Dvorak and Colemak keyboard layouts

I have been typing in the Dvorak keyboard layout for 22 years (since 2003). This is since before Colemak was invented, and significantly longer than I had ever been typing in QWERTY (15 to 18 years, depending how you define "typing"). Now that Colemak is a widely available, built-in alternative — it's in macOS since 2011, and Windows since 2024 — I feel that I would advocate for it over Dvorak to anyone who is considering abandoning QWERTY. I may even decide to switch to Colemak myself.

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Understanding Passkeys

Passkeys are a being talked about more and more recently, as a way to replace passwords for logging into web sites. They are a significant shift from password-based authentication, offering enhanced security through cryptographic key pairs while addressing common concerns about password storage, recovery, and practical usage.

But I found it confusing to understand what they are, how they work, and how to manage them. Here I'll explain what I found, and link to actual design papers, specifications and authoritative sources. There are many other sources you can read about passkeys: if my explanation is more confusing than helpful, I recommend you check those out, too.

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Setting up a GitLab environment with the GitLab Environment Toolkit

This post is a notebook. It contains instructions to set up and create a GitLab environment in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET), installed into a VS Code Dev Container.

The idea is that it's a literate sysadmin runbook, which can be copied and repeated within my get-container.

Notebook instructions

To use this, you must be running Jupyter Notebook with the Bash kernel installed. This is explored in detail on my earlier blog post. Jupyter and the extension should already have been installed when the GET Dev Container was provisioned. If not, then re-run the playbook:

ansible-playbook $WORKSPACE/.devcontainer/get/setup.yaml

Then start jupyter:

jupyter notebook --no-browser --allow-root

(this is aliased to notebook)

Select Kernel

Once jupyter is running in the dev container, you can open this notebook and select the Bash kernel from the Select Kernel button at the top of the buffer. The Bash kernel directly runs bash shell commands, rather than python.

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Use Jupyter Notebooks for bash scripting

I'm experimenting with using Jupyter to capture Linux server commands in a Notebook while I figure out doing GitLab Geo setup. It's complicated, so I want to keep good notes, but copy/paste from the terminal to a text editor is a chore I'd rather not deal with. Instead I would like to keep a literate-programming style notebook. I learnt recently that there is a Jupyter kernel for running bash instead of python, and that would be ideal.

This post describes how to set up using Jupyter Notebooks on a remote host, and then running and editing notebooks using Visual Studio Code's support for Jupyter.

You can also do this without VSCode, by SSH tunnelling a local web browser to the host. That would be better in cases where users' /home volume size is restricted. I briefly discuss this too.

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Saving and Restoring GCP instance snapshots

This post lists the full steps for how to snapshot/restore a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) compute instance, illustrating a few things that might relieve some frustration about performing this "simple operation" in the Googleplex.

Recently I was making a lot of changes to some GitLab virtual machines as I learnt about setting up GitLab Geo, and often I would make mistakes and need to start over. This is very doable with virtual machines managed through infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Ansible, as we do with the GitLab Environment Toolkit, but it does take about 25 minutes to spin up each new virtual machine and install GitLab.

Twenty-five minutes is amazing compared to doing it all by hand, but I felt it would be faster to use snapshots of the machine instead:

  • Build new machines for Geo primary and secondary
  • Snapshot them before making the tricky changes
  • and then if one breaks, restore the snapshot.

The virtual machines are GCP compute instances, so I needed to learn how to do this with the gcloud compute command-line interface to GCP.

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4-bit Rules of Computing, Part 5

A software team once changed their version control system's API, removing what they saw as redundant legacy functionality. What they didn't realize was that this particular piece of "technical debt" was actually a load-bearing wall in a customer's factory automation pipeline. The result? A business losing thousands of dollars per hour while the production line stood idle.

In software development, every API endpoint, command-line interface, or file format becomes part of someone's workflow, automation, and daily operations. When Microsoft introduced the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, they broke a promise that millions of users had built their muscle memory around. When a content management system I worked with removed its multimedia MIME-type feature in the name of code cleanup, it left a trail of broken websites and frustrated users in its wake.

We need to carefully balance between necessary changes and breaking changes, which brings me to Rule A: "Fix Mistakes, don't Break Promises". When does a "mistake" become serious enough to justify breaking a "promise"? How do we make necessary changes without leaving our users stranded?

This is the sixth part of my blog series expanding on my 4-bit rules of computing.

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Password databases: updating master key

It's been five years since I created my Unix password store, encypted with my GPG key pair password-store. That key expired and now I need to update my database to a new master key.

Now is also a good time to clear out the git history. My key has not (to my knowledge) been compromised, so I don't need to remove all instances of passwords encrypted with the old key, but it will be nice to clear out the old history.

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