Ping from Morocco

I run a PHP script every night to download funny greentexts from the r/4chan subreddit. I like reading them offline when I'm in bed. I don't remember since when I started noticing it, but some of the downloaded pictures would occasionally show signs of corruption. The image viewer would fail to read them. I didn't think much of it and wrote it off as the symptom of an aging SD card, which I've been using it since 2015. It wasn't until someone from r/morocco brought up issues with imgur that I made the connection. Most of the pictures I download from r/4chan are served by i.redd.it, but some of them are served by i.imgur.com. That explained why I thought they were corrupted. The retrieved images were essentially empty. A quick curl -I imgur.com check returned 429 Unknown Error , which confirmed my suspicion. r/morocco redditors submitted a bunch of reports and it quickly became apparent that the problem is limited to the inwi ISP, affecting not only their standar

This is something I've been meaning to write for a long time. If you're already familiar with how to set up App ID in a Spring Boot application, feel free to skip to the fifth step. That's where the juicy parts are. 1. Creating a project Let's start off by creating a new Spring Boot project. This link contains a Spring Boot project with the required dependencies: Spring Security, Spring Web and OAuth2 resource server. 2. Configuring App ID Next, let's create service credentials in our App ID instance. Notice that we gave it write permissions. You'll see why soon. While we're here, let's also add the "http://localhost:8080/login" redirect URL in the authentication settings : To make things easier, let's enable the Google provider in the "Identity Providers" tab. This way we can log in with an existing Google account. If you don't want to do this, it's also possible to create an account on Cloud Directo

I don't usually blog about work-related problems I encounter, but I figured this could be useful for some people. Below is a checklist of potential issues than can crop up when trying to introduce localization to an application that initially supported a single language. Backend error messages Instead of returning error messages, it would be more suitable to return error codes, and have the Android application display their interpretation in the user's language of choice. For example, instead of returning a string that says "This username is already in use", return something like "duplicate_username". One caveat of this approach is how the context that comes with errors should be handled. In the previous example, when a username is already in use, it's customary to return similar usernames that are available. The backend and the frontend should agree on a way to pass this contextual data through the response. Alternatively, you can propagate th

The recent LGR video prompted me to write about my experience on how I got an official WinRAR installation to run on Ubuntu. Back in August, I decided to treat myself to something nice to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. After a session of deep introspection, I concluded that it was time to purchase a WinRAR licence. Registering WinRAR was supposedly considered to be a rite of passage in ancient cultures, the turning point where boys became men. I felt that I had finally reached a level of maturity that would permit me to embark in this life changing journey. The process itself was relatively straightforward. I went over to the official website and placed an order, and they sent me an invoice and a link from which to download the licence key, itself compressed in a RAR archive. I couldn't help but marvel at the website, it aged like fine wine. It is reminiscent of an earlier internet, and I look back fondly to a time where websites used to be much simpler. You'll notic

Context : One of my earliest paychecks went into a cheap 22" TV. It's not fancy at all, but it was a nice upgrade from the old Sony Trinitron TV that was starting to show its age. The new TV has a brand name of "Vision", which is less glamorous than "Sony", but it has been working well so far, so I can't really complain. Just the other day, I found out that it is possible to get it to record something while it's on standby. It's a feature I never knew I needed until I discovered it. A couple of months after I got it, I ran into a problem with the remote controller. Luckily it turned out to be caused by a dead battery. Even though it was trivial to fix, this minor incident planted the seed of fear in me. Since the TV doesn't have physical buttons, I concluded that it would become useless should the remote stop working for some reason or another. Because of this, I decided to make a backup of the remote in case something happens to it. To d

A few days ago, in the programming subreddit, Paulo Henrique Cuchi shared his experience writing a command line tool in both Rust and Go . The tool in question is a client for his side project, Hashtrack. Hashtrack exposes a GraphQL API with which the clients can track certain twitter hashtags and get a real time list of relevant tweets. Prompted by this comment , I decided to write a D port to demonstrate how D can be used to achieve a similar goal. I'll try to keep the same structure as the one he used in his blog post. Source code on Github How did I end up using D? The main reason is that the original blog post compared statically typed languages like Go and Rust, and made honorable mentions to Nim and Crystal, but didn't mention D. D falls under this category, so I think this will make for an interesting comparison I also like D as a language and I have mentioned it in various other blog posts. Local environment The manual has a lengthy page on how to downlo