5!

I’m going to blog about what happened in a week, instead of only blogging when I think I have something significant and permanent to say and I’m in the mood to blog.

I’m still moving teams within Mozilla, but the transition is now pending without a date. I’m trying to make the best of the this in-between time.

At Mozilla, we use GPG for signing commits. We sometimes use it for encrypting secrets at rest, but the current favorite secret sharing tools are 1Password and magic-wormhole. When I was setting up my keys, I was convinced that an expiring key was a good idea, because if I lose access to the private key and can’t revoke it, at least it will expire eventually. However, this means that I need to refresh the expiration date. The article How to change the expiration date of a GPG key by George Notaras was published in 2010, but GPG doesn’t change much, so it is still relevant.

I schedule expiration for February, and set myself a reminder to refresh in January, along with the steps I take to do it. I publish keys 9ECA 5960 3107 8B1E and 082C 735D 154F B750 to keys.openpgp.org, after gpg.mozilla.org was taken down after a June 2019 attack. I also sync then to Keybase and recreate them in my Github account.

I cleaned up the MLS / Ichnaea documentation. PR 1764 includes a refresh of the deployment docs which is a couple of years overdue. I also updated the Location entry on the wiki and some other internal documents. This the end of my “quick” list of MLS updates, so I’m moving on to Taskcluster: fixing some build issues, reviewing and merging dependency updates, and thinking about how to monitor deployment health. I got a little stuck with building the generic-worker on my M1 MacBook, and a failing CI test, but both are surmountable.

For my next team, I read through the fx-private-relay codebase. I found this tip for getting the list of files tracked in a repo:

git ls-tree --full-tree --name-only -r HEAD

I then manipulated the output to to turn it into a list of Markdown links to the GitHub repository, and checked off each file as I viewed it in SourceTree, or on GitHub if it was more than 50 lines of code. Most of the action is in the email app, and a lot of that in emails/models.py and emails/views.py. There’s not as many tests as I would expect, and some integration tests may cover a bunch of functionality.

In my non-work life, the schools are struggling with Covid-19. Isaac was in remote learning one day, and got two notices of exposure, meaning he was in class with a Covid-positive person. Ainsley has two remote learning days. I’m so glad they are both vaccinated, and wear their masks. I’m so disappointed with Oklahoma’s leadership.

I got a promotion for a local pizza place’s 17th anniversary special, and got it for delivery. It was delivered almost 5 hours after ordering. It was a bad combination of a fantastic promotion, an online ordering system that didn’t turn itself off, and using a gig economy service for delivery. I don’t want to shame anyone, so I’m avoiding names. I went from a hero for ordering pizza, to an adequate dad for making spaghetti.

Finally, my grandmother turned 93 this week! I’m so grateful for her, and that she and my grandfather have stayed safe through this pandemic.

Recommendations and links:

• magic-wormhole is magic for transferring files securely. If you need to resend, change the filename first, to avoid problems conflicting with the original file.
• I’m taking notes in Markdown, and started using Marked 2 again to view them. The plugin itspriddle/vim-marked adds a :MarkedOpen command, that opens a rendered version and updates when saved.
• I printed a few photos and a board-backed poster with Walgreens Photo. The photo webapp is OK, but had a couple of hiccups. If you can, crop to the desired size in a desktop photo app first. I got them printed the same day, and the results were decent and competitive with printing myself.
• You can support the authors of some of the best MDN Web Docs content through Open Collective.

Tags: weekly log

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