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...

Bugzz Smaher

I created the first version of this game at my summer house over just two weekends in 2015. The full version differed only by minor interface tweaks, improvements to the wave generator, and Facebook integration. The game featured saving and …

Dice or Die

A logic game for mobile devices, blending elements of 2048, Color Lines, and Match-3. This game, like Krakoid and Bugzz Smasher, was built on my own engine. The engine supported only a few platforms — Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, and …

Cower Defense

A tower defense game developed by Belka for social networks – a really cool game with a great story, artwork, and animations. The original game was built in Adobe Flash. I was one of three programmers responsible for porting the …

Tweens Visualizer

Это небольшой javascript-проект, предназначенный для визуализации комбинации твинов по двум осям + ось скейла. Твины используются для нелинейной анимации различных объектов в играх и приложениях. Крайне полезная штука. Написал его потому, что мне надоело подбирать комбинацию твинов в уме. Формулы …

Kingdom of Seven Seals

This is a highly engaging hidden-object game featuring numerous mini-games and tasks. The game was developed by a team of three to four people, but the team composition changed several times, so the total number of developers was roughly twice …