Average day of a FLOSS developer

I woke up, ate my breakfast, did some workout with StepMania (a DDR clone, great game, BTW, you should definitely try it, if you like to move), practiced playing music a little on a MIDI keyboard (using QSynth with JACK (managed by Catia) for low latency response). I heard that Wine supports GTK3 themes, so I wanted to check it out, but there was none for the latest version, and that lead me to filing a bug. ...

February 18, 2021 · 3 min · Arusekk

TI 1337 Plus CE (DiceCTF 2021 challenge)

TI 1337 Plus CE Originally published in justCatTheFish repo. Writeup written by Arusekk. Solved by Arusekk, haqpl and Disconnect3d. We included the task files in ./taskfiles/. In the task, you have to take control over a patched (sandboxed) CPython. The patch checks the opcodes against a blacklist, and if any matches, it goes exit(1). It also forbids using variables beginning with _. The checks are perfored only if current environment is missing a secret COMPILE_SECRET and the current frame’s code object has co_filename set to anything other than a predefined string (FROZEN_SECRET). ...

February 10, 2021 · 6 min · Arusekk

Thoughts on opinions

A friend of mine recently told me that she is not smart (that’s a lie from her, since she is), but she pretends to be smart using one simple trick. She told me that the key to being perceived as smart is to have strong, carefully researched, and strongly founded opinions on some totally irrelevant details of the things you happen to talk about. While this may be a helpful advice, the worst part is that it will not make you any true expert. But if you are part of some phenomenon for long enough, you become an expert gradually. And then you start to notice the errors of those who err. ...

February 7, 2021 · 5 min · Arusekk

An adventure with Acer Swift

Recently my old laptop started losing keyboard keys, and I heard that in 2021 it is time to let go of that good ol’ laptop with loud HDD, CD station, glossy HD-ready LCD, dissolved keys, cracked screws, two jacks, snappy sound, rumbling mic, 640x480 webcam, 4GiB RAM, 2x bithread i5-4200M @ 2.50 GHz, especially that I use unstable Gentoo GNU/Linux distro, which requires an overnight CPU-heavy update (Portage, the Gentoo PM, compiles everything from source by default). ...

January 19, 2021 · 5 min · Arusekk

I translated Git!

I found that Git has no Polish translation! Terrible feeling, right? So now it has one. I spent every evening for a month before Christmas on translating it. So here are the main things I noticed: Software designers (or whoever does the things I mean) are very anglocentric. They mostly don’t care about other languages, even the similar ones, not to mention the exotic (search for designed well). Like Hebrew numerals in that article, in Polish we also say “dwie” for two (female), but “dwóch” for two (male) and “dwa” for two (neutral). So a msgid saying "Only two %s found." is a 100% bad design. The same goes for having many %s in a msgid. Hey, GNU printf supports "%1$s not found because of %2$s", all non-C languages also have some way to numer the percent-esses. And then you can of course translate it to "%2$s caused no results for %1$s" if it sounds more natural in the target language. ...

December 27, 2020 · 3 min · Arusekk