of things, but overall, I do not contribute as much as I would like to (topic for another post).

The reasons I started working on Husky were:

a1ba already stopped working on the application when I started using Pleroma.
I am an Android developer and I could do some work into the application to improve it.
I finally could have a project I can actually contribute and keep it as a FOSS project.

It was, mostly, selfish reasons, to begin with, but over time I noticed that I liked doing it, so I kept at it. That is the only FOSS project I currently maintain and work (actively) in my (little) spare time.

Money (mostly) equals to expectations

I do not link the time I spend on Husky to money. I would love to be able to work full-time as a FOSS developer, and maintain 2-3 applications² that are useful to people, but the world does not work like that, and my job already takes 1/3 of my time (as it does to anyone). Not everyone is lucky.

I always felt that giving me money in exchange for working on Husky makes the person giving me money think he/she can and may tell me what to do in the application. I do not want to feel that way, because that is a job, and I work in Husky because I want to, not to earn some side money.

Getting monetary donations

I think, at this point, the reader can feel that I do not really want to get money from him/her, but if that was not enough, let me write about other things that makes me not wanting you to donate money to me.

Taxes

Spain has a very bad tax code, and you have to pay (high) taxes for everything. Stripe and PayPal, as far as I could figure out, asks you for a VAT number, which is the registered number of your company/your personal ID. For privacy reasons I will not submit any of my personal data to those services.

I do not have a company registered in Spain, and I will never have one (again, high taxes for everything).

Cryptocurrencies are not a feasible option either:

I do not posses the means to exchange <insert here any cryptocurrency> into Euro (I am not going to send my ID [NIF in Spain] to any exchange company).
Taxes.

Thus, accepting donations is not feasible for me at this moment.

Open Collective

I spent some time researching about Open Collective. It seemed a suitable option to receive donations. But when I set up the collective for Husky, I had to apply to a Fiscal Host.

After looking for one that could suit Husky, I found two, and I did not have the requirements in place to get them to be my Fiscal Host, thus making Open Collective another discarded option.

One of them required to have a minimum of 100 stars in the repository, like it is an important metric of some sort… *sigh*.

Ko-fi and Liberapay

Although both platforms (and I am sure, more like them) are perfect candidates for getting donations, both requires a Stripe and/or a PayPal account, therefore rendering them not suitable, as I stated above the problems with both payment processors.

How can I support Husky then?

I told to many users, over time, that I do not need the money for Husky. I already have some devices for testing and the Android emulator, and my salary is more than enough money for me (at the moment of publishing this post).

If you want to support Husky:

Open issues at the issue tracker with as much information about the problem as possible.

You have a template to help you with this, and if you consider the template does not have enough fields, add them.
Help with current opened issues, as I might not be able to reproduce the issue.
Help with crashes sending the trace via email (enable the “Crash Reporter” in “Settings”). In the future this will be replaced with some service more suitable than emails.
Help testing the application for new developments (more about this in the future).

I am setting up a Matrix room for this purpose, but if an issue arises from testing, it must be opened at the issue tracker linked above.
Help translating the application.

As you can see, money is not the only way to contribute to the project. And you do not need to be a developer to do any of that stuff.

Closing down

There is enough reason to not accept donations and I think, for now, I will not accept them, because things related with money, in countries from the EU, are a mess.

I prefer to take my time and do things properly (or the best I can with my abilities), and hope Husky (or any FOSS application I maintain) is useful to you, my dear reader.

Thank you all! ↩︎
Or more, if possible. ↩︎

Status update, October 2023

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

It has been a while since I wrote my last status post.

The truth is that I do not want to keep writing this kind of posts. The reason is that it turned my blog in almost a “Status update, ” feed of posts that are not that really interesting to read.

So I decided to stop writing those posts. This will be the last one, with an exception that I might write one if something really interesting happens (which is not something common).

I might keep writing the yearly recap, because it is a good way to make a retrospective of the year.

I want to focus to write interesting stuff about topics I find interesting It might be about privacy issues, or Android stuff, or something I find amazing with C or Go… I know I said this many times, but seeing the feed this last week made me realize that it is something it needs to be done.

You can follow my shenanigans at my Fediverse account if you are interested, or contact me via email (check it at adol.pw/contact)

That would be all, see you!

Status update, August 2023

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

August (or summer, I may say) is a slow month.

UnifiedPush for Husky is almost done. I am only a few changes to release a new beta for testing, and I will look for a group of people to test this feature before releasing it as a stable version. Once this is released, I will focus on the another big refactor I want to make in Husky, expect news soon.

On non-Husky related news, I am very happy that, after paying an email provider for two months, it has been a blast. The freedom of creating aliases for you main email to sign up for services while not disclosing your personal account is one of the best things (among others, like using your own domain). I really recommend that you get your email with your domain, whether it is paying an email provider or self-hosting, because it will not make dependant of the domain of a tech giant (like Gmail).

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, July 2023

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This past month I focused my attention working on UnifiedPush support for Husky. I am pleased to say that it is almost done for a beta, despite some stuff being added later on. I will seek for a closed group of testers in the future.

On more programming-related stuff, I migrated one application to Jetpack Compose and the experience was interesting. I still have to learn a lot of stuff about it, but I would love to migrate Husky to it.

Lastly, I have started testing Neovim as my main editor. I was an Emacs user, but some issues with it made me give a try to this. I am using LazyVim as my configuration, with some custom options, and up until this point, I am loving it. In fact this post was written using Neovim.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, June 2023

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This monthly status came a bit late, but nevertheless, here it is.

Husky-related news, the implementation for UnifiedPush support is going well. Husky is able now to get notifications not polling each N minutes but using a UnifiedPush provider from now on. That means, if you do not install a valid UnifiedPush provider, you will not get any push notifications.

Also, instance capabilities was added as a feature into Husky, enabling (in the future) the ability to set up features on Husky that are only enabled in one instance, but not in others, or just setup proper limits (i.e. the max. items you can upload while composing a status). For now it is only at the “Edit profile” view, but more to come.

Outside of Husky but related to programming, I am looking for projects to start contributing in my (so little) spare time. I saw that nowadays having contributions on projects can make you a candidate worth hiring in some companies, and I think it is also an opportunity to give back something to the FOSS community.

I also have another project related to Jetpack Compose that a friend of mine suggested, and I am taking it seriously because it could be useful for someone in the future, when Jetpack Compose is more extended. For now it is an idea, but time will tell.

On other non-programming news, I had the opportunity to make an email address with my domain, so I took it. My email is now updated at the Contact page, along the GPG key. I still have to migrate some accounts, but it is something I am doing one by one.

I want to give my thanks, yet again, to Amolith, for being my email provider for a long time, and being a great admin when I had any problems whatsoever. Thank you, man!

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Social media use

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

You might read this in some social media profiles:

Opinions are my own.
Opinions are my own and do not represent my employer’s.
The opinions expressed here do not reflect my employer’s.

And similar lines on those profiles.

It truly baffles me that people have to specify that in their personal social media profiles. A profile that their employers did not pay them to have. It is not your corporate profile, it is not an account that your employer requires you to have. It is your account.

When you start working for someone you have to separate what it is your personal and professional profile. Your social media accounts do not belong to your employer, unless your employer requires you to make one (for some reason), in which case that profile should be dedicated to what employer requires you to do.

If you are a public figure, let’s say a software developer, you might post something from your employer from time to time, because you wrote something on its blog, or because you find something interesting your employer did, but that does not mean you express any alignment whatsoever with your employer. Same goes for a journalist, for example, or a writer, or even CEOs.

If you write a blog (like what you are reading now) and you want to use your personal account to promote it, whether it is a post with some (controversial) opinion, a technical post or a story, again, it is your blog, your personal social media account, therefore it should not matter what you wrote, or who or what you are criticizing.

Doing a repost (or retweet or whatever terminology is used in your preferred social media network) is not endorsement of anything. It just means you found something interesting and you wanted to share it inside the social network itself to your followers. You do not need to mention in your description/biography.

Your personal opinions about any topic are exactly that: your personal opinions. Companies should not be able to force you to have an opinion you must agree with, no matter what. Because nobody agree with 100% of the opinions expressed by any company (nor should you).

If your employer wants to force you to agree upon its opinions, somehow, make a separate, corporate-focused account to express those. Although, if you are forced to agree upon those opinions, you might want to rethink if that is good for you.

Your job and your personal life are two separate things. You should use your personal profile as exactly that, your personal space, and nothing else.

Status update, February 2023

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This montly status came a bit late, but nevertheless, here it is.

I am working on Husky to add more stuff that allows the app to setup itself some features for different ActivityPub backends. This is a very WIP task that I am doing carefuly and I would love some testing from users to debug possible issues.

For the 1.5.0 stable version of Husky I would like to rework the push notifications stack, since a ton of users complain about battery draining and I think providing another way of getting push notifications could be benefitial. For now, I removed old code from Husky regarding the views (Kotlin synthetics) and the first beta of this release will contain that and a couple of things more.

I also started to work on moving the Marvel app to Compose (there is nothing pushed yet) and working on a series of posts for the blog regarding how I handled the transition. I would love to do more in Compose, but time is limited.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, January 2023

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello there!

From the programming side of things, I kept working in Husky to release the 1.4.0 version. This release contains, among other things, a migration from Dagger to Koin and the update of the app for Android 13. I am happy with the result, and with this, the idea is to keep adding features to the app while providing support at the same time.

I have ambitious plans for Husky for this year, and I hope I manage to achieve those objectives in 2023.

I am also happy to report that, since the change of forges to Codeberg, people started to report bugs, and communication with users has improved, so that is something I celebrate.

In the meantime, I am also working on improving my Emacs configuration. Nothing new to report for now, I just keep trying new things to add or remove stuff in Emacs.

Before ending 2022, I wrote the 2022 recap, where I lay some objectives for this year. There is a lot of things I would like to do and to improve, and I hope to achieve those this year.

On an off-topic point of the post, I noticed the other day that, since I changed most of my applications to a light theme, stress in my eyes reduced substantially. I combine a mix of dark themes in a few apps (i.e. the terminal) with light themes (i.e. Emacs, Android Studio), and I noticed that my eyes do not get tired so soon, that I can look at the screen for longer period of times. Of course this does not mean I am going to stay looking at a screen more time, but it is something my eyes thank me for.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

2022 recap

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello there!

This post will be the last one this year. I planned on doing it a bit earlier, but life get in the way.

Last year I posted the 2021 recap, in which I detailed some of the things I went through 2021. Nevertheless to say, this year went not as I planned either.

Professional development

This past year was one in which my professional career was kept almost at the same spot as last year. I did not really learn new stuff, which is a bad thing since this world evolves within the minute.

I tried to put time into a project I have for this case (captainepoch/marvelapi), but other things in life with more priority took my time away and it did not happen in the end. For this year, I want to revamp this project, complete the TODO list, and apply all the knowledge I get there into Husky, or from Husky into this project.

For example, I want to touch some things of the architecture, I also want to migrate from Koin to Dagger Hilt, and at some point, I would love to add Compose to the project and keep some parts of the application with Compose, and some with the traditional XML layouts (or just migrate to a full-Compose application).

Speaking of Husky, this year was a bit of a mess, from my end, as the maintainer of the project. But I learnt from my mistakes, and for 2023 I have a new point of view of things and the project will continue its path with interesting stuff I have in my mind.

Other programming stuff

This year I also started again to revamp my Emacs configuration. There are great all-in-one solutions for this, like Doom Emacs if you do not want to deal yourself with a ton of stuff, but since I already had a base, I only needed to review some of it and improve it (or remove it).

At this moment, except for a few things here and there and the Python configuration, I can say I am enjoying using Emacs.

So VSCodium is now my second editor, but I plan to ditch it. I hate Electron apps.

Changing forges

This year was also the year I migrated from SourceHut to Codeberg. As I mentioned in the December monthly status, the big reason for this change was that I did not manage to be comfortable with the email-based workflow. I still think that SourceHut has a lot of potential, and you should give it a try and find if it suits you or not.

As I also mentioned, I will keep my account there and provide economic support (paying my account) because I want the project to be successful and alive.

I also want to give a big “Thank you!” to Drew DeVault and the whole SourceHut community. They were nothing but helpful with everything I asked and they did not hesitate in spend a few minutes replying my (more than noob) questions. I hope I am able to participate more in the IRC channels in the future.

The future of this blog

In the past recap I said I wanted to write more in my blog than monthly status updates. Well, I failed in this, because I did not have a high number of topics to talk about.

For this year I will try to write those 12 posts (monthly status updates does not count) from different topics. They could be about privacy, personal opinions, technical posts related to any programming.

Things in life

This year I also had my very personal objectives to reach, such as weight loss, reading more books and comics, play more games, and so on.

I am able to report that I satisfied all of them, and this year, I have more (some of them are a second part).

2023, here we go

I do not have so much to say from this year. It is been a hectic one, for sure, specially in life.

I wish you a very happy new year, and I hope you managed to fulfil your 2022 New Year Resolutions and made your 2023 New Year Resolutions!

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, December 2022

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This past month it did not happen a lot, but nevertheless, here is the last status update of the year.

On the programming side of things, I went back to work on Husky. The project received some patches and I am glad to see people getting into the email workflow within the project. The app still needs a refactor for some stuff people are asking to add into the project, but I am confident enough to be able to manage all of that, in time. When? Soon(tm).

On more stuff related to the programming world, I also managed to get back to Emacs and revamp my config to feel comfortable enough using it as my main editor. I am not going to lie, it was a bit of a challenge, but nevertheless, everything is working fine. There is still some stuff to fix, but for what I do on a daily basis, it works flawlessly. In fact, this is the first post written in the blog with my new Emacs config.

Since my Emacs config has aspell support, I also fixed some typos in the title of the statuses posts, and it might triggered your RSS feed if you have my blog added to it. Sorry about that!

I also added a new section of blogs I recommend reading, and that list may get longer as soon as I discover a new blog I like reading. You can access to it by going to adol.pw/friends.

For the next year I planned to contribute to more FOSS projects, specially if they are Android applications (since is my main programming platform), but I also would like to get outside of my comfort zone and contribute to other projects. I will document my process through that experience too, since it could be useful for first-time contributors who do not take the first step.

And, before you go, an important announcement: I will migrate all my repositories and projects from Sourcehut to Codeberg in the following days (including Husky). Over the last year I tried to make myself comfortable with the email workflow, but over time, I felt that workflow is not suitable for me.

I do still believe, however, that Sourcehut is an impressive ecosystem, and that you should try it to learn another way of working, you might even change it to your normal workflow. My post Why did I choose SourceHut? still applies.

However, I am not leaving entirely the platform. Because I want Sourcehut to be a successful forge, I will continue using it with some repositories and I will continue paying my account.

I want to thank Drew DeVault and the whole Sourcehut community for always being there when I have doubts or questions, and for being a healthy community of hackers.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, November 2022

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This has been another stalled month in terms of productivity. There is nothing interesting to tell you about, but nevertheless, I wrote the mandatory status update.

I am looking for some FOSS project(s) to contribute. Given that my main development platform is Android, I am looking into issues I can contribute on applications I use on a daily basis (i.e. NewPipe, Husky). I am also a bit conflicted myself with whether it is alright for me to review code from other people or not (in an email or a PR) given that I am not a maintainer, nor a collaborator, of most of the apps I use.

I use a lot of Free and Open Source Software and it would be good to give back to the community somehow. I know that there are more issues than only code, but it is what I do.

In the previous status, I wrote:

Another new is that I am going to try to write more stuff about technical topics […]

I have a couple of posts in my backlog as ideas to write in the future. At this moment, one of those ideas is being drafted: a post regarding Android and the wave of using the Clean Architecture for Android applications (although it could be applied to any platform where it is used). Not really a technical post, but related to it.

I also updated the theme of this website because of a suggestion given to me at the ##sr.ht.pub IRC channel (at Libera.chat). Now, in every post (not page) you will see, at the right of the date, the main page linked. That is because someone told me that going back to the index was not intuitive, so you can go back easily from now on.

Regarding this blog, I also decided to delete the description field of all my posts. I do not see its usefulness, and all of my posts will not have it from now on. Old posts will be modified to delete the field as well. Pages are included.

On november 11th, 2022, I updated the Privacy Policy for this website to reflect that it is hosted at SourceHut Sites from now on until further notice. The gist of it is: I do not collect any data and do not have cookies or any tracking software in my website (nor I intend to). This is the commit regarding this change.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Why are we not using free, decentralized platforms?

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the last week there was a huge influx of users joining the Fediverse¹ in the wake of Elon Musk buying Twitter. Whether if this is something good or bad is a topic I am not going to get into in this post because it is out of the scope of it, but I will have to mention something related to it in another section of the post.

The “network effect” of Twitter (and others)

Twitter has been, for the past years, one of the default social media platforms where, among others, programmers and their communities resided to communicate with their users. This made Twitter the de facto platform for publishing news, software releases, and even giving support to users.

After a long time using a “free” platform to publish content, who would want to go back to the old RSS feeds, or mailists, right? Well, it turns out that a lot of people had Twitter just because they could not get their news using more traditional methods². Twitter was the source for everything.

This, of course, drove Twitter to serve ads and to increase its data collection. For example, why does the Twitter app need to collect which applications a user has installed? It does not. And yet, it does.

If you want to check this out, go to the Privacy Policy of Twitter, section 1.2, at “Device information” (Wayback Machine link).

This behavior can be extended to any social media platform nowadays, whether it is Twitter or Facebook.

The Fediverse

After the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, a lot of people move away from Twitter to a more open ecosystem. That is when Pleroma, Mastodon and more come along.

Pleroma and Mastodon are both Twitter clones based on the ActivityPub protocol. They enable users to interact with each other, from their own instances or using one already running by a third-party.

The fediverse offers decentralization, freedom and privacy³ for users joining the different instances of the software that comprises this universe.

But since a ton of new users moved to one or other instance, I cannot but think that they did not really care (at all) about the ecosystem in the first place. A lot of people in the FOSS world (myself included) have been trying to get people into this ecosystem for a long time, and yet we were received with slogans like “But everybody is at <insert here platform>”. The same excuse.

It is a weird feeling. It is like a banter coming from a lot of people just because another rich person bought a company. So what? It happens from time to time. And be honest for a second: Twitter sucks.

Privacy within the Fediverse

The openess of the platforms and the software made almost imposible for a sysadmin to reach the same status of advertising into the platforms. None of them support adding advertising into their software, you would have to patch it (and maintain a copy yourself with those patches) in order to add ads.

You can easily, however, add tracking scripts (such as Google Analytics) because that involves a small patch easily maintainable.

Another thing that people tend to forget is that you are putting your trust with your data into another third-party (often a couple of sysadmins). This does not guarantee any privacy if those persons are not trustworthy. The software that runs the Fediverse already collects as minimum data as possible, but still.

And also everything you posts, if not marked as a DM, is public somehow. Even the followers-only posts. If someone follows you, (s)he can see what you posted (or you have your account locked but accept a follow request).

Monetization and long-term instances

One of the problems that seems to give people the feeling of failure is that the servers are often ran by one person, and that person has to pay for everything. If the instance increases its use, it means more hardware requirements (such as RAM and storage), so maybe the person running that instance takes it down after a period of time running it.

Bear in mind that Twitter was “free” because of the advertising⁴ done into the platform. Owners of the instances often do not ask for donations, but it is nice if people throw some money at them to keep things running. Remember: people who run this kind of software are not rich, precisely.

To set an example: the instance mastodon.world did not have a donation page. But since the influx of new users, the administation chose to open a OpenCollective page for users to donate money and keep things running, and it is doing pretty well.

Bear in mind that, in this ecosystem, you are not the product.

Moderation of content

One thing I saw this past few days is people asking for heavy moderation of the content, specially with other federated instances. New users coming from Twitter seem to want to be under the same umbrella of heavy moderation of content that they do not see fit in their description of what it should be allowed to be posted.

The software running your instance already provides the tools to deal with this. You can mute people or whole instances, instead of running to your admin to defederate. You must have in mind that federation is what makes the fediverse.

Also, if you ask to defederate with one instance, people who want to follow from that instance and/or interact with people will not be able to do, same as you if you want to follow someone in that (defederated) instance.

There are, of course, cases in which moderation and defederation are in place, such as posting CP/CSAM. That should not be allowed by any chance. I even suggest to report that to the authorities.

Mute that person -or those persons- that you do not like, or even the whole instance, and move on. Stop asking for heavy moderation in the name of others, when you are the only one wanting that. That stifles openness of respectful discussions.

Recommended instances to join

I am not really a big fan of recommending instances, because I do not really know how the moderation team is on them, with which instances they federate or not, or just how well maintained is the instance itself.

But, since there are a lot of people joining lately, I would like them to join a couple of instances where you can express as free as the platform allows (some of them might have closed registrations at the moment of this post, go and check them back from time to time):

stereophonic.space is the latest instance I joined, and I have been a member since a lot of time. The admins are cool guys and they can help you with any problem you have there.
nixnet.social is another cool instance, with a good and thoughtful moderation team.
blob.cat is another comfy instance, a bit moderated, but very open to discussions if you are respectful with eachother. Also, blobcats.

You will have, of course, comply with the legal requirements such as not posting anything illegal under the country the instance is hosted (they add that at the “About” page, normally).

The expected behavior on all of those instances is: do not be a dick and have fun!

PS.: Those are a few of the hugh quantity of instances out there.

What does the future hold?

What the future holds for the Fediverse is unknown. This is something that is new and exciting, and people seem to have a good time while interacting with others.

There are, of course, any kind of people there, and you should curate your experience there a bit to enjoy to the fullest.

I suggest to you, a new user to the Fediverse, that you should join a very open-minded instance and explore the Fediverse to the fullest, so you can see you will not miss propietary social platforms (with time, of course).

I only talked here about Pleroma and Mastodon, but the Fediverse is more than those:

Pixelfed: Instagram clone.
PeerTube: YouTube clone.
Friendica: Facebook clone.
BookWyrm: GoodReads clone.

And more that may come in the future.

A set of applications using the ActivityPub API design to be able to talk with eachother. It is a decentralized ecosystem. ↩︎
RSS feeds, mailists, newsletters, IRC channels and topics, forums… ↩︎
In a sense. Check the section Privacy within the Fediverse. ↩︎
As a monetization method to keep things running. ↩︎

Status update, October 2022

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This month has nothing special to log into a status update.

I ended my maintenance of Husky once and for all. There is not any special reason for this, only I do not have time to invest in it and I have another projects that require more attention from my end. I will contribute to FOSS projects from time to time if I can.

Another new is that I am going to try to write more stuff about technical topics (mostly regarding Android development). I will keep writing opinion articles and such, but I also want to add more techcnical topics into my feed. Stay tunned for them!

To end the status, I want you to know that this blog is now served from SourceHut Sites and I am very happy with the change, since it was really easy to migrate everything.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, September 2022

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

The past month was not a really espectacular one, since I took some time off of everything (not only programming, but also in life) to rest. Work has been excruciantly tiresome and it was something needed (even at this moment it is).

In Husky-related news I started two (big) changes. First one is the UnifiedPush provider for push notifications. I started adding it into Husky, so current and new users would be able to get notifications through a proper provider, rather than a custom implementation of this kind of thing. The idea is to allow only push notifications through this, and if the user does not have any push provider, there will be not any notifications (thus saving battery).

The other (big) change is removing Dagger from Husky for Koin. This is something that does not affect the user, more for developers. The reason is that, in time, Husky will become a single-activity application, and then, the library simple-stack will be used for navigation and injecting dependencies, since it has a service locator integrated in it, thus making Dagger unnecessary, and Koin is the middle-ground for this migration. Also, because the current Dagger implementation is a big messy, it allows me to clean code and organize the DI in a better way.

All of this changes are planned for the 1.4.0 version. There is not any ETA whatsoever, it will be ready when it is done.

On other development news, this past week the application andOTP is not longer maintained. I think this application is important and should not be left behind, and that is why I am thinking on making my own copy and try to keep it stable and working (if it does not take much time).

For more “tech” related news, I am migrating my website and my IRC bouncer to SourceHut. I consider that SourceHut is mature enough to handle this stuff, and because I already pay for my srht account, it does not make really sense to self-host this when I can do the same with srht.site and chat.sr.ht. If I even leave SourceHut or it just stop providing those services, I will be back with my VPS provider to self-host this again.

On non-tech news, I started to meditate. I have been researching about this topic for a while, given the benefits it has for the body and the mind, and I decided to give it a try, since I need to sleep and, lately, I have not been able to rest properly. The idea is to go from 5 minutes at night to half an hour, and if possible, also in the mornings (so one hour each day). The goal is not only for sleeping, but also to be relaxed and lose the added stress of the day. I will let you know how it goes.

That would be all, see you in the next update!

Status update, July 2022

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

I would like to start this post by saying a massive “Thank you!” to all the users and collaborators that worked with me while maintaining Husky. It was a great experience working with people willing to take their time to give a helping hand with the project. And a massive recognition to a1batross, the previous maintainer, who did an amazing job with Husky.

That being said, I am out of the Fediverse, possibly, once and for all. People have the problem that they want the stuff done by their way, instead of understanding that FOSS maintainers do that for free, and I do not think taking the effort to send an email while getting software for literally nothing is even a fair price, yet it is the only thing I asked to the users of Husky reporting issues: do it over email.

Husky will need another maintainer. The repository is open for anyone to copy and push it wherever you like.

I am done dealing with entitled people. It is not worth the effort. Maybe I will be back in the future to the Fediverse, maybe not, it is something I did not even think about, but if I do, I will do things differently.

Drew DeVault wrote a post called The Fediverse can be pretty toxic with which I agree. Also, he wrote bleh, reflecting his view of people and the relation with SourceHut and himself. I wrote this post, titled Why did I choose SourceHut?, that contains my reasons for using SourceHut as my preferred Git platform over others.

This, of course, does not mean I am going to stop being active. I will continue contributing to FOSS projects, as far as my spare time allows me. Whether if they will be Android applications or not it still is something I am thinking about.

This post also puts a final in the series Maintaining my first project. This post can be also considered the sixth and final part of those.

For those who come from the Fediverse to read this and want to keep in touch with me, you have all my contact details at adol.pw/contact.

On other news, I deleted all my repositories from GitHub. I am not going to keep hosting any code there (if I contribute to a project there I do not have any alternative). I do not think that GitHub is a Git forge anymore, instead it is a social network. Also, I do not consider GitHub Copilot an ethical tool, trained with our code and not recognizing that the code it writes can be considered a derived work. Lawers called that “suggestions”.

Drew DeVault wrote a good article about GitHub Copilot called GitHub Copilot and open source laundering. You should check it.

I understand that having the code in the open in another Git forges allows Copilot to be trained too. My opinion stands.

Now, I have my code in two places:

SourceHut, my main Git forge. You can check my repositories at git.sr.ht/~captainepoch.
Codeberg, my mirror Git forge. You can check my repositories at codeberg.org/captainepoch.

I choose to do this like that because people tend to like more a GitHub-like hosting, and thus, they prefer to look at the code in one like that.

The question “But why?” can be answered with this: I find that we should use as many FOSS platforms and FOSS software for FOSS projects as we can. Sometimes we cannot do that (for example, an iOS application can be FOSS, but Xcode and MacOS are not FOSS), but in the extent of our posibilities, we should.

If you are a FOSS programmer, I would recommend to you to take time to think about this kind of stuff, and migrate to Codeberg, a GitHub-like Git hosting, based on Gitea (and with all the code of the platform hosted there).

Drew DeVault wrote an article called It is important for free software to use free software infrastructure. I think it is a good article to understand this point of view from a long time FOSS maintainer.

Outside of the programming stuff, I started to play Minetest. It is a FOSS Minecraft clone turned into a Voxel games engine. It has a ton of mods, and you can create an almost 100% clone of vanilla Minecraft. You should check it out.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

PS.: I quote a lot of articles written by Drew DeVault because I consider him a very good FOSS maintainer with a good knowledge on ethics and issues on those that I do not posses. Plus, I learnt a lot from him when I started with SourceHut, reading his posts at his website and talking with him on IRC.

If you can recommend more blogs from people like Drew, please, send me a link to them, I would love to add them to my RSS reader.

Documentation at the right place

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When programming a piece of software, whether it is an application, a library, a set of scripts, it is always important to add some documentation to the project, specially if it is a self-hosted tool (with an API), or a library that makes some tasks easier for other programmers. A good documentation not only helps future programmers with your software, but it also helps by solving questions people can have, thus freeing you to reply them in your support channels.

But sometimes programmers do not put the documentation at the right place. An example would be an Android library called sandwich. I stumbled upon it the other day, and when I started to look into the project, I saw the README. The documentation for the whole library is at the README.

A README for a project should contain:

A short description indicating the scope of the project.
Links to the documentation of the project, not only the API (if it exists) but also how to install/deploy it and a basic initial setup. An advanced documentation should be provided as well if needed.
Links to the documentation about how to contribute to the project (not only with code but also reporting issues).
Links to the support channels.
(Optional) Links to the social networks you use to announce updates for the project.

If you are hosting your code at some Git hosting, it is possible that platform already provides you with a way to create man pages or a wiki, or any other place where the documentation should live.

SourceHut provides man.sr.ht, a git-based wiki that can be attached to a project. Any GitHub-like hosting, such as Gitea or GitLab also provides an integrated wiki within the project that can also be managed using git.

If you do not want to use those methods, you can always add a man or doc folder inside the repository itself with the documentation for your project.

The documentation should also be organized and linkable for any part of the documentation itself, so table of contents and references to other parts of the documentation can be made easily and without almost no effort. That would be very convinient for the users using your software.

A couple of examples of this:

soju, an IRC bouncer.
ACRA, an Android library for reporting crashes.

Next time you make a project, or if you already have some projects, take some time to review the documentation and see if you can improve it by using the tools we have for this purpose. It will be a huge boost for your project, and maybe even a point of reference for other people.

Status update, June 2022

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This past month has been a slow one.

On Husky related development, the upgrade to the API 32 (Android 12L) is almost done and the first beta of the 1.3.0 version will be available soon. I found some problems with ACRA and this means I am writing Husky’s own crash handler that will be available from 1.3.0 and up (for the moment).

I also have a couple of patchsets to review, which makes me a bit happy since there are users wiling to contribute to the project with code. To those users, thank you!

Next version of Husky will include a new push notifications provider, like Tusky, since some users have problems with them. The idea is to do that in the 1.4.0 version.

My idea is to reach the 2.0.0 version of Husky with the refactor I want to perform in the application. This might lead to a series of posts about Android development and technical stuff, which will be good to do because a) it will help me explain why I do that, b) it will help to make Husky more maintanable, and c) for my professional carreer as an Android developer. More in the future!

In the non-programmer world, I want to say that I started gathering information about email that might help you to have a public email account. You can find those resources at adol.pw/email. It contains a small amount of information at this moment, but I am gathering more to add. If you have any suggestions, please send me an email to my public inbox.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Why did I choose SourceHut?

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I do not have anything against GitHub itself. The platform itself managed to get a lot of people to contribute to FOSS projects, not only their own projects but other people’s projects. It expanded the ecosystem a lot, and it is something you cannot ignore.

The problem with GitHub is that is owned by Microsoft (M$). I do not trust M$ at all. My experience is that, every time M$ touches something, it will get bad over time. And GitHub will be one of those things.

Nevertheless, it was time to look for an alternative.

SourceHut (aka srht) was opened to the public on November 15, 2018. I know this platform because of Diego, a friend of mine. I made an account right away, and just for the simplicity of the platform I was blown away.

SourceHut provides a set of services for hackers to manage projects, i. e. CI/CD pipelines, git & mercurial support, a mailist service, an issue tracker aka todo, wikis aka man pages, and more. You can check out more at the website. This set of features do not only make srht a very well crafted platform, but also a competitive one with other Git forges.

SourceHut is also a platform based on 100% Free and Open Source Software. All the source code is managed at SourceHut itself, and the development and discussion topics are done in the open using the mailists or at the IRC channels.

It is also a platform that respects your privacy, something that a lot of people forget to take into account when choosing a service. No JS, no analytics, no nothing. Not even paying for your GitHub account will fix the tracking it does. In the era where companies gather data of you even in the most simpler apps, I think this is an important step towars a healthy ecosystem.

It also takes like 5 minutes or so to setup git + email and test it with a simple patch. Drew made git-send-email.io as a tutorial for those who are new to this workflow (I am one of those). It is easy to follow, it gives you instructions to get started right away, and it gives you the opportunity to send a patch to a mailist and to make a second one with a suggestion (it is an automated process for your to test the tutorial).

Another good thing about srht is that, if you want to contribute to any project, you do not Yet Another Account(TM). Because everything is done by email, you can avoid making an account into the platform but you can send patches, bug reports and reply to other emails from your email account.

Do you need to communicate an issue of the platform or need to fix something? You can because of the FOSS nature of srht, all of the code, mailists and todo trackers are available to you. It only takes a few minutes to setup your email client and send an email. Or you can also use IRC to talk to the developers of srht, #sr.ht at libera.chat. You have a couple of ways on how to reach the community here.

If you are a new user of SourceHut and need a bit of help, apart of reading the documentation you can reach out within the communication channels to the community, and everyone there will try to give you a helping hand.

The visibility argument

A lot of people will say that GitHub gives you the ability to be seen in the community. This is partially incorrect.

GitHub evolved from being a hacker forge to be more a social network. Therefore, you are being recommended projects and people that are somehow related to your activity inside the platform (hence the tracking I mentioned before). The problem is that GitHub has a ton of users, a ton of repos with a ton of code, and that does mean recommendations can, and will be, bad (a lot of times).

With such quantity of repositories and people, your project mighe be buried in the void faster than you can imagine. Also, stars are not a very good indicator about the popularity of the project, nor are the forks.

Since SourceHut does not track you, the hub (also, projects at srht) will show you projects that are hosted at srht, and nothing more.

GitHub-like alternatives

There are a couple of alternatives if you want to keep using something like GitHub.

Gitea and Codeberg

Gitea is a good option for those who want to preserve the GitHub-like appeal and workflow while keeping their code at their own Gitea instance. It runs in a Raspberry Pi, you do not need a huge server to run it for having small projects and a few contributions.

Codeberg is an EU-based Gitea instance. It is free to use, although donations are appreciated to keep the service running. If you want a good alternative to GitHub, I cannot recommend Codeberg enough times to you.

NOTE: if I am leaving SourceHut for any reason whatsoever I would choose Codeberg as my alternative for FOSS development.

GitLab

GitLab is somehow Open Source, although the main instance is behind its premium business model (after all, GitLab is a company too).

But you can self-host an instance, but be prepared to waste a lot RAM.

Email again?

Yes.

I am a fan of the email since I started using it.

It is an easy, simple way to communicate with people. Everyone has an email address, or more than one.

There are plenty of email clients for all tastes (I use neomutt + emacs/vim, for example), and also plenty of providers to make an account (free and paid).

Setting up the email for collaborating with a project is really easy, and since git has all the necessary stuff embedded for email collaboration, you only need a client to reply to comments made to your patch, so you can send a new version of that.

A lot of people complain about the fact that srht is a mail-based platform. git is intended to be used with the email as the main transport protocol to contribute to any project. GitHub was one, if not the first, of putting all the tools git offers behind a website. Forks are just copies, PRs are just patches from your copy to the original project, and so on. It is not magic.

As an example of a project using email as the main transport protocol for collaborating I always like to use Linux. Linux is being developed in this way since the 90s. It works. And just like in srht, you only need an email account to contribute to the project!

I am putting together resources about having a good email client, choosing a good provider, and so on. You can take a look at adol.pw/email. I accept suggestions, so send me an email if you know more (bear in mind that, at the time of publishing this post, it is a work-in-progress page).

Platforms made by and for FOSS

We do not always use FOSS to develop FOSS. But in this process the idea that using more FOSS to develop FOSS is something that stuck in my mind after reading the article It is important for free software to use free software infrastructure, by Drew DeVault.

After ending the maintenance of Husky, I started to think going back to GitHub would be a good option. But a couple of days after publishing the post, I thought that the success of a platform is that users keep using if after a while. I want srht to be a successful platform, and I intend to keep using it until I cannot longer do it.

All of my future projects will be hosted at SourceHut.

–

On a personal note, I want to give my appreciation and a big “Thank you!” to all the srht community. Everytime I asked someone anything on IRC, or via email, I always got a response that answers my doubts and questions.

And, specially, to Drew DeVault, because everytime I reached to ask him anything, he always had two minutes to reply to the question, and because he made those videos showing how patches are reviewed and managed via email, and I learnt a lot from him. Or just because reading his opinions makes me to re-think some stuff.

Thank you all!

Maintaining my first project: part V, the return

Sat, 14 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On May 9, 2022 I wrote the fourth part of this series of posts. This post came as a result of a bad day and complaints about how I manage Husky (by using the email and SourceHut, mainly).

The decision of ending the maintenance of Husky was a rash decision. It was something I did not think about properly and with time, and it was made in a bad moment of the day. I wrote that post and amolith helped me redacting part of it in a better way.

After thinking about it for this past days I realized that I did not want to end working on Husky. It is fun to do stuff in it, and I enjoy talking with people about it in the Fediverse. I am also learning a lot, specially working along people, which is something I do in my day-to-day work, but this feels different.

So, this morning, I woke up, and after a cup of coffee I fixed an issue that was bothering me in Husky (see husky#17). And it felt good. There is a lot of work on Husky to be done and I do not want the development of the app to be stalled.

That is why I decided to keep working on Husky.

Let me be clear from this very moment: I intend to keep using SourceHut as the platform of development of Husky. That means that the main form of communication to report bugs and discuss design issues and such things will be the mailist, publicly. And contributing to the project will be done with patches sent to the mailist, also publicly.

If you do not want to send emails to the mailist, that is more than fine, I am not going to force you to do it. And, if you need to send media content for reporting an issue, catbox.moe is a good service (there are more, bear in mind the time limit).

ACRA will still be available for you to send crashes. The email address is still up. I do not attend bugs reported there, though, only crashes reported with ACRA. Check if you have this enabled.

In the upcoming days I will update the todo tracker to add issues from the old issue tracker in order to keep track of what it is already fixed or what issues will not be fixed (and, thus, not added to the todo list).

I am sorry for all the noise this caused to all of the users.

On a last note, I want to thank every user that helps me improving Husky, whether it is reporting issues, gathering information for a bit of research, or testing new releases.

Cheers!

Maintaining my first project: part IV, the end

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I volunteered to maintain Husky, I decided to use SourceHut over GitHub, GitLab, or Gitea because SourceHut fits my workflow better. It is extremely convenient. Opening a bug report requires nothing more than an email address. Commenting on an issue requires nothing more than an email address. Contributing code requires nothing more than an email address. You do not need Yet Another Account™ on Yet Another Self-Hosted Gitea™. You just need an email address.

Unfortunately, I have received nothing but grief for maintaining Husky in a manner that suits my workflow. When people mention me on fedi to request a feature or tell me that the app crashes constantly and I ask them to send a bug report or feature request via email, I never get one. Instead, I get a barrage of complaints.

I integrated ACRA to make this process simpler; when Husky crashes, you are prompted to send me an email. Despite the integration, I have received precious few stacktraces and more complaints.

I volunteered to maintain Husky. That means I get to make my own decisions on how to develop the software. I chose SourceHut because it was convenient for me. Therefore, if you want your issue fixed or your feature added, your choices are 1) collaborate with me via email or 2) deal with it until someone else does.

People overwhelmingly choose option 2 - accompanied by more complaints. Because of this behaviour, maintaining Husky has become a major source of frustration and headaches.

… and I am done.

Husky 1.2.0 (email announcement) will be my last release as maintainer. After that, users who want updates will have to maintain it themselves or look for someone else. If another maintainer is found, I will happily certify them as the new maintainer in F-Droid so updates can be distributed through there.

The repository, along the mailing list and the issue tracker, are still available on SourceHut if anyone wants to take a look at them.

The website will be deleted in the coming days and the permissions to send emails and to reply to emails already sent are revoked.

I am not leaving SourceHut. I consider one of the best platforms to host projects, and future projects that I do or maintain will be there.

If you wanted to donate money, find another project to help or give it to a1batross directly; he made Husky possible in the first place and I will be always grateful to him.

I apologise to those who just used Husky in silence or worked with me when asked.

I want to thank amolith (also amolith at misskey) for helping me rewording this a bit better than I did.

Status update, May 2022

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This is early for a status update, but since I did not write any for two months, I do not really care about

This past two months I did not have really anything to update the blog. Life continued as nothing and nothing really important happened.

Regarding Husky development, there was a couple of fixes here and there and it seems that they made a positive reaction from the community. I am very thankful to all the people who test the application and send me bugs and crashes, so I can fix them and improve the app for everyone. Kudos to all of you!

Second: I have been thinking about migrating forges. The main reason is that, sometimes, I need to see a video/GIF or an image related to a bug and the mailist does not allow media content attached to it. Sure, an user can upload that content to a service and send the link, but it is not optimal (partially because that service could delete that media content at any time if it is not accessed in a period of time).

I can also argue that the user could, at any moment, delete that media content from that service and then the mailist will not have the whole context of the issue. And you can also argue that you can delete the same content from an issue created at GitHub or GitHub-like platform.

Some people told me to use the Fediverse as a platform to gather bugs. I am not going to do that at any time whatsoever. Those are social networks, not platforms to manage a project. Therefore, avoid to suggest that again to me, please, the answer will be always no¹.

I tested, in disposable repositories, both GitHub and Codeberg. In GitHub, an image is put inside the issue as a link to a (kind of) CDN, while at Codeberg an image is just uploaded and attached to an issue, but not embeded into the text of the issue (I do not know why). Also, at GitHub you cannot delete the file attached to an issue, only unlink it, and at Codeberg you can delete the file itself.

Another reason is that people do not want to use email nowadays. It does not take a big effort to ask for an email, but I almost got none when I do. I know, I know, almost everyone has an email, but not everyone wants to put it publicly (although you can create an email address just to have it publicly, like I have and you can check it out at adol.pw/contact). Also, people do not want to setup an email client to send emails with fixed width and in plaintext.

I mean no disrespect towards Sourcehut whatsoever. I think it is a fantastic platform and Drew and all the contributors are making a really good platform.

This is just a thought at this moment. It is something that, I think, could improve the development of Husky in the long term. If you have something to comment on this, please use the public inbox linked down below, it is my comment inbox, I do not have another nor will use another platform to reply comments to my articles! (please, be sure to setup your email client properly before sending anything).

On other FOSS news, I started to look for projects in which I could give a helping hand. The idea is to contribute with stuff I can do in a sort time, so my time working in Husky and other private projects is maximized, while contributing and giving back to the FOSS programmers that made possible all the software we use. From here, thank you all!

Take this status update like the update from march, april and may, since this was long overdue because I did not have anything to share until now.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

If you need to upload something for sharing it with an email, use catbox.moe or any service that allows to host content for the maximum period of time. If you do it with some service that only holds the files for, let’s say, 24 hours, I may not be able to see it in the future. ↩︎

Maintaining my first project: part III

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It is been a while since I wrote Maintaining my first project: part II, some stuff happened with Husky!

More reports!

As I am more known in the community as the new maintainer of Husky a lot of people reach me there to report bugs in the application. I am thankful for getting those reports (somehow) because it means more people is using the latest version and they can see if something fails.

Remember that Husky is a Pleroma client, and many things may be broken because not every instance is set up the same way. Some bugs are instance-specific, some are not. I try my best to fix everything without breaking the functionality in the rest of the instances.

Future for bug reports

As I love that people are using the newest version of Husky and I get those bug reports, I also get them through my Pleroma account. But…

I know, email… You hate email…

But I really prefer getting those in my email inbox. Sure, you do not want to send an email to a public mailist. But you do not have to do that!

At the Reporting bugs documentation I put two ways to send me reports:

Through the husky-devel mailist at Sourcehut (the preferred way).
Using the email husky (at) nixnetmail (dot) com.

The second way is as private as I am the only person I receive emails through that account. So you can send there any bug report (or patchset), nobody is going to know your email address.

If it is a bug, only the relevant part of the report is going to be published in the todo tickets in order to track the status of the bug or the task, but nothing more.

So, for now on, I am going to prioritize bug reports that I get using email rather than those I receive through Pleroma. Think of this as GitHub issues, for me it is a way to keep things better organized. I get, sometimes, a lot of mentions there and sometimes I forget about reports there (sorry if you are one of those persons…).

To-Do list

As I mentioned above, Husky has a todo tickets list. This is not very thorough, as I did not give it the attention it needs. The list is a bit old, I have to add bugs that were reported to me recently, but once I add those, I will keep it updated.

From now on, every bug report I get from email or Pleroma will be posted there, with a tag and, inside the ticket, the expected version to get it fixed.

Before sending any email, please, check that list.

F-Droid when?!

Ah… The dreaded question… The enigma!

As far as I know, as soon as I restore fastlane in the project it will be possible to update Husky at F-Droid again, so you can update the application without uninstalling it (because of the signing key).

Stay tuned because I am working on this. Did you think I forgot about that?

Refactoring the whole application

I know I said this a lot of times since I started maintaining the application, but Husky needs a refactor (a big one).

I started working on it (flavor newhusky) in my (little) spare time. The idea is to release a 2.0.0-alpha1 as soon as I complete the basic stuff to release it. This will take time, so do not worry right now. I will ask people to help me testing it. But, again, do not worry about it right now.

Documentation

I will review the documentation I made for Husky the next week. I have the feeling I might be able to improve it a little bit. Nothing really relevant to the application, but relevant for contributors.

For now…

This is for now. I do not have to say more, really. It might take a while to write the fourth part of this series.

Thank you for keep reading!

Cheers!

Status update, February 2022

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This month has been another one with very low activity. Aside from work I spent my time in a project I cannot talk about, but I am very excited to work on it!

Speaking of projects, last month ACRA support was added to Husky, meaning that now, if the application crashes unexpectedly, a push notification will display two options: Report or Dismiss. If you press report, your preferred email client will show with a email already composed, so you can press send directly (although if you have more context you should add it in the body, like steps to reproduce it and in which instance you are in).

The email content will be improved upon new versions of Husky, so stay tunned!

I also got a couple of bugs and a suggestion to add the option to download media content only on WiFi. I am taking a look into this, but it will take time. Another thing I will fix is custom emojis being animated properly (APNG and WebM emojis). Husky already supports SVG emojis.

Aside from adding new stuff and fixing but I am also rewriting the internals of Husky. As I stated before, the code is a bit of a mess, and refactoring the whole application to a more modern approach will not only bring the benefit of being more maintanable over time, but we will be able to add stuff faster. Stay tunned for more stuff about this. The application itself will not change much from an user perspective.

I want to make this perfectly clear: I will not stop maintaining the application as it is. This is a refactor for the 2.0.0 version of Husky.

Aside from this, I am also going to make streamings from time to time while programming or gaming. I made a streaming channel at video.hardlimit.com. My idea is to do Husky stuff while streaming, but I can also stream while playing games (whether FOSS games or not is another topic). The channel is at video.hardlimit.com/epochstreams.

In the mean time, reading, watching TV shows and movies, going out for a workout and such stuff is also part of my daily routine. I do not spend all my time in fron of the screen, and you should not to.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Adding and using ACRA in Husky

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This January 15th, 2022 I added ACRA to Husky. This library will help to improve the stability of the application by making you able to report random crashes that could happen using the application. This feature is opt-in.

Since Husky 1.1.0-beta1 now, when the application crashes randomly, a push notification is displayed, and the user has the option to either report the crash or discard the notification. In the future, instead of a notification, it will display a dialog, but for now the push is enough.

If you look at the code changed in that build you will see that I put a mailist email to send those crash reports. That made me think that, well, everyone can subscribe to a mailist in Sourcehut.

In Husky 1.1.0-beta2 I changed the email from that list to a more private one. Amolith¹ provided me an alias to my current email, so every crash report will be sent directly to me. As I say in the section ACRA support, no personal information will be made public.

The code which specifies what it is shared in the email is at TuskyApplication.kt#132-138:

reportContent = listOf(
	ANDROID_VERSION,
	APP_VERSION_NAME,
	APP_VERSION_CODE,
	BUILD_CONFIG,
	STACK_TRACE
).toTypedArray()

This will be only used for debugging purposes. I do not collect any personal data from anyone, nor do I intend to start doing it so.

Reviewing my stand on ethics with analytics

Adding this made me think about the blog post I wrote titled On ethics using analytics. Reporting something is, somehow, kind of a track system because you have data to analyze and choose how to act.

As you can see in the blog post, I pointed out things to keep in mind, important stuff to preserve the privacy of the users using your software and to clean old, useless data.

Adding ACRA into Husky provides a way for me to know about the crashes (if ACRA is enabled and the users report them). Also, let’s go over the checklist:

ACRA is an opt-in feature, it has to be enabled in the Preferences view.
ACRA generates random UUIDs in the reports that I do not keep (it has no meaning to the important stuff of the crash).
I use a FOSS backend to provide this functionality inside the application.
I specify how I will use the data in the Contributing guide, section ACRA support.
Old emails will be deleted, and crashes already fixed will result in the deletion of emails . Again, I do not collect any personal information about anybody.
The code is FOSS and you can see it at git.sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky.

I intend to keep Husky away from analytics (meaning Firebase or platforms like that) because I do not collect data about the use of the application. My intention with ACRA is to get crashes that could happen on a variety of devices that do not happen to me (or any contributor) while working on the application.

He provides NixNet Services and was kind enough to let me use email service. Thank you very much! ↩︎

Status update, January 2022

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

First status of the year!

I do not have that much to share this month. I also did not want to start the year by missing a status update.

I am getting close to get ACRA implemented in Husky. I am debating myself about a thing regarding how to enable it (it is an opt-in feature) to let the SDK know that it can start working or not.

Also, I have to say that I received my first patch for Husky courtesy of Edward Sneed. I am happy about this, because it is the first time I got a contribution. Thank you very much, Edward!

I intend to apply the patch as soon as I finish adding ACRA in the project.

Apart from that, I intend to write more in this blog. I said in the 2021 recap post I wrote, that I do not what this blog to be only status updates. My idea is to write technical topics about software engineering, research I consider good enough to publish, and stuff like that. Stay tuned for more posts!

That would be all, see you in the next status!

2021 recap

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This post comes a bit late, it should be done first thing this year or on december 31st, but anyway, it is never too late.

2021 was one of the weirdest years I lived. A lot of things happened, good and bad, but in the end, we are still alive!

Professional development

2021 was a year of professional development. As I am working right now as an Android hacker I have to keep up with new stuff (with new stuff I mean stuff I do not already know, like RxJava).

The Android development world is full of stuff to learn. But when you work in a company with projects made a long time ago, you find this kind of problems:

Making a refactor is not possible due to time constraints. You have to keep up releasing new versions with fixes and new stuff, and since everything works, making huge changes is something very difficult to acomplish.
Adding new libraries that could contain potential bugs is also difficult, since the Tech Lead/Project Owner, normally, does not want to play games.

This makes sometimes difficult to learn new stuff at work. When the project is new, sure, you can start from more new stuff, like Kotlin’s Coroutines instead of RxJava, using MVVM instead of MVP/MVI… But when the project is old, you have to keep the “legacy” stuff around.

That is why I started to learn more stuff that it is been around for a long time, because you never know where you are going to end working.

Other programmer stuff

I also have been working in other projects with other programming languages, maybe some of them will see the light of the FOSS world, maybe not, I did not decided it yet.

I do not keep my scope only in Android, because I love to learn and experiment a lot, that means I also have to learn new programming languages and ways to do things that can be done in one platform but not in another.

Husky maintenance

As you already know, I started maintaining Husky. The past year, even with huge leaps of time, the project continued to receive (small) updates. Right now I am working on the 1.1.0-beta1 version, which will come with ACRA support for reporting random crashes.

Husky reached the version 1.0.2. As you can see in its HISTORY, there were a few changes into the application. You can download this version going to the 1.0.2 tag.

I also made a simple website, so the domain I have asigned to the project has something to show (husky.adol.pw).

Apart from adding new stuff to the current application I am also making a refactor of the application itself to provide a more maintenable source code. The first version of this will be the 2.0.0-alpha1. My intentions with this is that, when you update from 1.X.Y to 2.0.0, everything is still working as intended. Like I said in posts here before, patches will be accepted but new features will not be likely implemented (except the necessary ones).

I am also working of making my own F-Droid repository to serve the application faster than using the official ones. a1ba and sn0w gave me the idea, so kudos to them!

Blogging

My blog consist, mostly, of status updates, which most of them do not provide any insighful stuff to read about anything, really… But they make me accountable of what I say I am doing or will do.

Last year I almost made the 12 months (I missed january, march, june and december). This yeah I will make the 12 months, because it is something that keeps me writing here.

But this year I want to write more stuff here. Not only status, but also opinions about things (like On ethics using analytics), technical stuff related to hacking stuff, research that I think it could be useful to someone…

I got a list of topics I collected and I hope to elaborate them through this year, and I also hope for more ideas in the future!

Gemini? Gopher?

I see a lot of people jumping on the Gemini ship nowadays.

I personally do not use it, nor I use other similar things like Gopher, but I see why people are using it.

I might do a PoC of my theme and this blog to put it in a Gemini capsule for those who want to see my website through it. If it is worth it, I might get it also in Gopher.

Other stuff in life

Since us, programmers, spend a lot of time sitting up, we tend to gain weight and not caring for our health so much. This happened to me, not only for this. This is why I started to do more excercise and start taking seriously this matter. If you are in the same situation, I hope you find the will to start exercising, little by little, to not get overwhelmed or hurt (this is important if you did not do excercise in a long time).

Another important part of this process is also taking care of your mental health. It is very important to take it seriously. If you need help, ask for it, there are a ton of people that can help you.

That would be all, see you in the next status!¹

This does not count as the january status post. ↩︎

Maintaining my first project: part II

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It has been two months since I wrote Maintaining my first project: part I, and a few things happened, others are planned.

First release

Monday 18th, 2021 was the date of the first release of this copy of Husky, the 1.0.2-beta1. It is a beta because:

I do not have enough experience with the codebase to identify every single thing that could cause a bug, or be a bug.
The old issue tracker has a lot of bugs, some of them reproducible, some of them without any indication whatsoever. This makes the task of fixing stuff more dificult.

I am fixing what I find and can reproduce right now.

I expect to use the application and find issues that can be fixed, and also, if any new user wants to test the application, I gladly accept bug reports. You have the Husky contributing guide at your disposal.

CI/CD

I do not plan to add a CI/CD to the project. The reason is that I do not generate versions for each single commit, and I am more than comfortable releasing versions to test and report issues.

However, I might add again fastlane support in order to make it easy for those who want to generate their own version using a CI/CD. This will be all documented in the Husky building guide, which will be written any time soon.

Refactoring the application

I intend to, eventually, rewrite the internal architecture of the application following a Clean architecture + MVVM approach in order to improve maintainability of the code. Also, the application will be single-Activity.

My idea is to port everything that Husky is able to do right now, and then, start adding features like moderation tools, for example. This, as you might imagine, will require a lot of testing.

One of the most expected features, which is real-time streaming, will be added too, I am not forgetting about those users!

Mergin from Tusky

The refactor will make almost imposible to merge anything from Tusky, if needed, so changes, bugfixes and features will have to be manually ported. This is a tech debt I am more than comfortable assuming.

Translations

The application, right now, has two sets of translations: those from Tusky, and the specific ones for Husky. Since I do not intend to merge more from Tusky, both will be merged in only one set of strings.xml (in all languages).

This will not only make easier to track translations, but also, it will remove the husky folder, which means one less flavor config, which means less time for Gradle to make its thing compiling the app. It is a silly thing, but it will be done in time (because there are a lot of strings).

Sending patches

Patches are welcome if they fix bugs. As stated in the contributing guide, this workflow will be done by email.

Because the application will suffer a huge refactor over time, new features will be added in the future, for now, porting the current ones and fixing bugs are high-priority tasks (in fact, I started the refactor already).

I will make sure that new versions with bugfixes still work while I make the refactor, so I can still release new versions.

Man, this is a lot!

There is a lot of things to be done and a few of them made. I still do not have a roadmap of what I would like to acomplish, for example. The refactor requires a huge plannification, because it will break things and testing is a must-do here.

Still, I am happy to contribute to the community somehow. I have been wanting to do this for a long time and I never steped up to do it, until now.

Oh, and Husky 1.0.2-beta2 has released today!

Status update, November 2021

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

Another month in 2021, another status message!

After a month of hiatus and another stuff in real life I started working again in Husky. I made a few commits this weekend, nothing really important, but I started planning the refactor I want to make in the application. More will come in future posts, because this is a huge thing to make and I want to document everything as a diary to write my experiences.

Also, next week I will publish the second part of my first time maintaining a project (it is a draft now, you can look for it at adol.pw/drafts).

In the meantime, I am also making another project from scratch (another Android application), for another thing. I will publish an alpha as soon as I have make a couple of things in it and, from there, I will plan what features to add. More in the future, maybe 2022, we will see. Of course, it will be FOSS and available at sr.ht.

Outside of the programming world I planned to publish more stuff in the blog, both technical and non-technical stuff. A few ideas are drafts now (some might be deleted, some might not), and I am always looking for more to do.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, October 2021

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This month has not been one in which a lot of things happened.

I plan to release the first beta version of Husky this weekend. I did a couple of fixes, and I have to polish a bit how I am going to release the betas over the stable versions, using the same package name or a different one.

The second approach presents the problem that there is not any export-and-import functions yet in Husky to port settings from the beta to the stable version, so it might be a burden to the user to change between them. On the other side, if I use the same package name, an user cannot go back to a stable version from a newer beta version, so the user must setup the application from scratch again.

If you read this and have any comment, please drop an email at lists.sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky-devel.

I am also redacting the second part of me being a maintainer of a project (altough I would like to get more time for the project), and it will be published next week, along a couple of things more.

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, September 2021

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This month have a little bit busy with real life, so there is not much to put in a status update.

As I announced in august (see Maintaining my first project: part I) I started maintaining Husky, the Pleroma client.

Less than two weeks I pushed my first fix for Husky: fixing the video player. It was really easy, only I had to use ExoPlayer and every video is now playable. I have to take a look to a thing to see if I can improve it, but nevertheless, it works now.

I want to use this small moment to tell you that this is my first real contribution to a Free Software project (even I am maintaining it), but it feels really good to be able to do this kind of stuff. I hope to make Husky a client that everyone can enjoy, with better performance and more features!

There is not a version released because I want to put more things before releasing a new version, but you can get updates subscribing to the mailist lists.sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky-announce (even not being a Sourcehut user, you can).

An update related to this blog: I am going to start making posts in english and spanish. Hugo supports multi-language blogs and I intend to take the oportunity to make this blog in both languages.

In the non-software development world, I started playing Minecraft again. I even uploaded a video of me playing (not voice, though). Who knows what I am going to upload next time…

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Maintaining my first project: part I

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since I started using Pleroma I used Husky to see and post stuff. But the application is not perfect, and it has some bugs (some of them very annoying). Given that I worked as an Android developer for the past two years, I think I can maintain the project.

But… This is also my first time maintaining a project in the Free and Open Source Software community.

Asking the author to maintain the project

The first thing I did before opening the project at Sourcehut was to ask the actual maintainer for his permission to “take over” the project. I also told him that the project will be hosted at Sourcehut.

From here, I want to thank him for letting me even keep the name of the application. I really appreciate it!

Link to the project

The project (including the source code and the mailists) is at sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky.

Getting started

First of all, I had to know the license of the project. Lucky me it is the GNU GPL v3, so I do know the license and the terms of it. The new code will be under the same license given that I want to keep Husky as a Free Software project.

Since there is a lot of work to do in the application, I feel that some of the changes may be a derivative work from the original, others may be not. I would really want to remove the “This file is a part of Tusky.” in the license notice for the derivative work, since it would not be from that project anymore, but I am not sure I can do it.

If anyone has any knowledge about if I could do that, please send me an email (you have my contact info at adol.pw/contact). If you want to have this conversation at a public space, send an email to lists.sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky-devel.

Documentation

Every project has a minimum of documentation in case people want to start hacking or building the project. I started to make some of it today.

General info

This is the Husky doc. website. There is some basic information on the project, and more will be added in time.

Setting up the ‘Contributing’ guide

To get contributions in a standard way a maintainer should have a “Contributing” section in the documentation of the project. Today I did the first version of this guide for Husky and you can see it at Contributing to Husky.

Setting up the ‘Building’ guide

At this time, as it says at Building Husky this is not ready at this very moment. It will be, so stay tunned!

Releases

My intention is to release a first version of the project as soon as possible.

I have to figure out how to put it on F-Droid in the future, because there is a Husky release already.

… and this is just the beginning

For the moment there is not much done in the project.

I suggest you to subscribe to the mailists of the project (you can find the information at Mailists). The communication will be done there. There is not an official Pleroma account in the fediverse for the project at this very moment.

I will be making more posts of this journey. This is the first time that I contribute to the Free Software community, and everything is new for me. My intention is to tell my experience along tips that help me to manage everything in the best possible way.

See you on Part II!

Status update, August 2021

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This past month has been a series of decissions that lead me here, today, 17th august.

There are few changes in project-related topics. I thought of getting started maintainig Husky. For those who use Pleroma you already know what it is. The maintainer has been inactive for a few months, and after asking him if I could take the project, he said I can. So, in the comming days/weeks the project will be rescued. I know there are a lot of people flying to Misskey, but for those who still use Pleroma…

The project will be hosted at Sourcehut. There is a project created already at sr.ht/~captainepoch/husky. The project, repositories and mailists are unlisted because I still have to migrate the actual code, define the contribute guideline, set permissions in the mailist… Well, I have to start the project, so I hope to have it all by the end of the week. I will write an email to the husky-announce soon with something like a roadmap. Patches will be accepted soon, stay tuned to the mailists.

This is the announcement email.

I will also see how to put the new application at F-Droid, so you can download and install it when it is ready for a first version.

I also setup neomutt with mbsync and msmtp. I tried aerc, but it lacks some features and I already had the configuration files for mutt, so I only had to change a few lines. I still have a couple of things to setup, but they are not important right now.

I still plan to use aerc in the future if it still exists.

My contact page has been updated too. I changed my GPG key for a better one. If you have already the old one in your keyring, delete it and import the new one!

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, July 2021

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

It is time to another montly-more-like-bi-monthly status update!

There was not any really important stuff going on in my life to make updates right now. I am working in a couple of things in my spare time (which is very minimal) but nothing ready for you to see.

Following the post On ethics using analytics, I started working on an Android project to try and implement the same points I made. The idea is to put Matomo and ACRA inside the application, so if you are working on a project with those technologies, you can put analytics in an ethical way for you and your users. The project will be open for everyone to see when the first version is ready!

Regarding this blog, I also added a drafts section, so if you are curious to see what I am writting or I put something to review, you can look at it and its progress. For now it has a couple of things I want to write while I do the project I mentioned before, but I also put down some ideas to write in the future in my to-write list. I also want to make a review of all of my posts to put a common format before the list grows any longer, so if you are subscribed to my RSS, I apologize beforehand for the flood in your RSS reader!

Regarding life in general, and I encourage this for you too, I started taking healthy habits of life, like getting up of the chair and starting exercising for 1 hour (almost) every day, combined with healthy food, I am expecting to loose some weight and improve my health. I also started playing the guitar again, which is something I wanted to do for the last couple of years!

That would be all, see you in the next status!

On ethics using analytics

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

DISCLAIMER: How analytics can be used for good is based on my personal observations in the real world and in the projects I worked where I had to put them into the software.

If you think this can be improved or want to start a conversation about this, send an email to my public inbox, you have the link down bellow!

The first thing I did when I started working as a developer was to fix some analytics the project had badly put (meaning tracking was not accurate). I fixed them, and then I started doing more interesting stuff.

Later on I had to go over analytics in another project, and then in another, and then help a couple of workmates adding them in a project I did from scratch. You can guess what we were using… Of course, the mighty Google’s Firebase.

Then I looked into Free Software/Open Source projects to see if they were using analytics, and no, they were not. But a few of them use ACRA for having a live error reporting system inside the application (e.g. F-Droid, by email). Most of those projects rely in users reporting issues, but normally the description of those issues are so vague developers do not know what to do.

Having analytics in a project

I do not think that having analytics in a project is a bad thing. You cannot always rely in users to get reports of bugs or unexpected crashes with a full report on how to reproduce the bug. Of course, there are a lot of users willingly to do so, but it is not the majority.

The problem is how the data is recollected, used and not deleted once it fulfilled its purpose. Most of the companies do not care about this, the data is there and it is not normally deleted after using it.

For example, Firebase is an excelent tool. It provides a really insight when you need to know how an user uses your application. But it is made by Google, with all of the implications it has.

Knowing what platforms really do

We do not really know what all the companies that provide analytics do with our data. You can read a ton of Privacy Policy and Terms of Use links, but in the end, we do not really know.

The only way to know how the data is stored, used and deleted is if you self-host your own instance of this kind of software.

Privacy first

You should have in mind that privacy should come first in anything related to this topic. I cover a couple of points in the next section related to privacy for the users.

Analytics used for good

For development purposes analytics can be really insightful. You can then release the production version of your software without them, or opted-out by default (if you can pay a server and scale the backend to suit your needs to allow opting in).

There are a few points that I think it could make analytics more ethical than they are perceived right now:

Opt-in by default.

Let the user choose what to do in that matter. Or remove analytics from the project.

Or, if you can, make two versions: one with analytics (opted-out by default) and another without anything related to analytics at all.
Randomize UUIDs

When you are implementing analytics, one of the things you have to do is to asign an UUID to an user. It could be random or you can make it manually with your own parameters. In each version of your software, you should randomize it, so the same user does not have the same UUID.
Use a backend that is Free Software/Open Source software.

There are great software that can be user for this purpose. You have to self-host it or you might want to look at price plans instead:
- Matomo: it is a web application that it is mostly used for websites, but it can be used in a lot of programming languages. Its main use is being a substitute of Firebase Analytics, but it can also catch exceptions in Java software (for example, it can be used for Android like Firebase Analytics and Firebase Crashlytics).
- ACRA: it is an error reporting tool for Android. It catches exceptions that are not handled by a try-catch block and allows you to report them by email, sending a post to a website, and a couple of options more.
- Sentry: it is a realtime monitoring software for your applications. You can see errors and where they are produced, so you can fix them easily. It is mandatory to point out that Sentry is not Open Source software, but the code is open in its GitHub repository.
Specify how you use the data recollected.

Elaborate a document where you put your intentions with the data, how you recollect it, what you recollect, and when you delete the old data you do not need anymore.
Always delete old data

Anything that can identify an user must be removed when it is not useful anymore or in a closed timespan, e.g. 90 days.
Put the source code of the project in a public repository

Whether you prefer to use SourceHut or GitHub, put the code to the public eye. Be clear what classes/methods/functions/however-is-called-in-your-preferred-language are used for analytics purposes.

In a way, having your source code in the open also allow users to see any changes you make in that part of the code.

Conclusion

This is something that I could get knowledge after working as an Android developer for almost two years and see how analytics are implemented in the projects I worked on.

I really think, if correctly used, analytics can be a good thing, but we have to be very careful about how we use them and not get addicted to them. Software also needs careful implementations and testing.

UPDATE: as pointed out by the user icy in this comment, Sentry is not really Open Source software at the time this post has been written. I updated the reference accordingly. Thank you very much!

Status update, April 2021

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

I have been thinking if writing this status update was worth it, because I was lazy this past two months and I did not do anything worth mentioning here.

After reading this article about Python and virtualenvs, I have been trying another way to isolate my projects’ dependencies. I tried the combination pyenv + virtualenv, but I did not know about the PEP standards defined into Python itself. So I also started to take a look at pdm.

Outside of the development world, it is been more than two months since I quitted WhatsApp. Nothing really changed, I did not use that much at that point of my life, so I only had a couple of days of “anxiety” thinking about how I will get in touch with some people, but hey, email is still there, so it was not a problem.

Due to bandwith problems in the NixNet’s Pleroma instance, I felt obligated to go to another Pleroma instance to stay at the Fediverse. For now on, you can find me at stereophonic.space/captainepoch. During my time at NixNet, I want to thank Amolith for allowing me to stay there with all the people I met. He is an amazing guy and an amazing sysadmin!

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Status update, February 2021

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy, y’all!

December and january did not deserve a status update. I did not do anything that was worth mentioning, and also, I prefered to enjoy more time not looking at another screen after work.

In the middle of january I started to feel some preasure about working in a side project for Android, because I believe that working on a project is a great way of learning new stuff (also, you have a project on your own!). So I started to look for ideas and I found one. For now I have only the skeleton, but I hope to release an alpha before summer (because I suck badly at UI/UX). This project will be open source at some point, but not during the initial development phase.

This project is not only for learning new stuff, but also for improving what I already now. There is always room for improvement, as a rule for life.

In the mean time, I am also waking my lazy ass up to start working out somehow. With coronavirus out there, I do not want to risk anything, so I am doing it at home. Since I spend a lot of time sit in a chair, I think it is necessary to move the body a bit to stay healthy.

This year I also thought about making, at least, 12 blogposts. I am behind by one (january status), but I will compensate through the year. The idea is not to do only statuses, but also to write about topics I find interesting enough (or feel comfortable enough to talk publicly and in english). Maybe I start writting about Android development, or Go development, or about privacy topics, I do not know, but something I feel is worth writting.

I said the same last year, but for unrelated some reasons, I was not able to acomplish that milestone.

I am also planning to publish my website in spanish too. I have a few readers in my life that I would like to share this, but do not know any english at all, so writting the post in both languages would be a nice feature. It will be done by this year (I hope), and I intend to keep it always in both languages (but I will try to write everything first in english, so I can keep improving my knowledge and use of the language).

That would be all, see you in the next status!

Quitting WhatsApp

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today, January 31st, 2021, I deleted my WhatsApp account.

I have been an user of this platform since, approximately, 10 years. The first time I installed WhatsApp was with my Samsung Galaxy Spica running Android 2.1. By that time, WhatsApp was an application not ran by Facebook. It cost 0.89€ in the Apple AppStore and, for Android, was free (although, technically, the service was 0.89€/year in Android).

I only had to paid once, and I paid gladly, because WhatsApp was a service I was using with a lot of people.

By that time, also, WhatsApp was not encrypted itself. Only the endpoints of the API were encrypted (SSL connections), but not the content users sent through the service. At that time, I really did not care.

Then, I started to worry a bit about my privacy, each day, a bit more. Then, I got where I stand today.

WhatsApp was bought by Facebook. The day news confirmed that, I deleted my account. The next day, I recreated it because, well, I thought “let’s give Facebook an oportunity”. I do not regret that day nor the decision I made. But I regret to keep using it until today.

It would not affect EU users. But that is not the point. The point is: Facebook is doing it, no matter what it says in a blogpost, in a white paper, whatever.

As I pointed out in this toot, in the WhatsApp Encryption White Paper, it suffered a change about the private key. In the original tweet (linked in the toot), another user says that FB still do not have to know about the private key of the user. Still, I do not trust it.

I sent a diffusion message to my contacts notifying them about my decission. I received mixed responses, from “Yeah man, we talk in <insert here another platform>” to “Facebook is just formalizing what it has been done until today” to “Give me your email, I do nt plan to leave WhatsApp but I still want to talk with you!”. It is alright, I did not thing for a moment that the 100% of my contacts would leave.

We have better alternatives. The best way would be using XMPP + OMEMO, or Signal. Telegram is something over WhatsApp, but tha is it (the server is closed source, so we cannot know what happens inside of it, for better or worse).

Anyway, by the time you read through here, it is done. I do not have a WhatsApp account anymore, and I doubt I am going to get one again.

I just do not trust Facebook. At all.

WhatsApp and the domestication of users.

A (Mostly) Google-Free Android.

Why IRC is Still Good in $CURRENT_YEAR.

If you think you have got nothing to hide, you need to read this: ‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy (press in Download this paper).

EU Parliamentary questions: European data protection regulations and legal certainty on privacy safeguards offered by WhatsApp to EU citizens.

EU Parliamentary questions: Safeguarding by Facebook of the privacy of European users of WhatsApp.

Using go.mod for local packages

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Golang provides the tools which enable the users to manage the dependencies of a project using mod. This allows one to host the dependencies for each project individually but, more importantly, to select the version of that dependency they wish to use.

But the problem I faced these last two days was not that, but another. I wanted to be able to host the code of my Go projects outside the src folder inside the $GOPATH. Also, I wanted to be able to develop closed-source projects without using the $gitserver/captainepoch/project naming scheme.

To be able to do that, first of all you need to create a folder (with the name of your liking because it will be the root package. For this example, my main package will be called potato:

$ go mod init potato

And you get a bare modules file:

module potato

go 1.15

Now, let’s create a config local package. The point of this is to be able to use it locally without getting it from any repo. Create a folder, a .go file, and a go.mod file:

$ mkdir config && cd config
$ go init mod config
$ touch config.go

Inside the config.go file:

package config

import "fmt"

func GetConfig() {
	fmt.Println("GetConfig executed")
}

To be able to use this in the main package, you have to use the replace directive:

module potato

go 1.15

replace potato/config => ./config

And the main.go content:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"potato/config"
)

func main() {
	fmt.Println("Potato is life")

	config.GetConfig()
}

You should see your modules file already changed when adding this to your main package. However, if you do not see anything, you have to run the tidy command:

$ go mod tidy

If you need to use some local package inside another local package, you have to use replace but using ..: replace potato/utils => ../utils which allows you to use a local package inside the project’s root inside another local package. Also, you have to add the replace in the root modules file, so Go knows where to look at to find that local package.

Be aware that this can cause circular dependencies which is not something good. So if you use this, use it with something you know will not create any circular dependency problem.

I know this is far from being orthodox but sometimes this hack helps more than other solutions.

If you have any questions, please reach me at my NixNet account captainepoch@nixnet.social (the mailist is WIP).

I want to thank jbauer and Tedster for the corrections of this post :).

Status update, November 2020

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

This month has been a normal one. I did not have many things to do so I pretty much started working on organizing my stuff at home, so my room is not a mess.

Apart from that, the most important thing that happened this month is the announcement of Drew DeVault closing his Mastodon instance, cmpwn.com forever (I do not know if he is going to be in another Pleroma/Mastodon instance). I have an account there because I could not follow him from my old mastodon.social instance, and he offered me one without hesitate. So, from here, I want to thank him for the time in the cmpwn instance!

Due to the closing of his instance, I migrated to a new one, property of Amolith. The new one is hosted at the NixNet Services offered by him. I barely exchanged words with him, but the few times I talked with him he is an amazing person, so follow him at his account. By the way, my new Fedi account is captainepoch@nixnet.social. My old account is already locked and pointing to the new one, and soon to be deleted. I might open all my toots from somewhere in the future, as an archive, I do not know.

Apart from that, I wanted to do a bit of stuff with Go, and one of the things I wanted to make is to have local packages (like Java and Python). I know Go is not designed to work like that, but in fact, it is possible to make them. I somehow figured how with the help of lyntsune, and I might write how it works (Go devs: I know Go is not designed for that, but sometimes, people do not want to have a few Open Source projects, and the $GOPATH way to work is a damn mess).

I will see you in the next status update!

Status update, October 2020

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello there!

This october has been a rather busy month. I have been making plans for unifying all my websites into one (it is already done if you are reading this), an Android project that I will talk about in future posts.

The main thing of this post is that I do not have a subdomain anymore. From now on, adol.pw will be my website (blog, contact section, license, etc.). So, if you have my feed in your RSS reader, please point it to the new link: adol.pw/index.xml.

As you can see (if you ever visited my blog), I changed the theme again. I felt the other I was using was not really good for my personal style, and I did some changes in order of making it a bit modern. It is updated to use the latest version of hugo (0.76.5 as this post is published). The code of the theme is at git.sr.ht/~captainepoch/blogtheme.

The domain change, the theme and other stuff is thanks to a couple of friends, one of them is an anon, but the other is Rafa, who helped me testing everything and giving me a couple of points for improving a couple of things.

Another thing I am trying to make is to write more. I only wrote a post a month, and that is the status update, but I feel I can write more about other topics (not necessarily engineering-specific, as It was intended from the start of this blog and I never did it).

I have been learning my way into the Android development world lately, not only the basics but also in an architectural level. It is not an easy topic, as you have a very limited amount of resources in a phone. I have been in contact with a person called Gabor Varadi (aka Zhuinden). I asked him a lot of stuff (because he is really a good guy and explains the stuff I ask for in a very concise and clear way). From here, I wanted to thank him very much for his time and patience, and I hope to keep in touch with him for a long time!

Along the lines of Android development, I am also making a little project I want to open source as soon as I feel it is ready. Part of making it is to have a base to get started making Android applications, but the other part is for people to use it, modify it, even contribute to improve it.

I am still looking for an email provider. Migadu or Mailbox are good, but they do not meet my expectations. I do not discard the idea of self-host with OpenBSD or Alpine Linux (if possible). If you know a new one, please, write to me at my Mastodon account nixnet.social/@captainepoch. Also, if that email provider meets Drew DeVault’s email criteria¹, please write him an email at sir (at) cmpwn (dot) com, he might not know it and want to check it out for further recommendations.

If I add reading comics, books, and watching TV shows and movies to this, I have been a bit busy (more thinking than doing things, but in the end, I did not stop).

I will see you in the next status update!

PS.: comments will be open in a public inbox as soon as I got an email address with my subdomain.

Drew’s Mastodon post about email recommendations. ↩︎

Status update, September 2020

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Howdy!

The past month was a static one. It did not happen anything worth writing in a blog post, nor did I something worth writing here.

This month, however, happen to be one in which I got a new job as Android developer. I like it, I am really comfortable in the environment, I am learning new stuff I did not know before, so I am happy.

This past two weeks I have been looking for contribute to an Open Source project in my little spare time. It does not have to be a huge project, a small one would be fine, and preferably, one I use every day and know how it works, so I can be more comfortable going into without feeling overwhelmed. Even doing bugfixing would be nice. I do not really contribute to Open Source, my commit history on GitHub or my apperance on SourceHut’s mailists are almost null (regarding patches). It is something I am still looking for doing, so I will write here when it happens!

At september 4rd Drew DeVault hosted an open conversation about the future of SourceHut, and let us ask questions about everything he said (although most of the questions went to the new billing conditions). As he said, he host another one at septiember 16th, so if you are reading this and are an user of SourceHut, I strongly recommend you to join it, it was really fun! And also It was an oportunity to participate in the project which takes seriously the principle of being open with the userbase.

And that is all I have to talk this month, see you!

Status update, July 2020

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Last month I was not available to make a status update. Because I did not have anything to talk about, to be honest.

During june I went doing some stuff I had in my big to-do list. The first one was the new theme of the blog. I use Hugo for generating this blog. It is a static site. I was also using an outdated version of it, so I updated to the latest one available at the moment of making the new theme (0.73.0), and now everything is new! The theme is called simple-style. The original one is made by Linlin Yan. This one is publised at git.sr.ht/~captainepoch/simple-style.

In the may 2020 status update I talked about an Android architecture I was making. I deleted the whole project by mistake (I did not have any copy of it), but I did not take it bad. In fact, I renew a few things after a bit of research, and now I made another one with a better organization of files and classes. I think I will be making a few technical articles about why I choose the way I do things, but it is only in my mind right now. I am new at this, and my experience making architectures is about zero (although I have been working with a few ones to understand them). The whole project will be open at some point, but for now, it is going to remaing closed.

The other project I did something is ServerProxy. It is an Android library that, and I quote:

ServerProxy is a Android library for creating proxy servers to serve files.

It is used in DSub, an Android application to stream music from Subsonic servers (or music servers with the Subsonic API implementation). I use it, and I wanted to update the application a little bit, fix some bugs, and in general, revamp the development of it. I already made the first change, which is changing the library to something buildable with jitpack.io. You can take a look at the builds logs at jitpack.io/#captainepoch/ServerProxy. The DSub application will follow once I finish evaluating if it needs to be started from scratch or it can be maintainable as it is.

On more miscelaneous news, I started using VSCodium as my main editor. I used to use emacs, but I spent more time setting it up than using it as an editor, and right now, I need one easy to setup and ready to use as fast as possible. I am going back to Emacs someday because I loved the experience while using it, but when I have time to set it up properly.

Also, I am moving from GitHub to git.sr.ht. I am still considering if self-hosting an email service is worth it or not (I never did it, but I self-host a lot of things right now and know the burden of it). When I have my email with my own domain I can start contributing and such stuff using git send-email. If you are new in that world, check Drew DeVault’s git-send-email.io for getting started.

That is it for now. Thank you for reading this, and I hope you stay safe out there. See you next month!

Status update, May 2020

Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welp… Another month since my last status update. I published three small opinion things here, which if you read, I hope you enjoyed it. I intend to keep this blog about technical stuff I find important or for something I learnt by fixing something… I will try to keep politics off as much as possible.

I planed a little revamp in the blog’s style. Updating Hugo seems to make this theme broken, so I am going to modify another theme I found to match my style and I hope to have it ready in a couple of weeks. I also intend to revamp my personal website’s style, it is a bit old (and some pages dissapeared because the info was outdated and needed a bit of a renewal).

I started a couple of projects, like a said before. One of them is an Android architecture based on MVVM. I know there is a lot of them out there, but it is not the same that doing one yourself and learning about the process and the decisions.

This Android base architecture will be compilable using builds of sourcehut. The build config file will be based in the post Sourcehut Android Gradle Continuous Integration, written by Anjan. I might have to modify the file to adapt for what I want to do, but otherwise, that is the file’s origin.

In the mean time, I am making a couple of projects to earn some extra money. One of them is a mix of Qt + PySide2, which is a strange mix of GUI and back-end code, but I am liking it. I might write something about my experience with this. I only did a project with GUI, and it was in Windows with C# (pretty easy, to be honest). I think I have the source code still at my computer, so I might publish it for the sake of archiving it in some place, but it stopped working a long time ago.

You can find me at Freenode with the handle captainepoch or at nixnet.social/@captainepoch.

Fixing the Firefox Sync Server

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE 2020-05-09: added at the end a perfect deploy guide and a bit of config tunning for the deploy. I have the guide archived just in case it is lost. The small-sized guide can be found at the end of this post.

I changed from Chrome to Firefox a long time ago, and I mostly do not regret it. I prefer to have all my personal data under my control, and that is the reason I host my own Firefox Sync Server.

Chrome, of course, has your data within Google’s servers (the botnet). Firefox, too. But, at least, Mozilla has a 2018-something version of the synchronization server open in GitHub (Firefox Sync Server).

I upgraded the software a month or so ago. I though it was easy, just following the steps in the README file and it is done. And, of course, it works. The software is upgraded after doing those steps. The problems are the changes made and not described in any part but a lost issue in the repository issue tracker.

This week I noticed that my changes were not synchronizing between my two computers. I though it was a problem of the Nginx configuration, so I started digging into it. It was not. Logs did not show anything special but one thing:

1586625940767	Services.Common.RESTRequest	DEBUG	GET https://DOMAIN/token/1.0/sync/1.5 500
1586625940767	Services.Common.TokenServerClient	DEBUG	Got token response: 500
1586625940767	Services.Common.TokenServerClient	WARN	Did not receive JSON response. Misconfigured server?
1586625940767	Services.Common.TokenServerClient	DEBUG	Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
1586625940767	Services.Common.TokenServerClient	DEBUG	Body: <html>
  <head>
    <title>Internal Server Error</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1><p>Internal Server Error</p></h1>

  </body>
</html>

1586625940767	Sync.BrowserIDManager	ERROR	Non-authentication error in _fetchTokenForUser: TokenServerClientServerError(...)(resource://services-common/tokenserverclient.js:39:36) JS Stack trace: TokenServerClientServerError@tokenserverclient.js:105:16
_processTokenResponse@tokenserverclient.js:279:19

What the fuck?!

I started diggin under the skin during 2 days until, for some reason, I left the watch command open with the status of the systemd service and found this:

ProgrammingError: (psycopg2.errors.UndefinedColumn) column "keys_changed_at" does not exist
LINE 3:     keys_changed_at, node
            ^

[SQL: select
    uid, generation, client_state, created_at, replaced_at,
    keys_changed_at, node
from
    users
where
    email = %(email)s
and
    service = %(service)s
order by
    created_at desc, uid desc
limit
    20
]
[parameters: {'email': u'REDACTED@api.accounts.firefox.com', 'service': u'sync-1.5'}]

Now, you might have guessed I use PostgreSQL to store the data. From my old setup to the new one, even doing the steps of the docs, the database was not upgraded at all. For this, I spent 2 days looking into the wrong place. The fix is in an issue (you can go to the issue), but if you do not want to get into it, here is the fix:

ALTER TABLE users ADD keys_changed_at BIGINT;
ALTER TABLE users ADD node VARCHAR(255);

Where do you have to apply it? Of course, in the database you put into the configuration. And, with such simple thing, it works. It could be pushed as a migration to be done in the make build step or something, but nope.

I faced another problem related to the Nginx configuration I have in place, but that is not relevant for this post.

And that is a writeup made by spending two days fixing something the upgrade process should consider in the documentation. I understand that hosting yourself the software has its problems, but damn…

There is a lot of things to improve with the Firefox Sync Server, for example, not using Python 2.7 or a better documentation, because it is not clear at all.

–

If you want to deploy a Firefox Sync Server in your own server, or VPS, or whatever server you own, a guide to deploy the Firefox Sync Server can be found at Firefox Bookmark Syncing (Wayback Machine backup), writen by Ansgar Kellner. Credits to him, it works like a charm.

The guide above this paragraph does not take into account using PostreSQL as the backend database, so you must do this in order to install witk before executing the make build command:

$ echo "psycopg2" >> requirements.txt

If it fails, try with psycopg2-binary instead.

Then, I recommend to you to setup the server for using gevent workers. To install them before installing the sync server:

$ echo "gevent" >> requirements.txt

If you have deployed your sync server already, you can install it and setup in the config file:

$ pip install gevent

In the file syncserver.ini:

[server:main]
...
worker_class = gevent

The three dots represents the rest of the configuration, put the last line at the end of that category.

And, with all of this, you are going to have a smooth and fast Firefox Sync Server at your disposal.

Status update, April 2020

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post should be posted about in mid-april, but I have not posted anything since october 2019, so I thought it was a good idea to write this.

First of all, I have been working as an Android developer for the past 5 months. I still have a lot to learn, because Android development is not as trivial as it might seem to be, but I like it. It is been a challenge, but I am learning a lot about how to develop an application properly, and I like it.

Also, I am starting to make my own Android base architecture to make applications (in Kotlin). I am thinking on writting a series of blog posts about this, because it is something I really loved to learn and I am sure it is going to help me even for debugging any bug I encounter! The source code of this will be open when I consider it is worth opening it, or maybe I will do it even it is being done.

I am also starting another project which I hope it ends someday. It is a web application done in flask. It is a simple task manager. Why? Because I did not find any that fits my needs, or at least, what I think a task manager should be. Do not get me wrong, something like todo.sr.ht would do it, but not for my personal tasks, so I hope to release a first version in a couple of months.

On the other hand, I am making another project, this is not going to be open source for a series of private reasons, but I hope to learn a lot from it too.

And that is it! I do not have time to get bored in this quarantine (or even in a normal life), so… I hope to get back to writing more soon!

Status update, October 2019

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last month I wrote a post about an status update about my progress in my tasks. I have been able to complete some tasks, but not every one of them.

First of all, I am almost finished about testing mailbox.org. But the aliases system for having multiple mail addresses does not fit my necessities. I am looking for something like migadu.com, but without the outgoing quota, and I think that leads me to self-hosting my email. I am still looking, so I have hope.

As my main job is Android development (I am still too new in this world), I also learnt about the MVP and MVVP patterns for software arquitecture. They are new for me. I see diferences between MVP, MVVM and MVC, but not too many as I imagined. I also learnt about Dagger and Retrofit, which are equally interesting projects I did not know about.

As far as my Go experience, it is still the same, I did not have any time this past month to get a deeper look into it, so I am keeping that for the next month.

Thank you for keep reading to the end!

Status update, September 2019

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am going to add status updates to the blog every month, so I force myself to complete tasks, projects and other stuff, and share the progress here.

I am starting to look for e-mail providers beyond Google or ProtonMail. As a privacy-conscius individual, I still do not like having my personal email in Gmail, even knowing that small-medium email providers can be shutdown any moment, and self-hosting my own requires a fair amount of time to maintain and I do not have it right now, maybe in a future…

I have some requirements to choose one:

Privacy first, preferably Europe-based.
Compilant with standard protocols (IMAP and SMTP).
Possibility of GPG encryption (altough I prefer to hold my keys).
Custom domain support and multi-account.
OTP support.

For now, mailbox.org is my choice. I paid one month and am testing the whole service right now. I am still dealing with having multiple aliases, though.

About my programming progress, I started doing stuff in Go. I find Go as the language between C and a high-level programming language: fast, “easy” and cross-platform, without the hard parts of C (it even has pointers and such stuff). I still have planned to go back to C, because I like it more, but I try to have time for both of them.

I got a project called TwootBot (the code will be open as soon as I finish a couple of things). This projects take the last entry of an RSS feed and put a tweet. Since I do not use Twitter anymore, I have a couple of things to do with this:

Check if it still works with Twitter for people who uses it.
Include the Mastodon API, so Mastodon and Pleroma users can use it too.
Add a TUI and a cli interface to see data such as the last post published and other stuff (the TUI is for learning purposes and I would like to give it a try).

I also started doing more Android development (application level, not the operating system, for now). I am looking for a new job and got some recomendations to learn new stuff that looks really promising (although some of them are Google-related, but it is a company’s project, I cannot change that).

And, for know, I think this is enough to the first status update.

Thank you for keep reading to the end!

Return to blogging, 2019 edition

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So… I am back!

There is a couple of times where I thought on not to be back at blogging. But then I had some ideas to make a few posts (plus a couple I got under my TO-DO list)…

And then my friend Diego (follow him @diego) put his blog on the Internet (diego.codes, down to “Posts”). And then I thought: damn, I got to put mine on the Internet too!

If everything went well you will see this post published on Jan. 26, 2019. A few more are comming on this month (I hope so), so stay tunned!

You can follow me @captainepoch. I have a Twitter account, but only for the handle, I do not really care about Twitter.

See you!

No static IP? No problem!

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Most of us do not have a static IP address at home, so having a server running at home with our stuff is kind of complicated. But it is possible to use a DNS service to not worry about the static IP!

Setting up the DNS at FreeDNS

Why is it free? It’s quite simple. We wanted a challenge… that’s it.

First of all, you have to make an account at FreeDNS. Then you have 5 subdomains to use, although we only need one, because we can later on set up a domain with a CNAME entry in our favourite nameserver provider.

Once you have the account, then go to Subdomains and add one. The image is a ‘default’ config, but you can choose a lot of subdomains. Simply go to Many many more available….

Go to Dynamic DNS, and you should see your DNS at the bottom of the website, like the image (I blanked the IP, but you should see one), and then go to quick cron example and you are going to see a lot of text and a cron rule at the bottom. Put that in your Raspberry Pi, or server, or whatever you want to have at home running your services.

That cronjob is going to be updating the DNS entry at FreeDNS with the IP you have at home at that very instant. If it changes instant any moment, it will be updated, so you should be good. For example:

*/5 * * * * sleep 44 ; wget --no-check-certificate -O - https://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?N0Nad05PUTVzYTdBTk5VUTZxSHYwdkFtOjE3NTgzNjUz >> /tmp/freedns_dopedns_crabdance_com.log 2>&1 &

That would update my DNS setup with the IP I have at this moment. It will execute every 5 minutes.

Setting up a domain

To set up a domain and not using your DNS domain (which could be a little difficult to remember), simply go to the domain panel at your nameserver provider and set up a CNAME entry. Then you can set up an Apache or Nginx normally pointing up to the domain.

With that you do not need a static IP at home to have your services served. Hope it helps!

Signal and no GAPPS...

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We, as users and consumers, saw Android evolving. Nowadays, a lot of really good funcionality is integrated into the Google Play Services (I will call them PS from now). If you do not know or are not familiar with what this is, please check the Wikipedia about that (Wikipedia’s Google Play Services).

So, if you are an user that care about its privacy, you obviously do not use PS in your mobile. It is the worst nightmare. Like a friend of mine said once: Why do you want to use privacy stuff if you have literally a spy in your phone? And a few months later, I put my phone with LineageOS + MicroG (you have that LOS+MicroG build here and I will talk about this in another post).

I wanted to try Signal again. Signal is an instant messaging application with a strong encryption protocol. The protocol itself has been proven very secure, and it has been audited too. It is open and you can use it freely. You can take a look at signal.org/docs.

The problem is I do not have the PS installed. I have something that can act as the PS, but not replace them. And, if you use Yalp Store to download the app, the first thing you see is…

It is true. Signal uses Google Cloud Messaging to send the messages. Also it uses PS for calls too.

That is the first problem. But this does not end here. After you install it and try to create an accout, you get this!

A friend of mine, tried to get Signal working in his mobile (he has the Play Services installed) and it worked.

It would be awesome that non-PS users could use Signal. In fact, LibreSignal was a succesful project until Moxie Marlinspike said he was not OK with LibreSignal using the Open Whisper Systems servers and the name “Signal”.

Using the C preprocessor

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We already know that C is a language broadly used in almost every computer or computer-like gadget. We also know that C is a complex thing and thus every operative system has its own POSIX API in order to give some portability (Windows is special, I wo nt cover anything about Windows and C here).

So, as a student, I have assignments. I am also a Computer Science and Engineering student, so some of those assignments are in low level languages (C and C++). I use Mac and GNU/Linux day-to-day and will love using the POSIX API in both operative systems without worring about library paths or some syscalls. So, as far as I know, some library paths are different between Mac and GNU/Linux, and thus we have to put those paths at the #include macro. I am going to write my findings about using the C preprocessor to solve this issue.

Disclaimer

This is not a professional post but the findings of a student who likes C enough.

Environments

For this post I am using my MacBook Pro with the latest version of El Capitán and my Raspberry Pi B+ with the latest version of Raspbian at the date of writing this post.

Mac compiler:

Configured with: --prefix=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Apple LLVM version 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.42.1)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin

RPi compiler:

gcc (Raspbian 4.9.2-10) 4.9.2
Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

What is the Preprocessor?

The C preprocessor, often known as cpp, is a macro processor that is used automatically by the C compiler to transform your program before compilation. It is called a macro processor because it allows you to define macros, which are brief abbreviations for longer constructs.

Source: Overview

The preprocessor does lexical substitutions, which is a hardcore copy and paste from macros to the source code!

Some code!

When we want to define some constant values in C we can use the const or #define. The #define macro is part of the preprocessor of C, so for example:

#define STRING "Hello, world"

You will get:

Hello, world

The #define macro is widely used (e. g. look at the Linux’s source code).

It is cool, but there is no problem with this, it is easy to use and compatible with both operating systems.

So, for example, you can define macro calls! Let’s call it ’little functions’. So, for example, you need a comparator (because of… reasons). So, let’s define a macro for that:

#define equal(X, Y)  ((X) == (Y) ? (X) : (Y))

It means: if X is equal to Y, returns X, else Y. It is an if but in a macro! Awesome :3.

And, of course, the output you get if true:

FALSE (2): 2
TRUE (1): 1

But, again, both operating systems have no problem with this, at all, it works cleanly.

As I said at the top of this post I wanted something more hardcore, like distinguish between paths. In an assignments we had to upload for correction we needed to use a lib. called ucontext.h. So, why would I want to use the preprocessor because of it? Well…

Linux path:

/usr/include/ucontext.h

Mac path:

/usr/include/sys/ucontext.h

So… We need the preprocessor… Again! :).

Let’s get started seeing what are the macros we need. First of all, it is neccesary to know the macros for both platforms, which are __APPLE__ for Mac and __linux__ for GNU/Linux.

Of course, if you do that in Mac OS it prints Mac OS if you compile and run in a Mac and GNU/Linux if you do it in Linux.

You can do it too for other macros (code: ex4.c) which prints 100 if you compile and run in a Mac and 200 if you do it in Linux.

Another example is for using different paths for a library:

#if __APPLE__
#include <sys/ucontext.h>
#elif __linux__
#include <ucontext.h>
#endif

That snippet is choosing between to paths for the same library. If there is some POSIX love between GNU/Linux and Mac, we should be able to use the same syscall of the same library. So, that means portability, and that is good! :D

As you can see C is really powerful and it was engineered in order to get portability from one operating system to another. POSIX allows it, and it is cool. I will edit this post to add things if I see more interesting stuff about the preprocessor that I could use and show you. This is bigger than you think, believe me!

You can get more info at GNU GCC’s Preprocessor wiki.

I am very thankful to @voiser who readed this post and pointed me some typos and grammatical errors that needed to be fixed :).

Isolate your Ruby environment

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Developers normally have a few environments while making a software (for a company, as an indie dev…) that isolates all the dependencies in order to get the product to work.

I was interested on that a few days ago. I was asking myself if it is another way to get isolated enviroments for hardcore stuff like C or C++, where libs are normally installed with the package manager you are using or by compiling them within the source code or as a static binary. With Python you can use virtualenv, which created isolated environments and then you can deploy. There are a few for Ruby, but I am going to use RVM.

I am not a Ruby developer. I do not know a thing about this programming language. I was looking for a way to have the same set up for Jekyll that I got on my server, because I wanted to make some modifications to the minima theme (It came as a gem and, if I modify inside of the gem, when I update it is not going to be the theme with my modifications) and not with the system’s Ruby version.

So, let’s get started!

DISCLAIMER: I will be doing this post on a Debian 8.3 machine with testing (stretch) repositories. I did on my ArchLinux machine and it works like a charm. I did not try on Mac OS X but it should work.

Installing RVM

First of all you need to install rvm. Going through its website you see a gpg import key command. Do not do it. If you do, then the curl command let you know that you should import another key, so execute the curl command first.

$ curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

You will be asked to import a gpg key, so do it and execute the command again. If it does not work, try the second command it appears:

$ curl -sSL https://rvm.io/mpapis.asc | gpg2 --import -

I did it once because the gpg2 command does not work and it works.

If you are using zsh as a shell, please read the comments you will get, because you need to do it in order to get rvm working. I put this at the end on my .zshrc file and it works:

if [[ -d "$HOME/.rvm" ]]; then
    source ~/.profile
fi

Then, close and reopen your terminal, and type:

$ rvm --version

And you should see something like that (with the version you installed):

$ rvm 1.27.0 (latest) by Wayne E. Seguin <wayneeseguin@gmail.com>, Michal Papis <mpapis@gmail.com> [https://rvm.io/]

Installing a Ruby version

With RVM you can manage a lot of versions of Ruby. In this post it will be 2.3.1, the latest at this moment, but you can have MRI/YARV, JRuby and Rubinius too.

Before installing anything about Ruby, let’s check if the requirements are installed, so execute:

$ rvm requirements

It installs every dependency to compile and install Ruby and get everyting working. You have to have sudo permissions.

After installing everything, let’s get to install a Ruby version, so:

$ rvm install RUBY_VERSION

Where RUBY_VERSION means the version you want to install. In my case, it will be 2.3.1.

You can use whatever version of Ruby you want. I will be using the latest because I use it with Jekyll. If rvm does not find any binary for that version, it will compile, so first you should check the requirements.

Using a version of Ruby

In order to have a version running as default, you have to execute the command to set it default:

$ rvm use RUBY_VERSION --default

Where RUBY_VERSION means the version you installed. This is going to set the necessary variables to use that version of Ruby on your user, not on the system. In my case it is going to be 2.3.1 as I said.

You can change it whenever you want for another version of Ruby you installed.

Create a `gemset`

A gemset is not more that a set of gems for an specific version of Ruby. Let’s create one:

$ rvm create gemset GEMSET_NAME

The GEMSET_NAME will be jekyll321 because I will use Jekyll 3.2.1 as an example. You can create the gemset with the name you want to, even create more than one gemset at a time, but it is not tue purpose of this post:

$ rvm gemset create GEMSET_NAME1 GEMSET_NAME2 ...

You have more information about gemsets at its Basics page.

Installing `gems`

To choose the gemset you have created, execute:

$ rvm RUBY_VERSION@GEMSET_NAME

Where RUBY_VERSION is the version of Ruby of your choice and GEMSET_NAME is the name of the gemset you want to use. In my case it will be 2.3.1 and jekyll321.

After that, you can install gems right know. I will do with Jekyll right now.

Isolating the environment

Right now you have everything you need to start blogging with Jekyll, and that is cool! But it is not completed. In order to achieve that first you need to create a blog and then set the files to use only that version of Ruby and that gemset.

Once you created your blog with Jekyll and you navigate into the folder, you will notice a message that says:

RVM used your Gemfile for selecting Ruby, it is all fine - Heroku does that too,
you can ignore these warnings with 'rvm rvmrc warning ignore [directory]/Gemfile'.
To ignore the warning for all files run 'rvm rvmrc warning ignore allGemfiles'.

Unknown ruby interpreter version (do not know how to handle): RUBY_VERSION.

And that is correct, because it means you (and me) installed everything correctly. But it presents a problem: you lost your gemset. If you try to execute some commands of Jekyll, it fails, so assign again as in Installing gems.

Then you are going to create two files: .ruby-version and .ruby-gemset. The first file will indicate which version of Ruby you will be running, and the second the gemset you want to use. Those files will contain information about what it should used by Ruby. Into the directory of your project execute:

$ rvm --ruby-version use RUBY_VERSION@GEMSET_NAME

--ruby-version will create two files that are compatible with others Ruby virtual environment managers such as rbenv. As always where RUBY_VERSION is the version of Ruby of your choice and GEMSET_NAME is the name of the gemset you want to use. In my case it will be 2.3.1 and jekyll321. You can now delete the Gemfile if you have what you need in your gemset.

And that is it! You got a isolated environment for Jekyll (in this case). You can create some of them with the gemsets and the Ruby versions.

Using a `hook` to generate the blog

You may notice, if you are using the post-receive hook to generate the blog using git that $PATH is not correctly loaded. To fix it, add at the start of the file:

unset GIT_DIR
source ~/.profile

A little rant on ads

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

DISCLAIMER: This is an opinion and you do not have to agree with it necessarily. That is why this is my blog, for write an opinion even if it is about a controversial topic.

This post came on my mind because I saw on reddit that Facebook will try to send ads out of the social network and How Facebook and Google are beating ad blockers. There is other news but I am sure you can find it at reddit. Also you have /r/Adblock, FYI.

I am sure you know that nowadays a big business is on online ads. You can see it because Google, Facebook, et al, put a lot of efforts in order to include ads on their websites (personalized or not, that will come on this post). I am sure you hate that too.

Well, the worst part of putting ads on a website is that you even can get malware if you are not careful what you click on. The good part is you get a revenue for forcing people to see your damn ads putting JS scripts that block the site if you do not deactivate the adblocker or putting messages like “This website can be possible because of the ads, please deactivate your adblocker”, yay! (Forbes is one of them putting a first-ad-page when you go into its website).

The fact is that I am not against ads. It as a part of the marketing strategy of a business and sure a company needs it for growing up. That is not enterily true, but for most of them, it is. There is a lot of companies that invest a lot of money in advertising and their own advertising because it is their bussines model. What it gets me anger is the huge amount of ads that invade TV and internet.

You turn on your TV, and I am sure you get an ad in the middle of whatever you are going to watch. You go into a newspapper or YouTube, and more ads! Really? Because I do not want to get to the point that you see more ads than a movie or a soup.

You install a free app from the Play Store or the AppStore, and BUM! More ads! And that ads are worst than the TV or website, because you can press onto them without wanting to do that!

So adblockers were born. The king was AdBlock Plus, but then uBlock went into the battlefield (use it, not the first). And then you can see a website without an ad bothering you at the left or right of the page, blinking with their colorful images (or even sound when ads were done with Flash). You can also block on Android with Adaway, but you have to be root :(.

And then, trackers’ blockers were born too! Because ads track people to know their preferences and then show personalized ads based on that. On a mobile platform ads track too.

And after that, internet collapses. For Duck’s sake!

After this little rage against ads, I have to say that I am against of tracking users, putting malware on the ads and that kind of stuff. One ad on TV or website is cool, even people will be considering not blocking them. On a mobile platform it gets data (woo, data, pls, it has to be paid every month and is loved by each one of ours) and that is the bad face of it.

If Facebook or Google would not based their bussines model on that (a part of selling data and that kind of stuff), and the Internet would not get that huge amount of ads, people would not block them. Buuuuuuut they wanted to play, so… :)

I am sorry, I am not going to support it. It bothers me that watching a video or reading some articles and then a wild ad appeared…

Let's Encrypt certificates!

Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As you may know I am a little concern about my privacy. And you should too, because your data, your life. So, in order to provide a secure and private connection to my sites, I needed a SSL certificate, which it is too expensive. Of course there are free solutions, but they do not provide a reliable SSL certificate or free wildcard support.

Then, Let’s Encrypt appeared in this game. They provide an Open Source, free, reliable SSL certificates for your websites. It is wonderful! So, my friend Rafa and me asked for the beta (Let’s Encrypt will be relased for the public on 16th november’s week).

After the private beta period, on 3rd december Let’s Encrypt relased the Open Beta program, which you can see here.

Set up

Let’s do it!

What do you need?

In order to generate your certs, you will need some stuff:

Python (because of the local server)
Git (to clone Let’s Encrypt’s repo)
Patient, because, why not?
Coffee (the most important part of this process) :)

Download the software

I, like Rafa, chose to download the software and generate all the files locally, so in your computer, you have to do:

$ git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt

It contains the tools you will need to generate your certificates. Remember that certs have 90 days of lifetime, so each 3 months, more or less, you must update it!.

Usage

I changed the way I generated the last certificate, so I could do in just one line on the terminal:

$ ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --manual --email YOUR_EMAIL -d DOMAIN_1 [-d DOMAIN_2, ...]

I usually do it at my main machine with ArchLinux or in my MacBook Pro, but if you do at FreeBSD or Amazon Linux Ami, it is the same command with the --debug flag:

$ ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --debug --manual --email YOUR_EMAIL -d DOMAIN_1 [-d DOMAIN_2, ...]

Let’s going to explain this:

letsencrypt-auto is the app for generating the certs. It has some parameters you can use, but we only need three.
certonly is for generate the certs locally. Note that we did from the start of this post, and it is not going to change, because I like so.
--email YOUR_EMAIL prevents to get the screen and put your email.
-d DOMAIN_1 puts all the domains you want in the certificate. You can put whatever domain you want, without restrictions. So, I put 3, but you could put 10 (always with the -d).

This will setup the virtual environment that letsencrypt will use in all future executions. Once that is done, you are asked to run a few commands on the server in order to get the auth to validate the cert(s). Follow the instructions to put the token into your server, they are clear.

After that you need to release the 80 port. Why? Because all the petitios to validate the cert will be done there. So:

$ sudo service nginx stop

Obviously, you will have a little downtime. But no worries! It is for your users, and that is the most important part of a website!

And then run this command (note it has to be run as root, and I still do not know why…):

$ sudo $(command -v python2 || command -v python2.7 || command -v python2.6) -c "import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer;s = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(('', 80), SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler);s.serve_forever()"

Then, in Terminal, press Enter after doing the steps Let’s Encrypt told you, et voilá!, authenticated and certificate generated (do the same steps for every domain you put, it is important because each domain generate its own token). The server is not needed anymore, so simply interrupt its execution.

Copying to the server

Given that I am generating the certificate in my own computer instead of in the server itself, I have to copy things around. The letsencrypt tool tells you that your certificates live in /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR_DOMAIN. The files there are actually symbolic links to /etc/letsencrypt/archive/YOUR_DOMAIN/fileX.pem.

Now, I am just going to copy two files to the server, because once you put 3 or 4 domains, they use the same certificate. Here is the files you have to copy to the server:

fullchain.pem ~> /etc/ssl/adol_pw.pem
privkey.pem ~> /etc/ssl/adol_pw.key

Nginx setup

I do not use Apache, so I do not know how to make it work there

Edit the file you want to incorporate the SSL certificate (in my case it is main’s website config):

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name adol.pw;

    return 301 https://$host$request_uri$is_args$args;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name adol.pw;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/adol_pw.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/adol_pw.key;
    ...
}

As you might see, I (like Rafa, again) chose to do a redirect if you access by http instead of https, and at ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key put the path for your certificate files. Now, do a:

$ sudo service nginx start

And you have now a valid, reliable and free SSL certificate!

Adding new domains

If you did everything but you forgot adding another domain, simply run everything again but with another -d DOMAIN_N flag.

Renewal

Recently I had to renew certs for the domains I registered the first time. If you try to renew with the system I posted here, it fails. A fix for that is renewing the certs by running this:

$ ./letsencrypt-auto renew --manual-public-ip-logging-ok

Why? I do not know. But @rmed_dev told me that it does not fail. If you execute without that flag, it is going to say this:

2016-02-28 08:43:21,803:WARNING:letsencrypt.cli:Attempting to renew cert from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/adol.pw.conf produced an unexpected error: Missing command line flag or config entry for this setting:
NOTE: The IP of this machine will be publicly logged as having requested this certificate. If you're running letsencrypt in manual mode on a machine that is not your server, please ensure you're okay with that.

Are you OK with your IP being logged?

(You can set this with the --manual-public-ip-logging-ok flag). Skipping.

Acknowledge

This tutorial is provided by Rafael aka @rmed_dev, which with his permission I publish here. I modified to adapt it to my website and improvements, by the way. Thank you for making it!

Also, thank you, Tak, for the command for FreeBSD and Amazon Linux Ami and the corrections you made to this article!

And finally, thank you, Let’s Encrypt, for making the private beta available for me. I am waiting for the final and public release too!

UPDATE 20-OCT-2021: Install Certbot, this guide might be outdated.

UPDATE 28-FEB-2016: Added “Adding new domains” and Renewal". Some typos."

UPDATE 09-DIC-2015: Minor fixes.

UPDATE 04-DIC-2015: On 3rd december, Let’s Encrypt went to open beta for the public, so I changed many stuff here to adapt to the new commandline and the text itself.

¿No tienes más puertos SATA?

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Conocí GNU/Linux hace mucho tiempo con Ubuntu. Desde que comencé a probarlo, quedé bastante impresionado con lo que ofrecía respecto a Windows (a parte de la filosofía Open Source que sigue, o seguía, depende de cómo se mire). Como siempre, acababa volviendo a Windows. Poco a poco, fui obligándome a usar GNU/Linux hasta que aguantase, hasta que este año me puse Debian en el portátil que uso en la universidad.

Después de estar usándolo unos meses, me encanta. He de decir que si, no será Mac OS X, y tampoco tendrá 100k cosas como tiene Windows, pero me sigue pareciendo un OS superior en muchos aspectos (entre ellos, que sea Open Source).

Entonces me volvió a entrar la neura de ponerlo en mi PC de sobremesa (creo, ya, la vez número 89.345). Problema: soy anti-particiones mezclando sistemas operativos en un mismo HDD y no tenía más puertos SATA libres (tengo 4). Así que me puse manos a la obra, y busqué este cacharro:

Es un conversor PCIE To SATA Asmedia 106X SATA Controller Ver 0.951 (link a eBay). Permite añadir 2 puertos eSATA (nunca he usado el que viene en la placa base, pero bueno, por si acaso), y 2 puertos SATA, a través del bus PCI Express.

Basta con conectarlo al bus PCIE, conectar el cable SATA del dispositivo en cuestión, y encender el ordenador. Depende de qué se conecte, habrá o no que retocar las opciones de la BIOS. En mi caso, como voy a usarlo para añadir un HDD extra e instalar Debian, os muestro los pasos que he seguido para configurarlo como primera opción de boot:

En las opciones de los HDD disponibles, seleccionar como primer dispositivo el HDD que va conectado al adaptador.
Después, en las opciones de “boot” de la BIOS, ponerlo como primer dispositivo.

¡Y ya está! Con esto ya queda perfectamente configurado. No obstante, este dispositivo comprueba que el HDD que hay conectado tenga arranque propio (con una distro GNU/Linux, el GRUB), y si lo tiene, inicia desde ahí automáticamente.

Os dejo un vídeo para que veáis su funcionamiento:

NOTA: donde pone ‘Windows Vista’ debería poner ‘Windows 8.1’, un error que no corregí en el GRUB. Actualmente es ‘Windows 10’.

Cambiar 'Action keys' en HP Pavilion DV6

Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Todos los que sean propietarios de un portátil HP Pavilion DV6 (o modelos similares), se encuentran las molestas teclas a la izquierda del todo (molestas en el sentido de que les das sin querer). Abreviando, esas teclas, cuando las pulsas, tienen registrada una acción, que se puede cambiar modificando el registro en Windows.

NOTA: no me hago responsable de lo que hagas, este tutorial será realizado sobre un HP Pavilion DV6 3180es con Windows 7 x64 Home Premium

Se accede al registro de Windows. Para ello, hay dos maneras rápidas:
- Tecla de Windows + R (se nos abrirá la ventana de ejecutar), se escribe regedit y le damos a “Aceptar”.
- Inicio -> Ejecutar -> escribir regedit.

Se busca la ruta:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AppKey

Hay (en mi caso) 5 carpetas, numeradas en este orden: 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 7. Cada carpeta corresponde a una de las 5 teclas que tengo en el portátil mencionado al comienzo.
- 15: corresponde a la asociación mailto; es decir, ejecuta el programa que tengamos por defecto para leer el correo electrónico (Mozilla Thunderbird, MS Outlook, etc.).
- 16: ejecuta el programa asociado a la extensión .cda.
- 17: ejecuta algo asociado a la dirección del registro ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}.
- 18: ejecuta el programa calc.exe, la calculadora.
- 7: es el botón que abre el programa asociado a http, es decir, el navegador (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.).
Una vez descritos todos los botones, se comienza a modificar alguno de ellos. Personalmente, el botón que no tengo activo es el de mailto, ya que no uso ningún gestor de correo en el portátil. Los pasos que tenemos que seguir son:
- Click derecho en la carpeta AppKey -> Export, y se almacena en algún sitio (será una copia de seguridad).
- Ir a la carpeta del botón que se quiera modificar modificar. En mi caso, la 15.
- Click derecho encima de la clave y a Cambiar nombre. Se escribirá ShellExecute.
- Ahora, click derecho de nuevo (o doble click), y a Modificar.
- En mi caso, voy a poner que se ejecute el programa Sublime Text 2, así que he copiado la ruta del .exe, y la he puesto ahí.
- Reiniciamos el ordenador.

Si todo ha ido bien, se debería poder ejecutar el programa Sublime Text 2 dandole a la tecla del correo que hay en el portátil. Lógicamente, poned lo que vosotros queráis que haga la tecla. Lo mio es un ejemplo.