-
Meet Bullion, An ACMEv2 Certificate Authority
I’m a huge fan of Let’s Encrypt and what they’ve done to secure the Internet. They’ve made safe communication free and open. Through their ACME protocol (and subsequent ACMEv2 protocol), they have changed PKI and the way we look at automating certificate provisioning for good.…
-
Rationality and COVID-19
The world is pretty crazy right now. COVID-19 has caused the closure of countless businesses and slowed down in-person business for most others (though there is a glimmer of hope as small business and schools are looking at reopening in some respect). Many, many people…
-
Connected: A Ruby Graph Search Library
A common problem posed in coding competitions and undergraduate computer science classes is implementing an algorithm for finding the shortest path through a series of interconnected nodes. It can be phrased in many ways, mostly because graph theory (which is the domain of this particular…
-
Rewriting Ruby’s #pack and #unpack Methods in Crystal
In Ruby, especially while writing low-level protocols, you may have encountered Array#pack() and/or String#unpack(). If you’ve ever experimented with them, they may seem mysterious; they take a cryptic string as a parameter (maybe something like C4 or w*) and seem to return gibberish (or, conversely,…
-
LDAP in Containers
Most of the time, connecting to LDAP is pretty straightforward and is just a matter of applying the right configuration to your application. Or maybe it isn’t even something you need to think about; it could be abstracted away behind an API call. This wasn’t…
-
Working During a Pandemic
We’re in very strange times, that’s for sure. The entirety of humankind is trying to social engineer a defense against a microscopic threat, yet here I am wanting to talk about working and how well it’s going in spite of the pandemic. When I was…
-
Changing Your Public IP on Home Internet
Sometimes, when you’re using a Linux server as your home router/Internet gateway, you need to change your public IP. I won’t go into the reason(s) why, because they don’t really matter. Maybe you accidentally exposed the proxy port (mostly just for your kids to protect…
-
Redis, Ruby, and Some Surprising Uses
Any developer worth their salt knows that Redis is great for caching. As an in-memory cache, it gets the job done. You certainly don’t have to take my word for it; the major sponsors of Redis (redislabs) wrote a white paper to explain it. What…
-
Skull Island: A CLI and SDK for Kong
I’ve been working on an open-source project for managing the Kong API Gateway, both as an SDK and as a CLI tool using a straightforward, YAML-based templated configuration. The project is called Skull Island and is available on RubyGems via skull_island, on DockerHub via jgnagy/skull_island,…
-
Redirecting Domains on a Traefik Ingress
I recently posted about my experience with k3s and how I’m now using it to run my blog. I also mentioned my blog’s new domain and how I’m keeping the old name working. That involved changing the Ingress resource for my blog, so I’ll show…
My musings on technology, science, math, and more