Pupdate

February was mostly cold and wet, so no particularly long walks for the boys :(

FOSDEM

The month started with my first trip to FOSDEM, and it was quite an experience seeing something like 8000 geeks descending on Université libre de Bruxelles.

Day 1 was all about getting a feel for the event. So I bounced between a few rooms to catch some talks[1] then finished the day off with some beers and a bite to eat.

I spent the whole of day 2 in the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) room, and gave my talk on ‘Struggles with making SBOMs for C apps‘. It was great to spend time with ~100 like minded folk, and there have been some very useful post conference conversations.

It was quite an experience. Sometimes a little overwhelming, but definitely worth the trip[2]. I also really liked Brussels, and feel like I should head back there for some sightseeing and good food.

I should also send my thanks to the FOSDEM veterans whose hints and tips helped me get through the weekend.

‘FOSDEM flu’

The down side of going was I returned with a scratchy throat that turned into a miserable cold, which somewhat ruined the first half of the month, and lingered into the second half :(

OpenWrt

I’ve been an OpenWrt fan since I started using it over a decade ago, and recently upgraded my router and access points to devices that work well with stock OpenWrt.

This month brought a new phase to my relationship with the project. I’m now a contributor :) I’ve been working for a while getting NoPorts packaged for OpenWrt. Whilst I was trying to figure out some UI elements for LuCI I noticed that arp-scan wasn’t working properly in the Network > Diagnostics page. It had been broken since late 2022 :( A quick issue and pull request, and it’s now straightened out :)

Solar Diary

The second half of the month was definitely brighter than the first half.

Notes

[1] I probably shouldn’t pick favourites, but I’m going to anyway. I was very glad to have staked a spot in the security room to hear Daniel Stenberg’s ‘Tightening every bolt‘ talk about Curl security. Whilst I was familiar with most of the material in terms of how Curl does OpenSSF Best Practices (and chooses not to do OpenSSF Scorecard) it was great to hear it first hand. I was also glad to stay for Emillie Ma’s ‘Kintsugi: A Decentralized E2EE Key Recovery Protocol‘ as that stuff might be very useful for atSigns. Mark Ryan’s ‘Towards seamless Python package installation on riscv64‘ covered a bunch of lessons I’ve sadly learned the hard way, but it’s a great overview of all the stuff that Linux distribution and Python package maintainers mostly do for us (with little thanks) so that stuff ‘just works’.
[2] I’m grateful to Google and the Developer Expert (GDE) programme for covering my train fare and hotel.