Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 15, 2024

mtlynch.io

• Published “Lessons from my First Exit”
  • This at first flopped on Hacker News, and then someone else submitted it the next day, and it reached #2
• Wrote notes for Charles Marohn’s “Escaping the Housing Trap” talk in Northampton on 2024-11-08.
• Continued working on November retrospective

Fuzz testing

• Created a Nix workflow to automate fuzzing Meta’s netconsd utility
  • I based this on Fady Othman’s blog posts
  • It’s my first time fuzzing with “persistent mode.”
    • That is, rather than run a binary over and over, I write a custom test harness that calls the code I want to test, which is much faster
  • I ran it for a few hours and it got to 35% coverage with honggfuzz, and I realized it was kind of a waste of time because Othman had already gotten 100% coverage, and there wasn’t much dev work on the project since then that could introduce other vulnerabilities
• Created a Nix workflow to automate fuzzing the CAOS interpreter in openc2e
  • CAOS is this super-niche scripting language that fascinates me because it was invented for the 1996 game Creatures, but there’s an enthusiast community that continues to write code in it to create add-ins for the game
  • openc2e is an incomplete open-source reimplementation of the Creatures game series, and they have a working CAOS interpreter, but I doubt it’s ever been fuzz tested
  • I found a bunch of crashes in the lexer, parser, and VM, but I’m not sure if the project is maintained enough for anyone to accept fixes
  • I submitted a fix to the most straightforward one and added tests + ASAN to the build

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Promoted the project from alpha to beta
  • It’s now in the state that I think other people can use it and get value from it without having to fiddle with it too much
  • Created a demo animation to show what the project does
• Finished implementing support for TV shows
  • Fixed null handling in SQLite and again
  • Updated the README to mention TV shows
• Compiled the whole app into a single binary
• Create app binaries in CI
• Got rid of MovieInfo and TvInfo structs
  • I think I chose them to be like a ScreenJounal-native equivalent of the data in TMDB, but it just became an extraneous format given that we already had structs to represent movies and TV shows
• Added builds for 32-bit and 64-bit ARM architectures
• Fixed a bug in my HTTP tests
• Renamed the movie template to be media-agnostic
• Reorganized some structs
• Upgraded to go 1.23.3

PicoShare

PicoShare is a minimalist web-based file sharing tool I’m working on. I’m often frustrated that I can’t just send someone a link directly to a file because every file-sharing service tries to re-encode images/video or wrap their own viewer around other files, so I’m making a simple self-hostable tool that lets you upload files and share them with other people.

• Accepted a PR from Jan to avoid a bug in my HTTP tests
• Upgraded to Go 1.23.3
• Switched to a more modern flow of publishing compiled binaries from CircleCI to Github releases

Misc

• Set up a 49" ultrawide monitor
  • It’s pretty crazy. I thought it would be too big, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming
  • I need to figure out a better window management thing. On my previous 34", I used to just dock windows to half the screen, but now I need something that can dock as four columns
• Contributed a donation button to markdown-here
  • Markdown here lets you write Markdown in any rich text editor on the web (e.g., Gmail) and it converts it to HTML
  • It’s a super useful tool, and the author recently took it out of maintenance mode to work around manifest v3 changes in Chrome
• Swapped summer tires for winter tires on my car
• Turned off outdoor faucet and disconnected the hose for winter