Ping from Morocco

In my previous post, I mentioned how I was using a data plan that amounts to 10 DH per gigabyte. Being a relatively light streamer, I can usually get by with 10 gigabytes per month. These days however, I often find myself abusing my data plan for calls and screen sharing and whatnot. This month for example, I spent 250 DH on internet alone. With a monthly spending like that, I realized that I might as well get ADSL or a cheap optical fiber subscription.So why didn't I ? Well, for one, I don't want to get tied down by a monthly subscription. Secondly, I don't want something that requires a heavy installation with all the fees and the time that it implies. And finally, I want to have the option of carrying it with me wherever I want.When I was searching for alternatives, a friend of mine suggested Win by Inwi. I looked into it and it seemed to satisfy my needs of portability and ease of use. In short, you can customize your plan as you wish, handle the paperwork online and o…

Given the state that the world is in right now, many companies, mine included, offered their employees the option of working from home. I decided to jump on the "working from home" bandwagon and write an entry describing how I personally managed it.HardwareA few days before the state of emergency took effect, I bought an HP monitor, a Logitech keyboard and the cheapest mouse I could find. With this, I set up an impromptu workstation for the days to come.I chose this monitor because it supports both HDMI and Display Port. I use the former with my work issued laptop and the latter with my own Thinkpad. The choice of keyboard was driven by the lack of an alternative. Most of the keyboards I was shown looked like cheap knockoffs of popular brands. As for the mouse, I picked the cheapest one because I'm not a heavy mouse user, and I figured any mouse would do the trick. I regretted this decision when I found out that the mouse sometimes releases mid-click, which results in so…

These past few days, I have been working on integrating IBM App ID into our Java backend and Android frontend codebases. Because of this, I would find myself going back and forth between the terminal and JWT.io whenever I need to inspect a JWT's payload. I don't want to call it a "JWT token" because that would be a bad case of RAS and I'm pedantic like that, but I digress.Instead of relying on a website to do that for me, I figured why not just do it from the terminal. I did some reading and it turns out that JWTs are relatively easy to parse :Split the token using the dot character as a delimiterBase 64 decode the first portion to get the headerBase 64 decode the second portion to get the payloadThe third portion serves as a signing mechanism for the token. I chose to ignore the signing logic for the script I intended to write because it was irrelevant for my use case.I ended up writing a command line tool in D to help me inspect JWTs. The main requirement was f…

I sometimes find myself needing to transfer a file to someone at the office. It's a common scenario. To solve this problem, a few options present themselves. The easiest one, in my opinion, is to just serve the file in question through HTTP from my own machine on the local network. I then send the link to whoever needs it. If you think about it, you will realize that it has many advantages :It's easy to setupEveryone these days has an HTTP client on their computerFiles can be protected from prying eyes thanks to HTTP authorizationYou can resume downloadsYou can serve entire directoriesIt has, however, a few downsides :The file is no longer available if the server is turned offThe client has to be on the same networkIt's probably not the most secure solution out thereTo use this method, I usually resort to python's built in HTTP server. It's only a matter of navigating to the directory you want to serve and running the python3 -m http.server command. The directory l…

D lets us write for loops in the following form : foreach(i; 0 .. 5) { //do something with i } While convenient, I sometimes find myself needing to iterate over a range inclusively, which means that I want the upper bound to be included in the loop. Kotlin supports both inclusive and exclusive looping with the .. and until operators. Nim's .. and ..< operators behave respectively like Kotlin's .. and until. Swift supports a similar construct as well. D doesn't support one natively, but it shouldn't be too difficult for us to come up with something. Naive solutionThe following hack makes use of UFCS to provide a readable solution to the problem outlined above : T inc(T)(T input) { return cast(T)(input + 1); } void main() { foreach(i; 0 .. 5.inc) { writeln(i); } } inc stands for inclusive, but it can also be thought of as increment since that's what really happens here. UFCS lets us write 5.inc instead of the more verbose inc(5) alte…

I've listed various webscraping-related tips and tricks below. I have collected these throughout the years, hopefully you will find them useful.Tip #1 : don't do itScraping should only be considered as a last resort. If the website from which you intend to extract information offers an API, use the API instead. It'll be easier to parse a nicely formatted JSON response then it would be to download an entire web page and go through verbose and sometimes malformed HTML just to extract a small piece of information.Tip #2 : check for mobile versionsMobile versions of websites tend to be lighter and more to the point, which makes them easier to scrape. Mobile websites also tend to be less reliant on Javascript than their desktop counterparts. Certain websites offer a mobile.* or m.* domain, while others simply redirect you based on your user agent. In this case, you might need to craft a specific user agent in order to fool the website into thinking you're on mobile. Others,…