zerokspot.com

Communicating online and building relationships

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 22:02:08 +0100

Right after returning from FOSDEM I stumbled upon the IndieWeb Carnival, something I hadn’t heard of before, thanks to Ben Werdmuller. The whole concept sounded like a nice idea to get slightly more diverse topics onto this blog and so I decided to join in with this month’s topic of “Digital Relationships” hosted by Manu!

When I first joined the web around 1999 and then for real in 2001, I got very interested in web forums. This kind of asynchronous communication with a semi-wide group of people just worked for me. It was not as frantic as IRC and not as slow and closed off like usenet or mailing lists. When the interface does not look like a chat window, it automatically makes me think a bit more about what I’m writing. This eventually led me down the blogging path but tools like web forums (YaBB and phpBB in the early days for me) and in the work-context issue trackers code-review tools still offer a nice middle-ground to me between quick and thoughtful interactions.

Some people might say that this is not a good way to interact with other people or to build relationships but as with pretty much anything, your milage will vary. While lots of people seem to be able to build connections through large chats, for me forums just allowed me think a bit more about what the person I was talking to actually meant.

Social media platforms like Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky feel like something that is somewhere between web forums and chats. I have some mixed feeling about them in general especially when it comes to directly interacting with people there, but they are useful for sharing ideas quickly, even with larger groups. Depending on how many participate there are, though, discussions can become even more hectic than in mid-sized chats. So even here: Small groups make things more consumable for me (I guess that’s why more popular folks have their own social media teams to not go crazy 🤪).

No matter the medium, though, it feels like I’ve been able to build relationships mostly depending on the amount of interaction I have with certain people. If I talk with someone more often, I tend to build a connection with them. The problem is often more to actually recognise someone again. Early chats only had usernames but with web forums and pretty much everything later there are more visual cues who I’m talking with!

Just to give an example for that: Some time ago in a larger group chat people started changing their avatars because they had all been at an event with a photo-booth. All of a sudden it felt like people didn’t know who they were talking with anymore and so - a day later - nearly everyone reverted to their old profile picture 🤣

No matter the tool, though, what is still fascinating to me after all these years is that I can just open a piece of software and just start interacting with people from half-way across the planet and learning from their experience. Even if all I know of these people is their pseudonym and a funny avatar…

I’m just glad that it’s no longer billed as remote call like in one of my all-time favorite Bash.org entries:

docsigma2000: jesus christ man
docsigma2000: my son is sooooooo dead
c8info: Why?
docsigma2000: hes been looking at internet web sites in fucking EUROPE.
docsigma2000: HE IS SURFING LONG DISTANCE
docsigma2000: our fucking phone bill is gonna be nuts
c8info: Ooh, this is bad. Surfing long distance adds an extra $69.99 to your bill per hour.
docsigma2000: …!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK
docsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???
docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that much
c8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you’ll have to live with it.
docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.
docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo dead
c8info: By the way, I’m from Europe, your chatting long distance.
** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)

All major passenger train lines on a PDF

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 19:34:24 +0100

Thanks to the Kraftfuttermischwerk I stumbled upon this awesome map of all major passenger train lines world-wide! When you travel around, you usually only see the regional network but Zhaoxu Sui zoomed out and create a map connecting them all! The result is two maps: One simplified version that covers only train lines and a highly detailed one that also includes busses and ferries where trains are not available.

Looking at these maps I just want to start crossing the lines off that I’ve already used, knowing that I will, sadly, never get them all 😅

Review: Moxy Brussels City Center

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 11:14:40 +0100

After a few years at the Motel One in Rue Royale my partner and I thought it might be nice to try something different. After looking around we found the Moxy Brussels City Center right on the route of the bus line 71 to ULB which meant we would no longer have to switch lines on Louise or other stops! Last September we had already had a great couple of nights in a Moxy hotel in Hamburg and so decided to go with it also for this year’s FOSDEM!

Compared to Hamburg, the room was spotless as far as I could tell, but otherwise very similar! It had no real storage options outside two large coat stacks but enough floor space so that we at least could easily our suitcases for storage without them blocking the paths to the bathroom or the door. The bed was similar although slightly on the soft side, which was great except for only having a single mattress. If there had been two mattresses, the room would have been perfect for me 😄

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time for breakfast on any of the mornings but the breakfast and bar area looks very welcoming and comfortable with nice lighting and a vertical garden. We did spend a bit of time there, though, while planning the days and it was really hard to leave those soft couches and chairs behind.

To summarise, the Moxy Brussels City Center is right now at the top of my list for our next FOSDEM trip! And next time I really want to try the breakfast there!

Review: Learning GitHub Actions

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:25:21 +0100

While I’ve already used GitHub Actions on various projects over the years I wanted to get a slightly broader overview and so picked up Learning GitHub Actions by Brent Laster. As the name somehow suggests, this book at first mostly is for people who have not worked with GHA before but also goes into quite a lot of detail that I wouldn’t have expected!

It not only covers creating workflows and running them on GitHub-hosted runners but then describes things like creating your own actions and re-usable workflows. But my personal highlights where the chapters around monitoring your workflows and improving the security around them and your whole setup!

To summarise, I got out of this book exactly what I had hoped - and more! I think this book is just a great read. If you’re considering GitHub Actions for your CI setup or have already used it for smaller setups, “Learning GitHub Actions” will definitely offer something for you!

FOSDEM 2024: A quick recap

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 21:38:35 +0100

Another year as come and so it was once again time to pack our bags and head over the Brussels for this year’s FOSDEM. As usual, my partner and I arrived on Friday but this time tried to get something off our bucket list that we missed in previous years: A quick tour of the European Parliament!

The EU Parliament

Turns out, this was far less exciting than we had hoped, mostly due to the fact that there were just so many other people who must have had the exact same idea - including at least two school classes. We also opted for using the multimedia guide app that is available in the App Store and Google Play Store instead of picking up the available headphones and tablets. This turned out not to be the best decision as the app was, unfortunately, not that great. Lock your phone? The playback stops. Want to take a picture? The playback stops and with some luck the whole app closes and you have to manually find your way back to the point where the playback stopped.

The Hemicycle in Brussels

Also, only the visitor area of the “Hemicycle” and the way to that are accessible, so there’s actually not all that much to see. We should have probably also the “Parlamentarium” but hunger was just too strong. Perhaps something for next year 🙂

Friday

After the tour through the EU district, we went back to our Hotel and met up with a friend to search for something to eat. Sadly, it feels like half of Brussels takes a break from living between 14:00 and 18:00. Luckily, we stumbled upon a food market called “Wolf” which had not only half open (like half of the restaurants were open) but also had its own microbrewery with some good options for the evening 🙂

Saturday

Because the last week was quite exhausting, we opted to get to ULB a bit later in the morning. Unfortunately, this didn’t mean that there was actual space in the busses and so walked a bit to reach one of the tram lines a couple of streets away from our hotel. Luckily, I was still in time for my very first volunteer shift at FOSDEM! Nothing glamorous but I at least help deliver some food to the various video teams around the campus.

Mozilla was handing out free third-party cookies 🍪

After that and having a delicious vegan burger (by Smaakmakers) I tried to get into the “Tool the docs” devroom in order to see Jack Baldry give a talk about Vale. The queue was long and it was well-deserved! Now I want to add Vale and Reviewdog pretty much to every project that has documentation.

After that I decided to just hang around the various booths and also Janson where I got some glimpses of Javier Ramirez talking about QuestDB, JupyterNotebooks and Grafana in “Ingesting and analyzing millions of events per second in real-time using open source tools”. Before heading home in preparation for dinner.

Sunday

Sundays are always hard: You know that there are still great talks ahead of you but also that this is the last day of FOSDEM. I started the day with hanging around the Grafana booth and then doing once again a shift of food delivering. Turns out: Pasta and wraps are more heavy than burgers and fries 😄

After that and a quick lunch I mostly just stuck to the “Monitoring & Observability” devroom to learn about Grafana Beyla, frame pointers, and CI/CD observability.

And then FOSDEM was over 😢 Luckily, GitHub had organised a party for Sunday evening which was once again great! As with last year, there was a game around meeting other people which resulted in you getting a ticket for a raffle. And, again as with last year, I didn’t win anything but had a lot of fun!

I won’t write about the rest of the evening 😉

Everything else

So, that was it again for FOSDEM. Compared to previous years I’ve watched even fewer talks live but am planning to work my way through some recordings! I spent far more time catching up with coworkers and just doing stuff outside of the talks, which was also fun!

To close of, some random items:

The Moxy Brussels City Center is a very nice hotel and I think this might be the right place to stay also during future trips to Brussels
Belgorama at Brussels Airport is not worth a visit
I’m not the only person who needs two attempts to find the right ticket box in the busses and trams to pay via creditcard.
Someone really needs to keep track of the sunny days during FOSDEM over the years. Last year we at least had one; unlike this year.

While I’m writing this, I’m in a deep post-FOSDEM-depression but luckily without FOSDEM-flu. It’s just sad when you don’t wake up near a waffle food truck 🙈 Once again, big thanks to all the organisers, volunteers, and supporters who make this event possible every year! And yes: The weather in Brussels is (nearly) always bad and the city is not the nicest, but it’s a highlight for me every year!

Vegetarian January: A quick summary

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 10:39:29 +0100

So, while pretty much half of social media was doing either DryJanuary or Veganuary, I opted for a more light-weight “challenge”: Going vegetarian for a month. Looks like there does not exist a widely accepted and social-media approved term but for that I think I’ll just call it “Vegetanuary” 🤪 I mostly managed to stick a vegan dishes, too, but I simply didn’t want to explicitly avoid milk. Over the years I’ve tried milk-replacement drinks again and again, but I simply don’t like the taste for my morning cereals or a hot chocolate. Thanks to some really good vegan mayonnaise replacements, I can actually avoid eggs in a lot of situations, so perhaps something to aim for next year!

The one big downside of going vegan/vegetarian today for me is that (if you also want something beyond vegetables from the food market, are not the best cook, or simply don’t have the time to pre-cook all the time) you have to deal with a lot of plastic packaging. If you’re lucky then there is only one layer of packaging now. A couple of years ago you had to deal with an outer layer and then each item was packaged again. Luckily, this got better and some companies are also trying to use compostable/bio-degradable materials but I think we still have a long way to go here.

There was also a lot of trial an error involved with new products but I have to give one shoutout to the German sausage company Rügenwalder, which in my opinion produces excellent vegan spreads that taste remarkably close to their meat-based counterparts! I should probably avoid highly processed food like these but I’ll make an exception for their products anytime 🤪 But again: Highly processed food is probably not something you should eat too much of…

On the plus-side, eating less meat over the last couple of years has improved my well-being by a lot! It takes a lot to get me feel completely stuffed after a meal (or even two!). It’s, obviously, anecdotal but I like that approach, eating meat only when I have to chance to eat it at a very high quality level!

The Phoenix Project

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 19:30:08 +0100

“The Phoenix Project” was one of these books that were on my to-read pile for years and years and years. It was recommended to me from quite a few people and got praised wherever I looked, but I somehow never got around actually reading it. If you haven’t heard of this book before, it is basically a novel from the point of view of a mid-level IT manager in an industrial company. Due to its structure and applied processes the department is struggling with getting projects finished, organizing their workforce, and in general not being a productive part of the whole enterprise.

While this may sound dry and boring to you, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford tell the story in a way that is thrilling and fast-paced. If you’ve ever been part of an IT project that has gone wrong, you will right away feel at home at “Parts Unlimited”! I wrote above that this is a novel but its main goal is to convey the advantages of the DevOps method. As such, it sometimes feels quite edutainment-like. There is even a guru-like character similar to the Maestro in One upon a time… man, trying to convey to the IT staff the three ways:

Optimizing left-to-right flow with small work packages and never passing known defects down
Creating a feedback loop so that defects are detected and fixed quickly
Culture of experimentation & learning

Fortunately, this doesn’t break the reading flow! It’s just a very enjoyable read and while the book was published in 2013, its message is still relevant. I literally plowed through this book, only stopping when some of the topics hit home slightly too much 😀 I just wish I had read “The Phoenix Project” sooner!

Doctor Who as a happy place

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 22:09:41 +0100

Some days are just bad. Things go wrong, work starts piling up, panic starts settling in, and things just continue to go downhill from there. Probably, everyone has such days every once in a while and everyone hopefully has some routine to get out of the mental loop that might result from that.

For me, watching an episode of Doctor Who is that. Ever since I watched my first episode back in 2009 on a Hotel bed in London, the show has had a special place in my heart. There is something magical when a show offers a positive outlook at the world, no matter how dire the situation. Each and every episode has me immediately hooked, I forget all my worries at least for those 60 minutes, and it feels like my brain uses that time to relax and reset again. No constant thinking, no worries, just that feeling of being part of an adventure, exploring everything that is amazing and exciting about the universe in all of time and space!

2023 in review

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 22:09:45 +0100

As you can see by the delay this post is published, I’ve been unsure whether I should even write it or not. The last year was weird, hard, and sad in so many ways. It feels like there is war and hate everywhere in the world. While I’m extremely that I’m not yet directly affected by it, it and other events have taken a toll. Our cat also passed away this autumn leaving a big hole in our lives. Even the holidays and the preparations for them felt hard and stressful this time time.

Luckily, we had already anticipated that the holidays would be quite stressful and so didn’t even try to get tickets for this year’s 37C3 in Hamburg. Perhaps next year but only if we manage to organise everything to be less stressful…

But enough of the bad parts. 2023 offered a lot of great things to remember! I want to focus on these in this post starting off with all the nice places I went to despite not doing all that much conference traveling anymore!

Places & Traveling

As always, the first real trip of the year was to Brussels for FOSDEM. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be the usual travel party this year due to illnesses but, on the plus-side, the weather was much nicer this year! There was even some sun!
Right after returning from Brussels I had the chance to get to know some of my new coworkers at an in-person event. Stressful but just great to meet everyone!
For our main summer vacation we went to the Styrian Salzkammergut which was just marvellous. For some reason I didn’t write a complete trip summary but I at least left some reviews (Zloam Wirt, train connection, Seewiese Altaussee).
In October we went with friends to Hamburg for an extended weekend. For some reason I never had time to do proper sightseeing there on previous trips and had lots of fun! Of course, as one does, I spent the week after returning sick in bed 😅
For work but also personal reasons I spent a lot of time in Vienna this year. So much so that we even briefly considered renting an apartment there as hotel prices exploded especially in the second half of the year.

Work

2023 was my first year of working 100% remotely. As expected, I require a change in scenery at least every once in a while and so did traveling and train-office but primarily also got a Regus subscription which I use to spend at least one day each week (in theory) at one of their office locations (mostly in Graz and Vienna).

I will probably write more about this in the future as I’ve visited quite a few of their locations during the last 12 months.

Setup

My personal setup hasn’t changed all that much since last year with one exception: Obsidian has become an integral tool for pretty much everything I do. I now also write all my blog posts in it! The setup isn’t perfect yet, but since August I can post to this blog.

On the pen & paper front I managed to actually fill most of the Hobonichi Techo and thought long hard if I should keep using it also for the new year. No matter what: Journaling is now a fixture as it allows me to write down some thoughts that are simply not suitable for a public space like this. I also started to use Fixion pens for my operational journal (a passport-sized Traveler’s Notebook) … they are nice but there not being a properly black one makes me switch to a fountain pen even on the go again and again.

Live events!

For some reason I went to a lot of live events, at least for me. It all started with seeing Alex Kristan in Klagenfurt in February. In June we saw Kalkbrenner and later Kaya Yanar with Carpenter Brut following in November.

Not much more to write about these here but for new year I already have some tickets, so 2024 should be at least as exciting as the previous year!

Rosetta emulation in Docker For Mac works again

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 19:39:11 +0100

Just a quick one: Last month I wrote about an issue I had with Go builds failing inside of linux/amd64 Docker containers when Rosetta was enabled. This issue has been fixed and should no longer appear with Docker For Mac 4.26.0 🥳

Big thanks to David Gageot and presumably other folks from Docker who investigated docker/for-mac#6773 and fixed it.

Local overrides for Terraform providers

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 21:56:11 +0100

A couple of days ago I had the need to debug a Terraform provider. After some digging around I learnt that you can define local overrides in a Terraform confirmation where you tell it to search for provider binaries in a local directory without requiring any checksums.

In this particular case I wanted to check an execution path in the GitHub provider and so I added some debug statements, built it, and then I wanted to use it in a test project. Terraform allows that by defining custom provider installation paths to to a global configuration file called .terraformrc:

provider_installation {
  dev_overrides {
    "integrations/github" = "/Users/zerok/src/github.com/integrations/terraform-providers-github"
  }

  direct {}
}

I don’t want to have that globally defined, but only for that particular test project. Locally, there is also the option to define a different file using the TF_CLI_CONFIG_FILE environment variable

export TF_CLI_CONFIG_FILE=/Users/zerok/testproject/dev.tfrc

When I then run terraform plan in the test project, it will print a warning that a local override is active and then use my locally compiled provider.

20 years of zerokspot

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 09:53:23 +0100

The date might not be completely accurate but on 2003-11-28 I wrote the first post for the site that would eventually become zerokspot.com, making this blog 20 years old 🥳 It’s weird to see a site evolve over the years. When it launched there was no Twitter or anything similar and so blogging as “early social media” also consisted of lots of link-posts. When other services showed up, I moved these mostly over there while reserving the blog for longer articles including technical tutorials and reviews.

The number of posts I managed to write also varied heavily over the years. Having a full-time job as opposed to being a student and also splitting content up between this site and various social media platforms led to a little dip that only got corrected after I had stumbled upon the whole IndieWeb movement and the POSSE practice. This also made me realise that my website should be one thing: It should be like a portfolio, presenting what I work on, what I care about, … what interests me.

Of course, there were moments when I thought it would be so much easier to just stick with sites like Twitter but, looking back, I’m extremely happy that I kept it! If nothing else, “modern” social media has shown that it’s just not reliable and I want to have a good place to archive all my public thinking, in whatever format I deem appropriate. Writing, in general, has always been something that allowed me to organise my thoughts about topics. Being able to share those thoughts with others, so that it might help them, has made the whole project that much more motivating! In recent months I, unfortunately, didn’t have the time to write too much technical & long-form but I hope this will change again in the future! I miss the days when I just jumped into a new frontend framework or library that I had stumbled upon and write a little tutorial out of my own experimentations. Those days will helpfully return again!

Another great aspect of this project has always been that I can just play around with it on a technical level. While the first couple of years saw a lot of changes on the frontend, after 2007 and with the move to Django, the backend changed drastically. In 2010 there was all of a sudden MongoDB and SOLR involved but there were also already the first components of file-based backend in place. The real switch to a static site generator (Hugo) happened in 2016 and I’ve sticked with it ever since. Commenting was first there, then moderated, then gone, and now I have webmentions (since 2020) and Mastodon-comments (since 2021). I’m not sure if this will stay that way as I miss the simplicity that good old comments provide. There are also tons of other IndieWeb topics (combined with the Fediverse) that I haven’t explored yet for this site. All I need is time (and not wasting it on playing video games 😅).

While I cannot promise another 20 years, I have enough ideas for at least some and I also don’t see the importance of having a personal website going away anytime soon. With the social media chaos and the increased commercialisation of the web, I think I will keep this little place for a little while longer 😅 Services like Twitter, Pownce (who still remembers it?), and App.net have come and gone but there is nothing like my own little online-home.

Thank you for reading this and if you’ve known about my little corner for the web for longer, thank you for coming back!

Restaurant Großstadt in Lindau

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 18:36:28 +0100

Sorry, one more restaurant review from Lindau (Germany), but I think this will be the last for a bit 🙂 This time it’s about a small place called Cafe/Bar/Restaurant Großstadt close to the centre of Lindau Insel:

While looking for vegan & vegetarian options we stumbled upon this place which offers (among others) wraps and bagels in vegetarian, vegan, and non-vegetarian variants. I had a great wrap with salmon, served with salad and a large serving of fries as a side. This might have been among the best wraps I’ve had in a while! We also had a delicious and a soup called “Energiesuppe”, which was very spicy but pleasantly so!

Wrap Deluxe with salmon

The place in general is also just very comfortable and cozy, always with a candle on the table and everything nicely decorated. Next time I’m in the area I will definitely try to make time for it again! One thing to keep in mind: They only accept cash but there is a bank two streets away 🙂

Signing Git commits with your SSH key

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 16:16:45 +0100

When someone commits code (or anything) into a Git repository, there is a simple way to identify that author: An e-mail address. The problem with this property is that it can be freely chosen by the author/committer. I could create commits with the e-mail address of any of my co-workers or Tim Cook and the system wouldn’t complain. For anybody who checks the history of a file it would appear as if Apple’s CEO had all of a sudden decided that writing Go was his new passion.

This is where “commit signing” comes in. This feature allows authors to “cryptographically sign” their commits, making it possible for others to verify that the author of a commit is really the expected person.

Historically, there was one way to do that: Using a tool called GnuPG which can also be used for signing (and encrypting) e-mails and other data but that has a (mostly deserved) reputation of being extremely hard to use and complicated.

Luckily, since some time in 2021 you can now also sign Git commits using your SSH key (and also x.509 certificates, but that’s a different can of worms). This is awesome simply because most people who interact with Git already have an SSH key in order to push their changes up to GitHub/GitLab/etc.

Simple setup

How to generate a singing key:

❯ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f $HOME/.ssh/signing-key

# Also add it to your ssh-agent for easier retrieval by the Git CLI:
❯ ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/signing-key

Now add that file to your Git configuration and enable SSH for signing:

❯ git config --global commit.gpgsign true
❯ git config --global gpg.format ssh
❯ git config --global user.signingkey "$(cat $HOME/.ssh/signing-key.pub)"

With this in place, whenever you do a commit, it will be signed with your new key.

Verifying commits

Now that you have a couple of signed commits, how can you verify them?

commit c56cca04c8380472c9f03381211e8f9518d1a559
Author: Tim Cook <tim@apple.com>
Date:   Fri Nov 17 14:37:47 2023 +0100

    Initial commit

I have this commit history inside a sample repository, but did Apple’s CEO really make this commit?

❯ git verify-commit 73d8a19
error: gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile needs to be configured and exist for ssh signature verification

And this is the core of verifying SSH-signed commits: You need a file that contains a list of public key files with some additional properties including the the e-mail addresses used in the commits. The file format is documented in the man page but is relatively simple:

zerok@zerokspot.com namespaces="git" ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIDfVABUcDd6H1O8a+niNTbcSabPcfRob4WvhVBztJGm+

For demo purposes, let’s create such a file inside the Git repository itself and then instruct Git to use it:

❯ git config --local gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile "${PWD}/allowed_signers"

# And let's verify the commit
❯ git verify-commit c56cca0
Good "git" signature for zerok@zerokspot.com with ED25519 key SHA256:LexzzNw7jvDW7/d5wi+22vSywe169EjzWC33jPnICvk

# Or also inside the log listing:
❯ git log --show-signature | pbcopy
commit c56cca04c8380472c9f03381211e8f9518d1a559
Good "git" signature for zerok@zerokspot.com with ED25519 key SHA256:LexzzNw7jvDW7/d5wi+22vSywe169EjzWC33jPnICvk
Author: Tim Cook <tim@apple.com>
Date:   Fri Nov 17 14:37:47 2023 +0100

    Initial commit

Huh… so the commit was actually signed by me and not Tim Cook?! No way! But the commit was at least done by someone who should have access to this repository!

But as you saw, git log and git verify-commit still indicated that the signature was “good” and didn’t report an error. This is where tooling like GitHub but also others might help you discover the mismatch. In the case of GitHub, there is some verification in place that will show this commit as “unverified” as Mr. Cook doesn’t seem to be on GitHub. In general, though: Don’t trust the author/committer email address. The mapping mapping inside the allowed-signers file should be more trustworthy but possibly some kind of combination would be best. Single GitHub at least does some e-mail verification, this might be a good first step.

Outside of GitHub (or in some setups, the management of that allowed-signers file is crucial. The Git manual has some hints there:

This file can be set to a location outside of the repository and every developer maintains their own trust store. A central repository server could generate this file automatically from ssh keys with push access to verify the code against.
In a corporate setting this file is probably generated at a global location from automation that already handles developer ssh keys.

A repository that only allows signed commits can store the file in the repository itself using a path relative to the top-level of the working tree. This way only committers with an already valid key can add or change keys in the keyring.

Especially for teams working together on more than one project it might probably make a lot of sense to have a shared allowed-signers file in its own repository and then have a CI job verify that commits to a pull-request/merge-request are signed with keys mentioned in that file.

Key revocation?

What should happen if a key expires or is otherwise compromised? Looks like there are two options:

You can either add it to yet another file configured through gpg.ssh.revocationFile
Or add life-time properties to the allowed-signers file

Adding the key to the revocation file will make verification fail also on historical commits while with the new valid-before and valid-after fields in the allowed-signers file, you should be able to more granularly handle revocations. Locally, I couldn’t make this work but that is probably just a typo somewhere in my config which I haven’t tracked down yet.

Does it work with 1Password?

As I now have a few SSH keys managed within 1Password, I also wanted to see if I could use those to sign commits. Turns out, I can and it’s even documented!

Verdict so far

I think making signing commits more accessible is an important goal and not having to use GnuPG for that definitely helps! As I already hinted at in the intro, it’s dangerous to not reliably know who actually authored a code change no matter how that commit then made its way into a repository.

I’m not yet sure how to handle the allowed-signers file in the long term, though. For my personal setup I have a lot of options including fetching keys from some known people from GitHub or curating that file manually. No idea yet 😄

Thanks to Caleb Hearth for his article about the same topic that made me dive into SSH-signing my commits ❤️

Rosetta integration in Docker Desktop feels broken

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 19:32:22 +0100

Over the course of the last couple of weeks I’ve been struggling heavily with Docker Desktop on my M2 Macbook Air. I often need to cross-compile code to linux/amd64 or just use images that were created only for that platform. Unfortunately, there seem to be some issues around the Rosetta layer in Docker Desktop that prevents me from, for instance, compile Go code inside of a linux/amd64 container.

exec go build ERROR: process “/dev/.buildkit_qemu_emulator go build” did not complete successfully: exit code: 1

The Rosetta emulation layer has now been declared as GA with 4.25.0 but that issue still persists. At least I don’t seem to be the only facing that as it is already documented on docker/for-mac#6773. I still wanted to have a quick sample program that I could use to check if that error is still present and so I created it using Dagger: https://github.com/zerok/docker-rosetta-issue

Right now the only solution seem to be to disable Rosetta in the Docker settings but that makes working with any amd64 code slower by an order of magnitude. I quickly tested all of this also in Orb and for some reason there everything works. This means that I’m currently at a point where I can either wait for someone to fix the issue in Docker (or whatever layer is actually responsible for this), switch Rosetta emulation of (which makes Docker mostly unusable to me), or consider alternatives like Orb. I quickly also gave Colima a try but fan into even weirder issues there.

Heimat Lindau

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 18:43:48 +0100

While wandering through Lindau a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon the restaurant “Heimat Lindau” and I really don’t know how I could miss this cozy restaurant the last time I was in the area. Heimat offers wide variety of meals with also quite a few vegetarian but also non-vegetarian options. The monthly specials also included things like a chestnut soup and seasonal burgers. On Friday and Saturday evenings Heimat also offers a happy-hour for cocktails which were also very tasty!

Given that the restaurant is very cozy - it even feels like a lounge in some areas - it’s hard not to start with a nice meal in the afternoon and then stay for the cocktails! Definitely a place I will visit again on future stays in the city!

The only downside I could find was that the toilets weren’t clean and also partially damaged.

Aftermath has launched

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 21:12:50 +0100

A couple of days ago a new gaming blog called “Aftermath” was launched by a group of former Kotaku/Washington Post writers/editors: Nathan Grayson, Gita Jackson, Riley MacLeod, and Luke Plunkett. If you’ve following the industry at least somehow you will probably recognize at least some of these names.

If the collective experience of the writers weren’t interesting enough, the site also has a very reader-friendly business model: It is owned by the editors and not financed through ads but directly through subscriptions. There are multiple tiers available (starting at $7/month) which will give you access to things like bonus podcast episodes, newsletters, and a private Discord server.

Given all that I’m pretty curious how this site will turn out. Ad-financed sites recently got more and more annoying in my news-feed especially during launch weeks of AAA games, spamming dozens of articles for every single side-quest. Without that dependency on ads I hope that Aftermath will be able to stick to industry news and high-level content without having to go down that route.

Carpenter Brut live in Vienna

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 18:01:28 +0100

I love listening to music (ok, only the subset that I enjoy …) but for some reason or another I only rarely go to live concerts. Perhaps it is that I don’t like the extreme volume or that people are usually crammed into tiny places with some folks just being there to actively bump into others. That being said, I’ve now been to two concerts in the last couple of years (I know, right?!) and very much enjoyed them!

This Monday and thanks to my partner I had the chance to see Carpenter Brut & Perturbator live in Vienna as part of their joint “Leather Sacraments” tour. It was either them or going to KubeCon in Chicago 🤣 Together with Ho99o9 as supporting act they managed to fill most of the Planet.TT hall which is part of the Gasometer event complex, and that on a Monday!

Carpenter Brut on stage

Usually, I have some serious issues at live concerts due to the volume overloading my ears but at least during the Carpenter Brut part I didn’t require earplugs and so could completely enjoy the songs without any filtering ❤ The show consisted mostly of tracks from the Leather Terror album but also some highlights from previous ones like Maniac and Turbo Killer. Just an awesome show with Franck Hueso himself, Adrien Grousset on the guitar, and drummer Florent Marcadet!

Sadly, after the break to Perturbator I wasn’t so lucky anymore as my ears were getting tired and so I tried it with earplugs/AirPods. But I was already extremely tired overall and so I opted to leave the event, having really enjoyed the evening and the awesome music! I still got a few tracks into the second part of the concert and liked them very much. I guess it’s time for me to listen through Perturbator’s back catalog 🙂

Next on my wishlist: Working earplugs that don’t destroy the audio experience and a Gunship or Hybrid live show 😅

I still wonder how people who attend tons of live events do it. I think my ears would fall off 🤪

New York Bagel & Bowls in Bregenz

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:46:36 +0100

Looking for some great wraps in Bregenz (e.g. while waiting for a train at the nearby train station)? While walking through the city we ran across the newly opened New York Bagel & Bowls. They offer a range of bowls, bagels, and wraps including vegan and non-vegan options. So far I’ve only had their wraps but they were delicious and well-filled. Combined with friendly service it has definitely made it onto my list of places to keep in mind when visiting Bregenz!

Exploring Austrian Beer Culture

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 08:35:03 +0200

Recently I had the chance to participate in a beer tasting session as a gift from my partner where we went through about a dozen different beers from all over the world including some from the now closed Anchor brewery. We also talked a lot about Austrian beer culture, something I had somehow never gotten into so far. I knew there were some smaller local breweries out there but I completely missed how many there actually were!

Part of the gift was also a copy of the Bier Guide Austria which tries to provide an overview of all Austrian breweries, new beer creations of the year, and the best places to enjoy a drink. With this new source of knowledge in hand I will from now on try to visit some of these places whenever I’m traveling through the country. Just last week I had an evening available and so went to 1516 Brewing Company to enjoy a great wheat beer and an even better “pumpkin ale”. The latter being possibly my favorite beer so far this year!

I think this quest to get to know the Austrian beer culture got off to a good start 😄