Building interactive SSH applications

After the announcement of shell access for builds.sr.ht jobs, a few people sent me some questions, wondering how this sort of thing is done. Writing interactive SSH applications is actually pretty easy, but it does require some knowledge of the pieces involved and a little bit of general Unix literacy.

On the server, there are three steps which you can meddle with using OpenSSH: authentication, the shell session, and the command. The shell is pretty easily manipulated. For example, if you set the user’s login shell to /usr/bin/nethack, then nethack will run when they log in. Editing this is pretty straightforward, just pop open /etc/passwd as root and...

Shell access for builds.sr.ht CI

Have you ever found yourself staring at a failed CI build, wondering desperately what happened? Or, have you ever needed a fresh machine on-demand to test out an idea in? Have you been working on Linux, but need to test something on OpenBSD? Starting this week, builds.sr.ht can help with all of these problems, because you can now SSH into the build environment.

The next time your build fails on builds.sr.ht,...

Status update, August 2019

Outside my window, the morning sun can be seen rising over the land of the rising sun, as I sip from a coffee purchased at the konbini down the street. I almost forgot to order it, as the staffer behind the counter pointed out with a smile and a joke that, having been told in Japanese, mostly went over my head. It’s on this quiet Osaka morning I write today’s status update - there are lots of existing developments to share!

Let’s start with sourcehut news. I deployed a cool feature yesterday - SSH access to builds.sr.ht. You can now SSH into a failed build to examine...

DRM leasing: VR for Wayland

As those who read my status updates have been aware, recently I’ve been working on bringing VR to Wayland (and vice versa). The deepest and most technical part of this work is DRM leasing (Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Restrictions Management), and I think it’d be good to write in detail about what’s involved in this part of the effort. This work has been sponsored by Status.im, as part of an effort to build a comprehensive Wayland-driven VR workspace. When we got started, most of the plumbing was missing for VR headsets to be useful on Wayland, so this has been my focus for a while. The result...

FOSS contributor tracks

Just like many companies have different advancement tracks for their employees (for example, a management track and an engineering track), similar concepts exist in free software projects. One of the roles of a maintainer is to help contributors develop into the roles which best suit them. I’d like to explain what this means to me in my role as a maintainer of several projects, though I should mention upfront that I’m just some guy and, while I can explain what has and hasn’t worked for me, I can’t claim to have all of the answers. People are hard.

There are lots of different tasks which need doing on...

Fabrique Noir – Space Travel

I'm enjoying creating music since 1981. First on analogue synthesizers (SIEL OPERA 6) and drum machines (ROLAND TR-505), later on with digital synths and workstations (KORG M1, KORG 01/Wfd). From 1986 to 1989 I created my music mainly on the COMMODORE AMIGA. The PC platform almost killed my motivation. Switching from hardware sequencers to a software sequencer was tough for me, later on an abundance of possibilities (I earned money and bought too many devices) somewhat paralyzed me. The birth of my daughter Lara-Marie in 2011 did add a share to my "uncreative pause". Still, I never stopped enjoying (making)...

Status update, July 2019

Today I received the keys to my new apartment, which by way of not being directly in the middle of the city1 saves me a decent chunk of money - and allows me to proudly announce that I have officially broken even on doing free software full time! I owe a great deal of thanks to all of you who have donated to support my work or purchased a paid SourceHut account. I’ve dreamed of sustainably working on free software for a long, long time, and I’m very grateful for all of your support in helping realize that dream. Now let me share with you what your...

Announcing code annotations for SourceHut

Today I’m happy to announce that code annotations are now available for SourceHut! These allow you to decorate your code with arbitrary links and markdown. The end result looks something like this:

NOTICE: Annotations were ultimately removed from sourcehut.

The annotations shown here are sourced from a JSON file which you can generate and upload during your CI process. It looks something like this:

{
  "98bc0394a2f15171fb113acb5a9286a7454f22e7": [
    {
  ...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2019-07-08 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

The other day a friend of mine (an oper on Freenode) wanted to talk about IRC compared to its peers, such as Matrix, Slack, Discord, etc. The ensuing discussion deserves summarization here. In short: I’m glad that IRC doesn’t have the features that are “showstoppers” for people choosing other platforms, and I’m worried that attempts to bring these showstopping “features” to IRC will worsen the platform for the people who use it now.

On IRC, features like embedded images, a nice UX for messages longer than a few lines (e.g. pasted code), threaded messages, etc; are absent. Some sort of “graceful degradation” to support mixed channels with clients...

Subtle ways to lose data