DAILY JOURNAL ============= An attempt to keep a daily record of worked on, what I achieved, and other things that made today different from yesterday. Minimal entries. The long term goal is to be able to get a sense of accomplishment. Entries are ordered from most to least recent, in an "endless file". Each entry is introduced by the output of: date +'= %F, %A =' = 2024-03-31, Sunday = More stressful days passed. In the last few days, we found a good teahouse in the city center. They seem to be competent, and we could buy some really good tea. As by tonight I'm done reading chapter 2 of the book about cryptography, and looking forward to discuss it with the friend I'm reading it with. I already collected lots of notes! I found a nice channel of friendly people in IRC :) = 2024-03-27, Wednesday = A good friend shared with me a copy of a book about cryptography. I proposed him to read it together and comment chapters as we progress, in the same way as I have seen done at reading groups. Other than that, it was the third awful day in a row, with my little daughter being sick. = 2024-03-24, Sunday = Coffee: Kokkaffe Too tired to defeat any obstacle on the CTF. I hoped I could speed up my attempts by leveraging radare2, but I'm not able to make it speak AT&T syntax, and I'm not motivated to do all the manual steps I have done in the past days. I was very nervous during the day, and I feel a little guilty for scolding my child. I suppose that's the difficult part of being a parent. He does not hate me. Yet. = 2024-03-23, Saturday = Tea: Earl Grey A few days passed. I think I found a few friends who are willing to explore security topics with me. Hopefully we will start a little club on Matrix. I'm continuing the CTF effort, and learning useful things about assembly on ##asm (in Libera.chat). Ironically, I resume the exercise every day, fail to progress with the exercise, but succeed in learning something new. = 2024-03-18, Monday = Coffee: Kokkaffe Even if parenting sucks up most of my energies, I could at least clean the front yard and do some house work. I'm about to resume my CTF: I just learned about vDSO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSO = 2024-03-17, Sunday = Coffee: Kokkaffe Back to this journal after another long pause. Interestingly (or not) this pause is 7 days longer than the previous one. Yet another day spent parenting (as mentioned elsewhere). Trying to build a shellcode for a CTF in the little spare time I'm left with. // = 2023-10-11, Tuesday = Nothing interesting happened during the day. Keeping up with my CVE reviews, which is kinda boring. = 2023-10-09, Monday = Regular work day, not very productive. Besides trying to automate a few boring procedures, I've spent most of my workday looking into Linux vulnerability reports, almost everything was not relevant to our particular setup. = 2023-10-08, Sunday = A very busy day, mostly doing maintenance works. My son helped me vacuuming the car and doing other chores: it was not very efficient to work while looking after him, but it was nice to spend some time together. = 2023-10-07, Saturday = The tough routine of a parent makes it difficult for me to keep up even with daily journaling. In this period I'm only working four days per week, since this is the current work agreement. It is similar to have long week ends every weekend, except it implies looking after my 3 years old kid, which is a non trivial task. I'd really like to spend some time alone. Today we have guests, and we are going to eat the vegetable curry, one of my preferred dishes. // = 2023-05-09, Tuesday = I'm spending a lot of time in the office lately, even with our "hybrid" work arrangement for which I need to be there just twice per week. Since I passed quite a stressful time, I stopped pretty much all computer related hobbies, and focused more on reading, as I already mentioned yesterday. Our kid is a huge source of stress lately, as he's in that age where they need to claim their independence. But it is also so fun to stay with him, as he is more and more creative and clever. = 2023-05-08, Monday = I'm done with the task that took me so much energy, and I'm recovering from the stress. In these days I've finally made some progress in reading books. I've started to read "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (Leo Tolstoj), a book that have been recommended to me by my good friend D. I'm almost done with it. I plan to write a review on it soon, probably in the "Pentoloni" phlog. At the same time I'm reading "When Prophecy Fails" (Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, Stanley Schachter). = 2023-04-28, Friday = Weeks hammering on the same task, unable to complete it, even if I know what I'm doing. I'm definitely experiencing some burnout. Every day I feel the urge of writing, both to take note of my progress (as poor as it can be, it is still progress!), and to vent my anxiety. My wife helps me in the evening to progress, by staying in the same room and following my ramblings. I couldn't be more grateful. Soon I'll have a bit of vacation: my elder sister is coming here in visit for the first time! = 2023-04-04, Tuesday = Not very productive at work lately: I'm trying to get the jffs2 filesystem work on $current_board, and it is taking me forever. I'm learnin something though. CTF: I've completed three Microcorruption challenges in a row. = 2023-04-03, Monday = After a long pause, I'd like to resume the good habit of quick annotations. This one is going to be a little longer, cumulative of a few days back. We had our friend I. in visit on Saturday. A fairly good Sunday followed up. Spring starts to be here after a long winter, so it is now possible to take a walk in the sun with the pram. It turned out to be a perfect way to induce our child to have a good nap. He's getting increasingly clever. I'm looking forward to the time where we can have fun together with some project. I resumed both the reading of "Practical Binary Analysis" and the Microcorruption CTF. I passed the "Reykjavik" level: it turned out to be very simple, and I'm not sure of what blocked me. I'm also improving and fixing Crossbow, after my good friend A. (who is probably the only user of my software :D) reported a problem with duplicated feed items guid. = 2023-01-10, Tuesday = I want to be more systematic. I learned that I can ask advices to a fake chat, and exploit my fear of being bashed to answer myself, before asking advices to a real chat and being bashed for real. = 2022-12-16, Friday = We will not be able to have vacations as planned, to begin with, because a few important flights have been canceled. We are going to be four. Five if we include the cat. = 2022-12-15, Thursday = A few busy days passed, with a lot of work to do. Not much of interest happened. My smartphone is broken, but it can be repaired. I backed it up. I will have to ship it to get it fixed, so I will wipe it, and spent the Christmas vacation without it. This might be a positive thing. = 2022-12-12, Monday = I had a fairly good start of week. I wasn't particularly entusiast of getting to work, but it turned out to be a productive day. Me and my colleague M are busy flashing a batch of hardware boards, and we strived to make the process as automatic as possible. The working session was so intense that both me and M even forgot to have lunch. In fact none of us even mentioned it. I spent the late afternoon with my toddler. We went to the station to watch trains passing: very boring for me, extremely exciting for him. My wife came home towards the evening, and we had a good dinner. Unfortunatly I'm probably about to get a gastro, which made me both hungry and nauseated at the same time. Weird sensation. I spent a relaxing evening programming while following a live video stream. = 2022-12-11, Sunday = We had a good Sunday. After a really long time, we met our friends M&B. They're moving permanently to Italy, so our chances to met them in future are thin. I had an interesting discussion with M about religion, catechism, and how it gets more and more awkward to teach it in modern times. As former believer (I'm afraid I woke up faithless recently) I'd like to write an essay on the topic, but I'm hardly going to find the time for it. The Ju Jitsu session was awful, again because of the gastric reflux. I should lose 10 kilos: this would fix the problem. It is a good and proven advice a gastroenterologist gave me a few years ago. Proven because the reflux disappeared as I lost weight, back then. Unfortunately I recovered both weight and reflux, since then. = 2022-12-10, Saturday = Even if we couldn't sleep that well, the day was altogether quite relaxing. We went to the nearby shopping center, we ate oriental food, and bought some presents for our friends' kids. In the afternoon I had a few hours of productive work on Crossbow, while our son had a nap. Later my wife went to buy some groceries, while me and the kid prepared a beautiful soup. = 2022-12-09, Friday = A busy day. At work I was busy automating as much as possible the flashing procedure of certain optical routers, of which we have to prepare several copies next week. I worked under pressure, since I couldn't stay in the afternoon, having an appointment with the car mechanic at 3 PM. On the top of it, our son is sick again: he threw up a few times during the night, so we can't let him to the preschool. = 2022-12-08, Thursday = It's harder and harder to keep up with the exercise of annotating daily. A few working day spent in enabling static checks on the code. Battling against clang tools is really frustrating. I spent two evenings working on Crossbow. I half forgot about how it works, so the first one was spent in reloading it in my head, while also documenting the source code in the process (function headers). The second evening was spent in small fixes. I wasn't particularly inspired by martial arts this week, so I shamelessly skipped both Tai Chi yesterday, and Ju Jitsu today. My mobile phone is breaking apart! Hopefully it is still under warranty. = 2022-12-08, Thursday = It's harder and harder to keep up with the exercise of annotating daily. A few working day spent in enabling static checks on the code. Battling against clang tools is really frustrating. I spent two evenings working on Crossbow. I half forgot about how it works, so the first one was spent in reloading it in my head, while also documenting the source code in the process (function headers). The second evening was spent in small fixes. I wasn't particularly inspired by martial arts this week, so I shamelessly skipped both Tai Chi yesterday, and Ju Jitsu today. My mobile phone is breaking apart! Hopefully it is still under warranty. = 2022-12-05, Monday = No entry for Sunday, but it wasn't a good day, unfortunately. I even skipped the Ju Jitsu training: after starting with it I was unable to continue due to a strong gastric reflux. Not that today was such a good day either. I'm tired, basically worn off. We went to a different supermarket, found by my wife a few weeks ago, when she had a doctor visit. The place turned out to be a little shabby, but we found some really good Italian biscuits. = 2022-12-03, Saturday = Almost done with the bureaucracy, it is now time to ship this big package of papers. I got nervous while trying to set up a shelf in our living room: we have hollow walls and they seem to be made of nothing! We celebrated our friend I.'s birthday, and had lunch with them, and they had great news for us! I spent my evening watching movies of people who visit abandoned places: some are creepy, others are moving. = 2022-12-02, Friday = We finally had our day at the wellness (thanks to our friend Homer for the recommendation). We took one day off, spent the morning in the hot tub, and had lunch. Then we came back home and chilled a little more, before picking up our son. After a number of weeks of not doing my Tai Chi, I couldn't recollect the last part of the sword form. = 2022-12-01, Thursday = Spent my working day in integrating static checks (clang-tidy, cppcheck, ...) in our codebase. Nothing really interesting happened today. = 2022-11-30, Wednesday = Another burst of intense days. Plenty of bureaucracy going on, but things are now close to be done. I'm also almost off the hook about the software modification that drove me crazy. I met my good friend DL yesterday. = 2022-11-27, Sunday = A few intense days. I'm trying to sum it up in one entry: will I remember of everything? We were supposed to go to the wellness and have some relaxing hot tub, but my wife is still somewhat sick, and we had to move it forward. Hopefully this week. I met my good friend and former colleague A., and we had a beer remembering about the time we worked together. Apart from that, I spent my whole free time, and a few evenings till late, to wrap up my work task. I don't usually work beyond my regular working hours, but this time I felt I owed it. I'm relieved that we booked the plane tickets for Christmas. I'm not so relieved by the idea of the Christmas vacation. I received a bunch of papers from the migration agency: this is about my citizenship request pending. I'll have to delve into bureaucracy. Unfortunately had to I skip Tai Chi on Friday, but I managed to go to the Ju Jitsu lesson on Sunday. = 2022-11-24, Thursday = After working hard to terminate the implementation, and to scaffold the unit test, I exchanged a few words about it with a colleague, and suddenly my implementation started to look sub-optimal. My wife is feeling better, although still quite bashed. Having the ju jitsu course in the evening, I helped her as much as I could. When I came home she wife was ready for sleeping, so I kissed her good night. I spent some further time fixing my work, since I'm ashamed that it takes so long. I didn't do much, but I've got a plan now. = 2022-11-23, Wednesday = Yet another Wednesday. Workday was decent. The little feature I'm working on (lazy image verification) is somewhat more 'software engineer' than the usual, and I'm having fun. I'm just a bit afraid of being bashed by certain colleagues, even if I'm trying my best to keep it as simple as I can. My wife asked me to check the Christmas lights to be in working conditions, so I had a good reason for playing with my multimeter. I hate Christmas. I like my multimeter. Me and my wife are watching "Aliens" tonight. = 2022-11-22, Tuesday = My wife is still quite sick, but a quick visit to the doctor gave us peace of mind. I will take care of her in the next few days. My workday was initially a little demoralising, as I realised how the codebase I have to modify is effectively very redundant. Copy-paste-modify? Here's why results came out so fast. I hate this. I managed to get on track quite fast, and to properly factorize at least the parts that I needed. If anything the code is fairly simple. I worked a little more in the evening, and I'm now quite satisfied with the resut. = 2022-11-21, Monday = After a week end under the weather (both literally and figuratively), I had a semi-decent working day. At work I live under the impression of being close to useless. I'm slow, and I get assigned to uninteresting tasks, being grossly underqualified for the real meat. I'm looking forward to the end of this week: we have plans... = 2022-11-18, Friday = This illness continues, for both me and my wife. Today I've got even fever. We bought some COVID tests, but that turned out to be negative. Not that every illness is COVID, right? Anyway, half day at work, since I felt dizzy. I skipped Tai Chi too. If anything, our son is normal and happy, which is both good and bad, given that it is difficult to look after him while being sick. = 2022-11-17, Thursday = Even if sick, even if doing anything takes a long time (wait for jenkins, syncronize repos...), I had a fairly productive work day. I had to skip the Ju Jitsu course beacuse of the flu. I had a few nice mail conversations, with my friends and former colleagues A and D. = 2022-11-16, Wednesday = Two days skipped, of which I don't remember anything interesting happening. I'm a little sick, so I have been working from home this week. It's obviously just a regular cold, but I don't want to infect my colleagues. I'm a little embarassed by how clumsy I have been at work today: I've sent in a few pull requests, and they were full of little errors. I have completed another Microcorruption CTF tonight. It was an easy level, and to be honest I wouldn't have had the energy for doing anything more difficult. = 2022-11-13, Sunday = A peaceful Sunday spent with my family. In my spare time I continued a little with "Practical Binary Analysis", and I spent some time on a CTF. I didn't manage to do much, but I learned a few valuable things, promptly annotated in my "Today I learned" file. = 2022-11-12, Saturday = The weather has been good, so we went to the center with our child. We travelled by train, since he likes trains a lot. We had lunch at a really good burger place, where I also enjoyed a well deserved beer. I spent some free time looking into the Crossbow project, for which I'm planning a new round of improvements. Searching for some old data into my disks, I stumbled into old videos and photo. I think I had a little panic attack realising how much time it passed, and how happy and light hearted I was when those pictures were taken. = 2022-11-11, Friday = A poorly productive day at work. The $local_language course is eating up the first hours of the morning, and on the top of it I didn't have a clear task assigned today. On the plus side, a good Taiji session and a good dinner with my family. I'll do some coding tonight. = 2022-11-10, Thursday = Sleeping helps. As every Thursday, I worked from the office. I've patched the 'g' firmware, which is a monster user application. The amount of dependences and the compilation time are obvious sign of feature creep. The list of warnings produced by the compiler is an obvious sign of a careless approach to the matter. Regardless, it is not as bad as the codebase I was working on Monday! If anything, I had some fun with C++, which made me crave for some coding. Excellent Ju Jitsu session. = 2022-11-19, Wednesday = A very bad day, today. Possibly because I couldn't sleep during the night? Our child wakes up at least once per night, lately. This night it was at least five occurrences. The daycare was closed for ...reasons, and we had him home the whole day. My wife handled the whole situation, while I was trying to work. Yet work didn't yield any satisfaction. I could sit there, stormed with things happening, and the very unpleasant impression that everyone knows how to do things, except for me. Skipped Taiji. Skipped the role-playing session. Screw it. = 2022-11-08, Tuesday = The day at work wasn't very productive, as I spent most of my time trying to upload a binary on the target board, with a half broken network link. I had a few useful discussion with a colleague. We had a really good pizza at the nearby restaurant. = 2022-11-07, Monday = Did I lose an entry? I was sure I wrote it. [EDIT: I wrote it on another computer, and forgot to commit.] It has been a boring day anyway. Working on a bad codebase, and fortunately learning that the work was already done, so I don't have to care for it. The afternoon made it painfully clear how we are sometimes unable to find anything interesting to do, as a family. I couldn't learn anything in the evening, since I was simply too tired for anything. I started to read "Dante" (an essay on Dante Alighieri, written by Alessandro Barbero). = 2022-11-06, Sunday = We had lunch with our friends J and M, at an Indian street food restaurant. The food was delicious, but of course quite spicy, and hard to digest. The ju jitsu training in the evening was exceptionally good, although I was still affected by the stomach acid. = 2022-11-05, Saturday = A regular Saturday spent with my family. I've [re]started to read "Practical Binary Analysis" by Dennis Andriesse, a book that I bought a few years ago, and still waits for me to delve into. Me and my wife are going to watch "Alien" tonight, the 1979 sci-fi horror: she never watched it before. = 2022-11-04, Friday = Half day at work today! The preschool had full time, so me and my wife had some free time in our hands. We went to the city center, had a good meal at our preferred restaurant, followed by a walk as we did a few years ago, when life was simpler, and we had plenty of time for us. A very good Taiji session: I've almost learned the sword form. = 2022-11-03, Thursday = Normal working day at the office, evening spent with my family. A good Ju Jitsu training in the evening: I think I'll do a yearly subscription. = 2022-11-02, Wednesday = A working day spent in reading documentation. I'm very happy about the quality of the docs available at the ARM developer portal (developer.arm.com). No roleplaying tonight, so I might spend my night doing a CTF, or maybe some reverse engineering. = 2022-11-01, Tuesday = At work, while waiting for a platform where to test a certain driver problem, I started to read up some ARM Cortex a53 documentation. I was supposed to have a roleplaying session tonight. The game master decided to skip it and to jump to next week. = 2022-10-31, Monday = Regular work day: I managed to fix the driver reset problem. A different problem involving the same hardware waits for me tomorrow. We went to the nearby center to buy a winter jacket for our child, and some groceries. Definitely not an outstanding day, but I stewed some chicken, and it turned out a delicious dinner. = 2022-10-30, Sunday = Met a few friends this morning. I upgraded freebsd on my VPS, all went good minus a minor glitch that prevented ssh login, which I could fix with a service restart. CTF: I'm trying a challenge involving AES-ECB encryption. I have to supply a key that will allow to decript a known 128-bit ciphertext into a known 128-bit plaintext. This is theoretically impossible, so it must be something else. Boundary checks are OK. I'm a bit lost. Ju Jitsu lession skipped. = 2022-10-29, Saturday = Regular Saturday with family. I've been with my son and wife at the Sami fair. After various years, I've decided to start over the "Microcorruption" CTF, and I passed two levels (they're very easy) before running out of time. We had our best friends for dinner. = 2022-10-28, Friday = Fuss at work for a buggy release candidate. The problem adds up to the same driver I'm fixing as by current task. I'll have the opportunity to work a little more on the final platform, not just the usual mock up. My muscles are sore because of yesterday's Ju Jitsu workout. I couldn't do the Tai Chi session, partially because of this. Swedish lession in the morning, I should put more effort into it. I finally get to continue with the capture the flag that I'm playing with. = 2022-10-27, Thursday = Worked on a bug of a driver that makes our platform unable to reboot cleanly. Second lesson of Ju Jitsu.