When I launched my Patreon, I vowed to explain how computers work. But in 2019, computers rarely work in isolation. So let’s take the time to write a few articles about how computers talk to each other.

The history of network protocols and standards is long and complicated. Starting with a comprehensive review would prove quite tedious, especially if such a review was done in isolation from modern use.

I’ve spent the past few weeks after rock 0.9.8’s release working on some of the neglected aspects of ooc, namely tooling support and performance.

My kingdom for a vim plug-in!

Well, technically, ooc.vim is a few years old, and it was even updated a few times to match new ooc features. But unfortunately, so far, it was limited to syntax highlighting.

What’s a ktls

I started work on ktls and ktls-sys, a pair of crates exposing Kernel TLS offload to Rust, about two years ago.

kTLS lets the kernel (and, in turn, any network interface that supports it) take care of encryption, framing, etc., for the entire duration of a TLS connection… as soon as you have a TLS connection.

For the handshake itself (hellos, change cipher, encrypted extensions, certificate verification, etc.), you still have to use a userland TLS implementation.

Another day, another Advent of Code 2020 problem.

That one seems fun! For some nerdy values of fun.

Our input is a set of rules:

light red bags contain 1 bright white bag, 2 muted yellow bags. dark orange bags contain 3 bright white bags, 4 muted yellow bags. bright white bags contain 1 shiny gold bag. muted yellow bags contain 2 shiny gold bags, 9 faded blue bags. shiny gold bags contain 1 dark olive bag, 2 vibrant plum bags. dark olive bags contain 3 faded blue bags, 4 dotted black bags. vibrant plum bags contain 5 faded blue bags, 6 dotted black bags. faded blue bags contain no other bags. dotted black bags contain no other bags.

So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it’s not. So let’s do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we’ll go for it intentionally.

Cool Bear's hot tip

That’s all-around solid life advice.

Choo choo here comes the easy part 🚂💨

We make a new project:

$ cargo new waytoodeep Created binary (application) `waytoodeep` package

Day 9’s problem statement is convoluted - the “ah maybe that’s why I don’t usually do Advent of Code” kind of convoluted, but let’s give it a go anyway.

So, we have a series of numbers, like so:

35 20 15 25 47 40 62 55 65 95 102 117 150 182 127 219 299 277 309 576

And uh the first N numbers are a “preamble” and every number that comes after that must be the sum of any two of the numbers that come before it.

Day 2, Day 2! Woo!

The Advent of Code 2020, Day 2 problem talks about passwords. Sounds familiar.

Basically, our input looks like this:

1-3 a: abcde 1-3 b: cdefg 2-9 c: ccccccccc

Each line contains a “password policy” and a “password”. For the first line, the policy is that the password must contain between 1 and 3 (inclusive) times the letter “a”.

I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was taking too damn long!

For me, this is a big issue. Because I juggle a lot of things at any given time, and I have less and less time to just hyperfocus on an issue, I try to make my setup as productive as possible.

In the previous chapter, we’ve written a Dockerfile to build the catscii service inside Docker. The result is a container image that can be pushed to production!