Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 19

Video Score: Me 83, Rats 53650

I’ve been experimenting more with audio and video, thinking it might draw in some new readers. That’s why I have the 60 Seconds of WIP podcast. Kickstarter doesn’t require videos, unless you want to succeed. There’s videos of me reading things where I’m happy to get two or three views. And there’s the playlist of my various public presentations.

I don’t normally check the number of views on these things. Like the number of books I sold this week, it doesn’t matter. This thing I did has been laun...

60 Seconds of WIP, 14 September 2023

Today we have a tidbit from Run Your Own Mail Server, where I discuss debugging submission at the command line.

Don’t leap straight to OpenSSL or a TLS-aware netcat, though. Submission doesn’t take a straight username and password. Instead, you need a login string. If you’re supporting Microsoft clients, you need two. A login string is a precisely formatted username and/or password, encoded in Base64. Base64 is not an encryption method, but rather a way to transparently transfer binaries as plai...

Proof You Should Not Run My Code: my SNMP agent

I’ve included bits of code in my books, sure. Always with warnings to not run it in production, as I am a firm devotee of fault-oblivious computing. You should not follow my example. But after a Fediverse (Mastodon) discussion last night, I’ve decided to share the code of a program I wrote and deployed. In production. When writing SNMP Mastery, I needed to understand how to integrate a custom agent into net-snmp. I also needed to go through the process of getting my own enterprise OID. I submitt...

60 Seconds of WIP, 7 September 2023

Run Your Own Mail Server has finally forced me to write a bit about netcat versus telnet.

Netcat is a flexible network tool that, among other things, allows you to connect to arbitrary TCP/IP ports. We’ll use it for testing services. Over the decades netcat has been forked, reimplemented, and served as inspiration for other programs that also call themselves netcat. These variants made no effort to make their added features compatible with other variants. Your Unix might provide a netcat-alike s...

“Apocalypse Moi” ebook out!

The official release date for Apocalypse Moi is 26 September 2023. If you want to get it from one of the big bookstores, you’ll have to wait. (I’ve been accused of hiding the big point, so: this collection contains a previously unpublished Prohibition Orcs tale.)

It’s already available at my ebookstore, though. If you believe that I’m deploying a sophisticated, subtle strategy to steer people to buying direct from me rather than via Amazon, you would be incorrect. It is neither sophisticated no...

August’s Aghast Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of August, and the public at the beginning of September.)

The most exciting thing this month is probably the Writing Chariot.

I have written at a standing desk since about 2010. I find it much more sustainable than a standard desk, and it lets me pace more easily when my brain logjams. I have no idea when I started using split keyboards, but it’s been many years. Split keyboards let me open my shoulders naturally and keep my wrists straight, which ...

60 Seconds of WIP, 31 August 2023

Today’s reading is from the Kickstarter-supported afterword from Apocalypse Moi. I have no idea if this will make it into the final book. I write things that are about things. When I try to write about the things I’ve written about things, my brain immediately enters a recursive death spiral. I offered this Kickstarter stretch goal in part to force me to learn to write them.

This book contains revelations. Some of them destroy the world. In one, the world has already been destroyed and everyone’...

Finding a way to “Speak the Truth”

One of my biggest rules for writing nonfiction is “speak the truth.” It might be *my* truth, others might disagree, but that truth is absolutely necessary.

A book I’m planning to write after Run Your Own Mail Server really needs to use Debian as the reference platform, for reasons I’m not gonna get into here. But my heart is obviously and publicly in BSD-land. How could I write this and be truthful?

I’ve been chewing this over for a while, but the obvious just hit me: it’s about voice and theme....

60 Seconds of WIP, 24 August 2023

Today’s reading is from an as-yet-untitled Christmas story. Yes, I write Christmas stories. And I sell them to anthologies.

We go through a lot of coal. The Workshop has geothermal heat, sure, and there’s the big solar farms for the nightless summers, but certain people don’t have real friends—friends who will tell them the truth. You might be one of the richest people on Earth, surrounded by sycophants and lickspittles who cheer your every whim as unquestionable moral excellence, but it doesn’t...

60 Seconds of WIP, 17 August 2023

Today’s snippet is from Run Your Own Mail Server, discussing Dovecot’s password algorithms. You also get a footnote.

What are all these algorithms, and why do you care? Most often, you don’t.

You just need to pick one.

Dovecot’s documentation declares that ARGON2I or ARGON2ID are the preferred algorithms. Blowfish (BLF-CRYPT) comes next. In 2010 the NIST recommended the PBKDF2 algorithm, although in 2023 NIST declared they would be revising their recommendation. If nothing else, the salted SHA51...