deaddabe

Configuring Vimium-C bindings for BÉPO

2022-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

Vimium-C is a browser extension for using Vim-like bindings while surfing. Let’s see how we can configure it for the BÉPO keyboard layout.

BÉPO is a French-focused keyboard layout. Every key binding in programs need to be refined because the usual keybindings are more or less accessible. This is especially true for vim-like software, where HJKL becomes CTSR.

Custom key mappings

Like in vim, the first step is to unbind the default key mappings, in order to redefine them with a more ergonomic disposition:

# Scrolling

unmap j
unmap k
unmap h
unmap l

unmap t
#unmap s
#unmap c
unmap r

map t scrollDown
map s scrollUp
map c scrollLeft
map r scrollRight

# History
unmap H
unmap L
#unmap C
unmap R

map C goBack
map R goForward

# Tabs
unmap J
unmap K
unmap T
#unmap S

map T previousTab
map S nextTab

Characters used for links

When using the leader key for navigating links, the default keys will be accessible on a QWERTY keyboard. As you have guessed, we will need to change this setting as well in order to have an ergonomic experience with our BÉPO layout:

# Default is `sadjklewcmpgh`
ubitsrpaxnj,c

Aaaand… that’s it!

This article is mostly for myself, so that when I install the extension on a new browser I can just copy/paste it from here. If it can help others BÉPOists, even better!

Finishing my first cybersecurity challenge

2022-06-01T00:00:00+02:00

I have completed my first “CTF”, or kind of; it was for beginners, but fun!

Yesterday I started (and finished) the very first wargame offered by OverTheWire, named Bandit.

The Bandit wargame is aimed at absolute beginners. It will teach the basics needed to be able to play other wargames. If you notice something essential is missing or have ideas for new levels, please let us know!

I found the link to this website on a Hacker News discussion about hacking satellites.

The levels go from 0 to 34. I just wanted to start the first one, but then was curious about the next one, and the next one… and finally did all of the levels in a few hours. Despite the website asking to not share info about how to get to the next level, answers can be found online. I did have to look for them for challenges 26 and 33.

Of the few things that has helped me, I retained the following advices for future challenges:

keep a big file for taking notes (I used Obsidian);
manpages, manpages, manpages;
mktemp -d to create a temporary directory;
use openssl to connect to TCP TLS servers;
use nmap to scan ports; and
more is not a secure shell.

I really enjoyed this challenge. The website recommends to switch to one of these other wargames after this one:

Leviathan (SSH intrusion, similar to Bandit but without help);
Natas (HTTP intrusion);
Krypton (cryptography challenges).

I think I will try the Leviathan challenge next. Having no help could be a real challenge but it is closer to real penetration testing. Another thing I would like to do is reverse-engineering of binary files and proprietary transmission protocols.

Stay tuned!

Status update, May 2022

2022-05-20T00:00:00+02:00

Boing, time for another status update.

Debian work

I have finally found how to make my fonts-creep2 package work on my Debian machines. The solution was to not use the TTF file that contains the Bitmap glyphs, but instead generate an OTB file, which is an OpenType format for Bitmap fonts.

This means that I can close the fonts-creep ITP bug altogether and rely on this fonts-creep2 package instead. Hopefully it will be reviewed and uploaded soon by a certified™ Debian Developer.

This font is too small for daily usage, but imagine the quantity of data you could display on an auxiliary screen with poor resolution (and poor pixel density eventually).

Here is a meme I created for the occasion:

Checks out.

Rust work

I have obsoleted my most popular Rust crate, gladis.

Indeed, the GTK folks have managed to develop a similar solution named CompositeTemplate, that is available in both gtk3-macros and gtk4-macros crates. I did not investigate from how long this has been available before I created this crate. Hopefully it did not exist before I developed it.

I have learnt a lot about Rust crates development with this crate, and managed to put in place a semi-automated release flow that I will surely use in other future crates.

See ya.

Git aliases for Gerrit-based workflow

2022-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

After using Gerrit professionally for almost 5 years, I have came up with a set of 6 simple git aliases to ease things up.

One does not push force

I now really like Gerrit compared to Github and Gitlab-based merge requests workflow. One of the main reasons is that Gerrit allows you to refine your commit using multiple patchsets, until is is good enough to be merged. In the PR/MR way, from my observations, you push many fix commits into your development branch — or eventually push-force to your branch a refined commit.

This PR/MR workflow leads to commit pollution because of all of the extra fix commits and merge commits, or hard-to-review PR/MR if a force push is used because the interface does not keep track of “patchset revisions” like Gerrit.

The Gerrit flow however comes with an extra cost: having to put a Change-Id trailer in every commit message. For me this is fine as long as doing closed-source work. When upstreaming, one has to remember to remove these trailers from the patchset.

Pushing to review

You basically interact from Git to Gerrit using two commands:

Creating a review: git push origin HEAD:refs/for/your-branch%topic=your-topic
Updating a review: git push origin HEAD:refs/for/your-branch

Most of your work will be targeting the master branches; probably main for newer repositories with an up-to-date Gerrit version (or not, depends on upstream and company policy). This assumption allows us to create the first alias for updating reviews to the master branch:

# update gerrit, master
ug = git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master

If your want to update to a branch other than main, we can create another alias that can take a parameter. Because git aliases is very basic, it does not allow us to compose strings. This is fine if you want to pass arguments as-is to other programs, but we will need to make a bit of string concatenation for our next alias to work. Hopefully, on Debian systems sh is dash and is very fast to fork, so we can use it to concatenate the strings:

# update gerrit, custom branch
ugb = "!sh -c \"git push origin HEAD:refs/for/$1\""

Now that we have this trick, we can create two other aliases for creating reviews by taking the topic as a parameter:

# create gerrit, master
cg = "!sh -c \"git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master%topic=$1\""
# create gerrit, custom branch
cgb = "!sh -c \"git push origin HEAD:refs/for/$1%topic=$2\""

Final aliases

This provides us with the final aliases to work comfortably with Gerrit:

cg = "!sh -c \"git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master%topic=$1\""
cgb = "!sh -c \"git push origin HEAD:refs/for/$1%topic=$2\""
ug = git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master
ugb = "!sh -c \"git push origin HEAD:refs/for/$1\""

Here are two bonus aliases, just for your eyes (and for my future self):

fix = commit --amend --no-edit
fixmodules = "!sh -c \"git st --porcelain | awk '/M/ {print \\$2}' | tee | xargs -n1 git submodule update\""

The first one is because you will be reworking the same commit again and again, instead of pushing fix commits. So better get used to do this quickly.

The last one will fix out-of-date checked-out submodules only. Using git submodule update would update all of the submodules, even the ones that are not currently checked out, and this is will take hours on our system.

Cheers!

Exporting MOV and MP4 animations from GIMP

2022-04-27T00:00:00+02:00

To this date, the GIMP can export to GIF and WEBP animations. But what about video formats? We are not there yet, but ImageMagick and FFMPEG can help us. Warning: contains rent againt GIMP animation support.

The need: OBS Studio animations

Why would you want to export animations in video formats in the first place? Well, video recording and streaming software like OBS Studio does not support animated WebP images as a media input.

There is still the possibility of using the old GIF format for that, but the quality is going to be degraded for images with a lot of colors. APNG and MNG are not supported either as animated inputs.

This leaves us with a few video formats for importing our videos into OBS:

MOV;
MP4 (not tested); and
WebM (not tested).

However, it seems that using compressed codecs may have some overhead during playback, at least for WebM that does not seem to have hardware decoding. This may be different for MP4.

I did not want to take the risk and went to the old battle-tested MOV format for my experiment.

GIMP animations are just layers

GIMP has a very basic support of animation playback, in the form of displaying and masking layers or adding them on each other. Given the look of this web page, you can guess that the support for animations is not a priority nor has seen big changes in the last years:

This probably dates from 2002 according to the Copyright date of the page.

After creating an animation, you have a lot of layers that represent the different frames.

Exporting layers is hard!

Since the GIMP is not able to export in any video format, we will just have to create one using FFMPEG by combining all of the layers ourselves. But wait! The GIMP has no way to export all layers!

This is a known issue from a long time. There is a plugin that is supposed to fix that, but it does not appear in the GIMP's plugin manager interface. As I did not want to spend time figuring how to install plugins manually, I went the hard way: exporting to MNG.

MNG is not widely used and even its support in the GIMP is partial. It is based on putting together a bunch of PNG files, and was eventually replaced by APNG, which GIMP only support by an outdated plugin. So we will use MNG to export our animation, even if no software can play it back. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The MNG exporter does not show us any progress bar, so we have to wait. WebP does provide a progress bar, but it is way slower than MNG at exporting since it compresses more — even when lossless is activated — and there is no way to tell it to not compress that much in the export window:

Converting MNG to MOV and MP4

Now that the MNG image is generated, we can extract the layers using ImageMagick:

$ convert animation.mng frame%03d.png

This results in many files being created as excepted: be sure to run this command inside of a dedicated directory.

And regroup the frames using FFMPEG into a MOV and MP4 clip at the desired framerate:

$ ffmpeg -r 30 -i frame%03d.png out.mov
$ ffmpeg -r 30 -i frame%03d.png out.mp4

I will use the MOV file into OBS in order to not make the CPU load too much, but I guess I could also use MP4 inside of OBS if the decoding is not that slow.

Here is the result:

Sorry, your browser does not support embedded videos.

Conclusion

It boggles my mind that GIMP is not able to natively export layers as distinct images. I guess next time I will try the plugin — or you can do it and come back to me with your results!

See ya.

Status update, April 2022

2022-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

After missing the previous March update, here we go again!

New avatar

I created myself a new avatar! Of course, I designed it as a pixel-art picture — as you should know if you have been following the previous status update.

Since I am still trying to learn to draw stuff, I used my previous avatar that I created with a Picrew generator as a base.

Creation process of the avatar

Nothing fancy here. I imported the avatar in Aseprite and then draw over it. Well, it took me some time nonetheless. I estimate it to be around 2 or 3 hours. Note that I am still a beginner, so this (may) explain that.

If you ask me, I am very happy with the result.

Lospec palette scrapper

I have cleaned up my little scrapper script for the Lospec palettes, and have uploaded the project on Github. Lospec is a website that I have been using for retrieving cool color palettes for doing pixel art.

I quickly drafter a logo, ironically in vectorial format using Inkscape.

I also took the opportunity to upload the scrapped data directly into the repository, because who knows how may the Lospec website author may react to this. Whatever happens, the data will stay available in the repository.

The initial goal of this side project was to create an offline-first palette browser in GTK4, but I first needed the data. To be continued (?).

Debian work

The Debian work still continues, although it has calmed down. I am still trying to figure out how to make font-creep2 recognised in various software — if not giving up by proposing to package its original variant.

I also made a lot of progress on my personal (semi-private) dashboard to track my progression of packaging work. This is something that I should be able to present soon to the other Debianites, if the proposed presentation is accepted by the reviewers. I will be sure to make a case in point here if in any case.

Until then, happy coding!

Status update, February 2022

2022-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Published one day late because of reasons, here is another status update.

Arts

This comes first, because it is what I dedicated most of my time recently. Well, I still have a problem regarding the “art” word as I am really not that great but more of a beginner.

Mostly, I am currently trying to learn and practising:

Pixel-art; and
Hand-drawing.

I started with pixel-art first — but as someone who does not know how to draw things properly, I realised that pixel art is not a magical shortcut. One still needs to know how to draw, even if twiddling with pixels.

Here is one realization of mine, using cubes because I can’t draw much more:

For hand drawing I am using Drawabox, and I have nothing special to show here. I am doing the exercises as well as practising on white paper and notebooks, nothing fancy (mostly boxes and triangles, if you really want to be disappointed).

Rust work

Gladis

I have released a new major version of gladis, named 2.0. This is a breaking change, because it is now requiring the latest 0.15 gtk-rs crate, instead of the previous 0.14 version in the 1.x versions series.

There are no major changes regarding the code itself, but there have been many changes in “chore” tasks like described in the CHANGELOG. Mainly, these have been:

Making the project REUSE-compliant; and
Making publishing new versions a lot easier, using automated tools.

Making projects REUSE-compliant

For the first point, I am now on making my new and maintained projects adhere to the software REUSE specification. I think that this is a great initiative.

Indeed, as a Debian individual contributor, figuring out the Copyright holders of big projects is always a mess. And if someone else from Redhat or another distribution wants to package the software, but does not know that this copyright checking has already been done in Debian, this madness has to be done again!

Detailing copyright holders directly in upstream using an automated format, instead of distributions, is the sanest solution in my opinion to transfer this burden to upstream (sometimes we are even “gessing” copyright holders by deep inspection of the commit history…).

Making releasing easy

Maintaining a package with two crates and keeping their versions synchronised is an “interesting” problem. I have been doing this manually for most of the history of this crate, but I am done with it. I am now using a set of related tools in order to release new versions (be it patch, minor or major) a breeze.

The tools that I have selected for this purpose are:

git-cliff for automatic CHANGELOG generation; and
cargo-release for automating the release process in general (calls git-cliff).

This process probably be more detailed in a dedicated article in the future. It can be (and will eventually be) reused in other crates in order to facilitate releasing.

I am also looking into creating a template for starting out new projects with everything configured, but it seems that Cargo templates are not available yet, so I will probably create a dedicated git repository for that.

Debian work

I have packaged two new fonts:

fonts-national-park (available in unstable)
fonts-routed-gothic (still in NEW, see ITP #1004995)

I also updated the popular fonts-ebgaramond to its latest git version in order to get some fixes that have not been published into a new, dedicated version by upstream.

Finally I have started packaging python-dt-schema (ITP #1005301) for my kernel tweaking needs, but after some yak shaking I am now blocked by dependencies planned to be packaged by other individuals, but actually not packaged yet.

Aaaand… that’s all! See you next time.

Automating Git commit messages with the prepare-commit-msg hook

2022-01-21T00:00:00+01:00

Some commit messages can be automated. For example, I usually create a commit each time I am adding a new blog entry like this one. Instead of copy-pasting the article name in the commit message, we can detect that and fill the commit message automatically. ✨

Previous workflow

Let's have a look at the history of commits for this blog at some point in the past:

introduce scripts/new_image.py
new article: 2021-10-06_sending-templated-emails-using-python-and-msmtp.rst
new article: 2021-09-29_git-pre-commit-hook-for-rust-projects.rst
new article: 2021-09-20_status-update-september-2021.rst
new_status_update: add tags
tasks: rename livereload to live
new article: 2021-08-18_status-update-august-2021.rst

Indeed, each time I add an article, I type the same new article: prefix, and then yank and paste the name of the added file from the comment included in the commit message's default body.

In order to publish more often and with less friction, I want to automate this git commit part when adding a new article — which is the nominal use case for a blog.

Intermediate solution: use a script?

The fist naive solution was to write a scripts/commit_new_article.sh file, chmod +x it and hope that I will remember to use it instead of the mechanical git commit habit that I have built over time.

Here was the content of the script, for your eyes only:

#!/bin/sh

set -eu

P=$(git status --porcelain | awk '/^A/ { print $2; }')

if [ "$P" = "" ]
then
       >&2 echo "Error: please 'git add' first"
       exit 1
fi

NAME=$(basename "$P")

git commit -m"new article: $NAME"

But let's face it: I will never remember to use such script. What I will only remember is to use git add . && git commit to save my fresh new article into the repository.

Final solution: using the prepare-commit-msg hook

This hook is called before $EDITOR is fired up and asks you to edit the commit message. The strategy is the following: if we detect that only an article was added, then we pre-fill the commit message using a template.

This strategy is implemented in the following lines in the .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg executable text file:

#!/bin/sh

COMMIT_MSG_FILE=$1
COMMIT_SOURCE=$2
SHA1=$3

P=$(git status --porcelain | awk '/A\s+content\/articles\// { print $2; }')
if [ "$P" != "" ]
then
        A=$(echo $P | \
                xargs basename -s .rst | \
                cut -d'_' -f2- | \
                awk '{ print "📝️ " $0; }'
        )

        if test -z "$COMMIT_SOURCE"
        then
                /usr/bin/perl -i.bak -pe "print \"$A\n\" if !\$first_line++" "$COMMIT_MSG_FILE"
        fi
fi

Note that I have changed the prefix from “new article” to just using an appropriate “📝️” emoji. This way it is easier for me to see in the log when I have added new articles. Also this blog is a pet project — and the sources are not public yet — so I can do whatever I please!

Demo

Using this very article, lets see how things work out!

$ git add .
$ git commit

And here is the result:

[master 892b1a1] 📝️ automating-git-commit-messages-with-the-prepare-commit-msg-hook
 1 file changed, 109 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 content/articles/2022-01-21_automating-git-commit-messages-with-the-prepare-commit-msg-hook.rst

Perfect! I could use the real title inside of the file instead of its slug. This is left as an exercise for the attentive reader.

Now, whenever I am adding a new article, the commit message will be pre-written for me. When modifying scripts or other tooling — which should be a minor, part-part-time job — the commit message will be empty as expected.

One less excuse to not frequently write down my thoughts down there.

Status update, January 2022

2022-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Let’s hope for the best for this new year. I think that compaired to the last two, it will be refreshening and full of possibilities — with the perspective of the global pandemic finally coming to an end.

Resolutions

I take the “adopt new resolutions on a new year” thing quite seriously — even if it seems unpopular these days for some reason that I ignore. Changing habits is a hard thing, and January the 1st of every year, one gets the occasion to kickstart new things.

I will not detail every change that I will start to make this year in this small update. Still, some of them are described in this article and some others will come in later publications. This looks like a teasing indeed, so stay tuned!

Debian work

Here is one resolution for this new year: reduce my Debian involvement to the parts that I enjoy the most.

Last year, on multiple times, I have found myself creating or maintaining packages that did not bring me direct usefulness in my day to day developer life. When something becomes a burden — and you do it on your free time — you should seek to stop the burden and do something that brings you satisfaction instead.

From now, this is the philosophy that I will try to stick to concerning my Debian involvment on my free time.

This means that I will stop working on the following packages:

python-ppft (RFA #1003846 created)
python-pox (ITP #992509 closed)
python-pathos (ITP #992511 closed)

They were packaged by mistake: I misread a dependency name in a package, and yak-shaving led me to package these as sub-dependencies.

I wanted to “archive” the Git repositories on Salsa, but I could not find the corresponding option in the “Settings/Advanced” section of the Gitlab interface ; the repositories will probably stay as-is for now.

Esperanto

I am still actively learning Esperanto, but failing to use it in real-life situations (online or offline). Still, this little mental challenge is nice to have. I think that when the COVID-19 pandemic situation will have chilled — hopefully soon with this Ο-variant [1] — I will look forward to meet IRL people in order to speak the “lingvo” out loud.

Final thoughs

One of the other resolutions is to — as every year — write a little bit more on this very blog. It is first and foremost a tool that I use to empty my mind and clarify subjects that I find interresting. And, as a byproduct, a publication platform that can be read by others.

I have so many ideas of things to try this year, so, as always, see you soon!

[1]	Yes, this is a real “omicron” greek leter. Thanks BÉPO for letting me access so many fancy symbols.

Status update, November 2021

2021-11-20T00:00:00+01:00

Winter is coming. Let’s see what has been achieved during the last ~30 days. As before, this status update is written from a local coffee. Let’s try to keep this monthly habbit!

Vimium-FF

I discovered and installed Vimium-FF, after reading about it on a thread on an alternative hacker news browser. It is awesome.

The default key mapping is for the QWERTY layout. I had to reconfigure it for the BÉPO keyboard layout that I am using.

Caveats: shortcuts do not work in reader mode. It is a shame because this makes me switch back to arrow keys to scroll through reading material instead of using the ergonomic HJKL keys (well, CTSR in bépo).

Project Euler

In quest of intellectual stimulation, I have started to participate in the Project Euler online challenges. I already participated when I was a student, but only made it through the 10 first because of time scarity. I participated in Python at the time, which caused some performance challenges as I was bruteforcing some solutions.

This time I am participating in my favorite programming language for non-scripting usage: Rust. The great performance and functional constructions available (generators, filters, …) make it an ideal choice for implementing the algorithms. Pencil and paper are valuable as well for constructing the final solution.

Debian work

New gftools release

I am trying to bring the new gftools release to Debian, but the new required dependencies cannot be ported because PEP-517/518 are not supported yet.

As more and more Python packages that I need to package are blocked because of this issue, it may be the time to take a break from packaging Python packages in Debian for me. Especially since the NEW queue is full again, so packages uploaded today may arrive in unstable in months anyways.

I have trouble of keeping track of bug dependencies between my different ITPs. I managed to create graphviz diagrams of the dependencies by querying the Ultimate Debian Database with some Python scripts. However this is still very manual. I hope this idea can gain some traction in the community, but I need to find energy to promote it.

Notion dashboard

I created myself a dashboard on Notion, a SaaS product that I wanted to try given the hype it recently received in the tech scene. The idea is to track the progress of (most of) my ongoing Debian packages that are not available in unstable yet.

For this, I have created a set of columns that directly represents the states of the packages in my own interpretation of the Debian delivery process:

This is not optimal and manually updated. But I think there is an idea behind this that could be explored. Maybe oneday I will pursue down this rabbit hole and create myself an automatic dashboard.

Esperanto

Ekde kvar semanaj mi lernas la esperanton. Mi estas komencanto. La lingvo estas facile. Mi usas DuoLingon kaj esperantan vortaron. Fojfoje mi usas "Google Translate" pro konfirmiĝi mian vortumijn. Mi ŝatas la esperanton pli ol la hispanon, kiu mi lernis al liceo.

Eble mi skribos esperantajn artiklojn se mi ŝatas la lingvo ankoraŭ. Sed sur otro blogo, ĉar ĝi blogo estas nur pro la teknikajn artiklojn en angla.

Ĝis la revido!

deaddabe

Configuring Vimium-C bindings for BÉPO

Custom key mappings

Characters used for links

Finishing my first cybersecurity challenge

Status update, May 2022

Debian work

Rust work

Git aliases for Gerrit-based workflow

One does not push force

Pushing to review

Final aliases

Exporting MOV and MP4 animations from GIMP

The need: OBS Studio animations

GIMP animations are just layers

Exporting layers is hard!

Converting MNG to MOV and MP4

Conclusion

Status update, April 2022

New avatar

Lospec palette scrapper

Debian work

Status update, February 2022

Arts

Rust work

Gladis

Making projects REUSE-compliant

Making releasing easy

Debian work

Automating Git commit messages with the prepare-commit-msg hook

Previous workflow

Intermediate solution: use a script?

Final solution: using the prepare-commit-msg hook

Demo

Status update, January 2022

Resolutions

Debian work

Meta

Esperanto

Final thoughs

Status update, November 2021

Vimium-FF

Project Euler

Debian work

New gftools release

Notion dashboard

Esperanto