The other morning I was greeted by a mailbox full of messages from failed cronjobs.
The reported error message was:

<28>Nov  7 02:51:02 ntpleapfetch[3253838]: Download from https://www.ietf.org/timezones/data/leap-seconds.list failed after 6 attempts
--2024-11-07 02:51:02--  https://www.ietf.org/timezones/data/leap-seconds.list
Resolving www.ietf.org (www.ietf.org)... 2606:4700::6810:2d63, 2606:4700::6810:2c63, 104.16.45.99, ...
Connecting to www.ietf.org (www.ietf.org)|2606:4700::6810:2d63|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2024-11-07 02:51:02 ERROR 404: Not Found.

The failing cronjobs were weekly invocations of ntpleapfetch to get the latest list of leap seconds.

After some research I found out that indeed the URL returns a 404 and that there was no newer version of the Debian package available to try.
Also the bugtracker didn't show anyone else dealing with this problem.

Thus I started looking at the source code of ntpsec (which provides the ntpleapsec script).
I found a commit with the promising title of Fix URL used by ntpleapfetch.

This commit corrects the URL used for downloading the leap seconds list in the script.
Later I also found a corresponding message in the ntpsec users mailing list.

For my Debian systems there is no updated package with the new URL available yet.
Thus I used the following one-liner to directly fix the ntpleapfetch script.

sed -i -e 's_^LEAPSRC="https://.*"_LEAPSRC="https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/leap-seconds.list"_' /usr/sbin/ntpleapfetch

In his writing secure Go code article, Jakub Jarosz lists tools that help with writing secure Go code.
The article lists the tools and for each of them explains what it does and how it contributes to writing secure Go code.

The following tools are covered:

• go vet
• staticcheck
• golangci-lint
• go test -race
• govulncheck
• gosec

An interesting learning for me whas that govulncheck can not only be used to analyze source code, but also to analyze existing binaries.
And there it scans the used libraries for vulnerabilities and wether the vulnerable code paths are actually invoked by the code in the binary.

In the build pipelines of my Go programs, some of these tools are already used.
Room for improvement exists when it comes to using the govulncheck and gosec tools.
Another lonely winter weekend task :-)

Please publish and share more from Jeff Triplett. (via)

Friends, I encourage you to publish more, indirectly meaning you should write more and then share it.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Our posts are done when you say they are. You do not have to fret about sticking to landing and having a perfect conclusion. Your posts, like this post, are done after we stop writing.

Reminds me that I should setup some POSSE mechanism for the blog.
Maybe during one of the grey and cold weekends this winter :-)

I wanted to see the output of a program repeatedly with the watch command.
To my surprise this failed on my macOS laptop with the following error:

% watch ipaddr
zsh: command not found: watch

Turns out that macOS does not have the watch command installed by default.

% which watch
watch not found

Thankfully this can be fixed easily by using homebrew to install the watch binary:

% brew install watch

In the Delegating security remediation to employees via Slack article, Maya Kaczorowski coins the term SlackSecOps to describe automation and delegation of security tasks to employees.
The article gives a nice overview of some ideas that are more and more applied by security teams and tools.

A couple years ago such ideas were mostly custom built bots/automations at larger companies, but not shared more widely.
Nowadays there seems to be a much broader adoption of these in companies, especially the Alert and Remind categories.
The most interesting ones are Delegation and Respond, which I would claim also can have the most impact.

By delegating security remediation tasks directly to the involved persons, the handling of the task becomes more efficient as all the context is available.
And then by providing the automation to the delegee to directly perform the remediation in self-service, this critically shortens the response cycle.
With the shortened response cycle, the exposure window of a vulnerable configuration is minimized, which reduces the risk of exploitation.

Similar to the 512KB club, there exists the 250KB club. It collects web pages that focus on performance, efficiency and accessibility.
Qualifying sites must fullfil one requirement.
The website must not exceed 256KB compressed size.

256KB Club also contains very niche sites and is great to discover some new corners of the Internet.
The linked pages are often minimalistic personal pages and geeky blogs.

I submitted my blog for inclusion in the club, as it measures less than 250KB.
It was accepted a day earlier than for the 512KB club :-)
Now the blog has its own page in the club: https://250kb.club/blog-x-way-org/

Some time ago I discovered the 512KB club. It collects performance-focused websites from across the Internet.
Qualifying sites must fullfil two requirements to participate.
The site must provide a reasonable amount of content.
And the total uncompressed web resources must not exceed 512KB.

512KB Club is a nice resource to discover more niche sites on the Internet.
Often these are handcrafted personal sites and blogs with unique content.
They remind me of all the unique personal sites and blogs from before the web2.0/social-media/walled-garden time.

My blog is also very lightweight (currently clocking 39.48kB on the Cloudflare URL Scanner), thus I submitted it for inclusion in the list.
It was accepted recently and is now listed as part of the Green Team (sites smaller than 100KB).

Found this cute snippet in the Makefile of the NumWorks Epsilon codebase. It is a rudimentary implementation of the cowsay functionality.

We also see how it is used in the clena: cowsay_CLENA clean part.
I like how it reminds about the typo when calling the clena instead of the clean target.
It gives a clear but unintrusive message about the typo, and then also does what was intented (running the clean target).

.PHONY: cowsay_%
cowsay_%:
	@echo " -------"
	@echo "| $(*F) |"
	@echo " -------"
	@echo "        \\   ^__^"
	@echo "         \\  (oo)\\_______"
	@echo "            (__)\\       )\\/\\"
	@echo "                ||----w |"
	@echo "                ||     ||"

.PHONY: clena
clena: cowsay_CLENA clean

In the Realizing Meshtastic's Promise with the T-Deck article, Jeff Geerling showcases the experimental device-ui for the T-Deck.

This experimental UI looks already very pretty and I expect that it will provide a very nice Meshtastic experience once all features have been implemented.
The article also contains instructions on how to install a development version of the experimantal UI based on some CI snapshots. Maybe something to try out one of these days :-)

In his Writing one sentence per line article, Derek Sivers explains the benefits of writing one sentence per line.
The approach leverages that whitespace in HTML source code is collapsed when being rendered in the browser.
Thus we can have a much more writer-friendly text formatting when editing the text, while still providing a nicely rendered output to whoever views the resulting page in a browser.

The main advantages outlined in the article are:
It helps you judge each sentence on its own.
It helps you vary sentence length.
It helps you move sentences.
It helps you see first and last words.

I really like this approach and will apply it in my future writing on the blog.
The indenting of text (not explicitly mentioned in the article but visible in the source) is also something I will try to adopt.

Here is how the above two paragraphs look in the source text:

<p>
	The main advantages outlined in the article are:<br>
	It helps you judge each sentence on its own.<br>
	It helps you vary sentence length.<br>
	It helps you move sentences.<br>
	It helps you see first and last words.
</p>
<p>
	I really like this approach and will apply it in my future writing on the blog.<br>
	The indenting of text (not explicitly mentioned in the article but visible in the source) is also something I will try to adopt.
</p>