Status update, February 2022
Published on February 15, 2022
Table of contents
Time for another monthly update. I’m moving these to the middle of the month.
ANSOL
This was a busy month for ANSOL.
I took the lead in writing an analysis of the parties’ programmes for the 2022 Portuguese legislative election, focusing on free software and digital rights issues. This got some attention and media coverage (SAPO Tek, PCGuia, and TSF).
I also worked on our yearly “I love free software” message, making a quick round-up of free software technologies that we used in the last year.
We migrated our code forge from Phabricator to Gitea a couple of days ago, so I spent some time configuring ANSOL’s account and mirroring some repositories. You can check it out on https://git.ansol.org. We’re still using github and gitlab as the main repositories, but that will probably change with time.
Finally, I recovered our mastodon account @ansol@floss.social. This was using an email account that no longer exists, so I had to contact the administration team, but then I couldn’t receive their email replies… it took some time, but they were super helpful and we’re going to try to use it again now.
Cyberscore
I’ve been going through Cyberscore’s codebase and converting it file by file. On my last update, there were 12k lines of code to go through. Today, that number is down to 1.5kloc! When this reaches zero, hopefully we’ll be able to make the code public. I can’t wait to share with the world the mini-framework I wrote.
Our server ran out of space this month. Players submit image proofs of their
highscores and we store them all, so this tends to take up a lot of disk space.
We had some redundant local backups as a result of the april 2021 hack, so I
moved those off-site and deleted them. This gave us ~15gb of breathing room,
which should be enough for at least a few months. Another thing that’s taking
up a ton of space is /var/lib/mysql: 26Gb. Our database isn’t that big, so
there’s something weird going on. I think I’ll need to tweak the binlog
expiration period.
Other stuff
I released a podcast episode this month: Ep 40: Nada funciona nunca. We have another one in the editing queue, but I didn’t have much time this month.
I virtually attended FOSDEM and the EU Open Source Policy Summit. During FOSDEM I mostly focused on the Matrix and Legal and Policy devrooms. Videos of both events are available.
I was trying to read this german page about how a school adopted and adapted a matrix client to their needs, when I decided to look for an alternative to google translate. I found something that’s self-hostable, LibreTranslate. I tried self-hosting this on my PTisp VPS, and it was terribly slow. I tried again in a 5 USD digital ocean VPS, and it was way faster. I really need to switch to a different provider. I started working on a browser extension for firefox but with such a slow instance I was having a hard time iterating, so I paused work on it until I get a better server.
Finally, I tried to convince some folks to host their meetup on free software solutions instead of zoom, but had some trouble finding a setup that felt good enough to replace it. I tried jitsi, owncast, OBS, VDO.ninja, and BigBlueButton in several combinations. I’ll need to give it another go.
Up next
I’ll be doing some consulting work for the next couple of weeks, working on upgrading up some Terraform repositories and some postgres clusters.
Other than that, I want to finish the cyberscore conversion. It’s so close! As soon as I finish convering all the missing files, I still need to go through every file again for a quick second pass, ensuring that we have the proper authorization in each endpoint and double-checking for SQL injections. Then, we’ll have to change all our server passwords (since some of them were commited to the git repository when I started). Finally, we’ll have to pick a license and release the software.