Those who know me remember how I used to be in love with GitHub. The idea was genuinely interesting: Git is a decentralised system, which is great, but discovering repositories and projects was hard, and GitHub solved that under the premise – or promise? – of “Social Coding”. But Vito, everyone moved to GitHub, that...

This post continues the investigation that began with “This is not RLE”. If the first post was about dismantling assumptions, this one is about replacing them with certainty. Back then, we had a decoder that worked, a pile of strange patterns, and a growing suspicion that the name RLE was little more than a...

Just to take a breath between Assembly and graphics, I installed Mojave on an old Mac Mini and spun Microsoft Messenger, which is the equivalent of Windows Live Messenger for macOS, as removing Windows from the equation makes things way easier. The objective today is to fool it enough to make it think it is talking...

Some formats lie. But this one… This one lied to me in the first three bytes. 52 4C 45 → "RLE" It was not RLE. Not byte-aligned runs, not (count, value), not even something you could generously call RLE-like. What sits behind that header is a bit-packed predictive codec with interleaved channels, delta predictors, a...

I was deep into Tickling a Sun Ray 2, but then something happened: I got a Border Collie pup! Her name is Zari! To have a dog was something I wanted since I was a child, and my love for Border Collies grew as I had contact with the breed. What I didn’t expect was the mess that the first few days could be, but they...

This is the second post on a series I’m working on, regarding the black-box reverse-engineering of a Sun Microsystems Ray 2 Desktop Unit. The first post can be found here: Tickling a Sun Ray 2 - DHCP Discovery. New Findings In the last post, I mentioned that I had omitted a few DHCPACK and DHCPINFORM packets,...

This Christmas I just got from my partner a brand new, still sealed, Sun Ray 2. Basically the best gift I ever got. Period. The Ray is a thin client that connects to a remote Sun server. I already ordered a Sun Fire, but until it arrives, I decided to poke the little thing and see what makes it tick! After powering...

Those who work with me know for sure of two important points: I despise LLMs. I don’t think they should replace or even try to replace people. I am a big fan of well-written RFCs and specifications. The first point is not a surprise; being a part of this industry before the advent of LLMs gave me enough resources to...

Today I found a post from Sarah Mathey that makes very good points regarding conventional commits. I’ll quote a few here:

After being a long-time Firefox user and fan, in 2022 I decided to switch to Arc, given their promise to make the web better — although using the Chromium engine, which isn’t better per se. It has been my default browser ever since, even though I felt like I was betraying the web by leveraging Chromium.

Here at nice try, I’m working on an NPM proxy and internal registry. All is fine and dandy until you notice that NPM Registry, although returning ETag headers, simply ignore them. For instance, let’s try get the latest version of say, react, and then use If-None-Match to get an indicator our request is still fresh.

I know there are so many posts on how to configure a bare-metal K8s cluster, but after studying a lot, here’s my take on it.