Alexandra Catalina dunn

NOTE: a more up-to-date version of this can be found on my blog

nix-shell and Shebang Lines

A few days ago, version 1.9 of the Nix package manager was released. From the release notes:

nix-shell can now be used as a #!-interpreter. This allows you to write scripts that dynamically fetch their own dependencies.

FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

Since 2008 or 2009 I work on Apple hardware and OS: back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001), and switched to something that Just Works. Six years later, it less and less Just Works, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system. I am finding myself turning away from GUI programs that I used to appreciate, and most of the time I use OSX to just run a terminal, Firefox, and Emacs. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. Again, this is from a sysadmin/developer ki

Mosh (mobile shell) is a gift from the Gods(tm). Anyone with spotty internet or wireless connection has suffered the pain of a lost SSH session. Sure, one can fire up screen (or tmux as the kids are using these days), but that's an extra step and you are still using the SSH protocol.

I'm not here to tout the benefits of Mosh, you came here to open it up in your firewall.

Create the following file as /etc/firewalld/services/mosh.xml
firewall-cmd --add-service=mosh --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

If you tend to have a lot of sessions (not recommended), you can increase the ports, but the default should be fine for most applications.

Operational PGP

This is a guide on how to email securely.

There are many guides on how to install and use PGP to encrypt email. This is not one of them. This is a guide on secure communication using email with PGP encryption. If you are not familiar with PGP, please read another guide first. If you are comfortable using PGP to encrypt and decrypt emails, this guide will raise your security to the next level.

	/* $This file is distributed under the terms of the license in /doc/license.txt$ */

	package edu.cornell.mannlib.vitro.webapp.modules;

	import javax.servlet.ServletContext;

	import edu.cornell.mannlib.vitro.webapp.application.VitroHomeDirectory;
	import edu.cornell.mannlib.vitro.webapp.modules.fileStorage.FileStorage;
	import edu.cornell.mannlib.vitro.webapp.modules.imageProcessor.ImageProcessor;
	import edu.cornell.mannlib.vitro.webapp.modules.searchEngine.SearchEngine;

	# This is a Duck. It is clearly not a string.
	class Duck
	def to_s
	" _ \n" +
	"__(.)<\n" +
	"\\___) \n"
	end
	end

	# This displays Strings. It will clearly never display a Duck.

	{ config, pkgs, ... }:

	let
	hostname = "luz3";
	in {
	imports =
	[ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
	./hardware-configuration.nix

	# I use VirtualBox to connect to Windows and Linux guests

	# Old-school GPG config was taken from the following docs. I'm preserving these
	# links here just in case I need to configure an old version of mutt & gnupg in
	# the future without gpgme.
	# * /usr/share/docs/mutt/gpg.rc
	# * http://codesorcery.net/old/mutt/mutt-gnupg-howto
	# * http://dev.mutt.org/trac/wiki/MuttGuide/UseGPG
	#
	# Mutt now has solid support for GPGME, which not only makes config much
	# simpler and eliminates the need to fork gpg processes & parse their output -
	# it also makes working with gpg-agent, kwallet, gnome-keyring etc. a doddle

	##
	# WHOIS servers for new TLDs (http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db)
	# Current as of 2017-12-10 UTC
	##

	\.aarp$ whois.nic.aarp
	\.abarth$ whois.afilias-srs.net
	\.abbott$ whois.afilias-srs.net
	\.abbvie$ whois.afilias-srs.net
	\.abc$ whois.nic.abc