Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 03, 2022

• To err is human, to forgive is divine

  In the context of ACME today the large majority of clients have no failover or logic. This means if the enrollment fails due to connectivity issues to the specified CA, the CA has an outage, or the CA suspends operations for one reason or another the enrollment will fail.

• Twenty five thousand dollars of funny money

  I loaded it up on my dev environment and got cracking. Sure enough, something was wrong with it, and the first time through, it would blow up. It was something dumb like the code was throwing an exception but the exception handling path was making the wrong sort of log call so that would then blow up the whole request. I fixed the logging so we'd actually get to see what the exception was, and that'd give us a chance to fix any real problems. Simple enough, right? I sent the change to the last person to touch the code... who had just touched it that morning, oddly enough. They thanked me and it was applied.

  Then I tried to get my credit, and this time it blew up again, but now it logged what was wrong. I could see this on the dev environment. It was something about calling some function with the wrong number of parameters.

• A couple of Rust error messages

  I’ve been doing Advent of Code in Rust for the past couple of days, because I’ve never really gotten comfortable with the language and I thought doing some Advent of Code problems might help.

  My solutions aren’t anything special, but because I’m trying to learn, I’ve been trying to take a slightly more rigorous approach than usual to compiler errors. Instead of just fixing the error and moving on, I’m trying to make sure that I actually understand what the error message means and what it’s telling me about how the language works.

• A Quick Guide to Filters on Mastodon

  This can be a problem on social media. You might be following someone for their insightful takes on RuPaul's Drag Race but can't be bothered with their opinions about football. In my ideal social network that wouldn't be a problem - people would post to "Channels" which you could subscribe to. We're not there yet, so we have to do with keyword filtering.

  Here's a quick guide to setting up a filter on the Mastodon social network.