I am starting a series of weekly recaps of everything that is going on in my life.
There is no specific theme. I will cover what happened, what I am working on and what my plans for the nearest future are.
Mass Shooting in Krakow
On Saturday me, Krakow, where I live, and entire country of Poland were shocked by the first ever terror act in Poland. The Polish citizen now identified as Michal Olsinski drove to Krakow, to the central square and started shooting randomly at passerbies from the automatic weapon. He went through the main square and further down until, thanks to the road repairs crashed into another vehicle and was shot at by policemen who were chasing him.
Early morning today the terrorsit died in the hospital. Six people are dead and a dozen is injured including two policemen who had finally stopped the killer. Terrorsit was 24 years old Polish citizen. Before heading to Krakow he has killed his entire family.
On Saturday I was sitting at the bar where my daughter works. I was waiting for my wife and son. Shortly after they came - and the bar is very close to the main square - we started hearing rumors of what was happening. My wife and son were at the epicenter of the tragedy just minutes befor all went down. So we were lucky. Still it was shocking to all of us. Krakow is a quite city. Yes, things are happening here, crime and all that but not to that scale as it had on Saturday. My son could not sleep well for the past two nights.
All things pass but something in the world is ultimately broken and it is hard to shake off the feeling of dread and pessimism regarding all of this.
Noise Watch Launch
On the more positive note, I have finally finished the app for tracking my server logs. It is called the Noise Watch because honestly the noise is what is mostly in my logs. My online presence is next to nothing so any legit traffic that my server generates is mostly me visiting those pages and maybe some random people but most of it is full of scanners, AI crawlers and other bad boys.
More thorough analysis is under way, and I am planning to have a weekly recap of the Noise Watch.
I am not a security expert so things are going slow but I am still happy with what I have done here. I was starting from zero a c couple of months ago. Now I have a Go tool for logs parsing, extracting and exporting, an analysis pipeline which runs a Quack server on my homelab box which hosts the DuckDB database with all the data and I finally have a public facing Observable Framework app which allows me to have a quick look at what is going on in my logs. Frankly, that is not nothing. But more things to come on that front.
Debian Security Updates
I only mention this because I want to notice how crazy the security lanscape has become. I am signed up to the Debian sec mailist and I am getting emails everyday with new security upgrades recommended. I won't exaggerate if I say that sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade is the most often used command I type every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. I have always been paranoid about security and this is the era that should not be good for me, from mental health point of view. For some reason though I feel energized instead. It is not that I am planning on fighting all those security threats but weirdly enough new security holes and attacks make me feel alive. And I am not even working in security.
Just Works
I want to mention a tool called just here and express my gratitude to people who developed it. It is now my go to tool if I need to automating something. My usage is pretty basic at the moment but I am working through the Just Programmer's Manual. It is a useful one to add to the toolbelt.
Plans & Wishes
This week is a short working week so I am hoping to find some time to work on the following:
- Looking at the certficates infrustructure and data. Here Bob Rudis has a usefull write-up on the topic
- CheckFirst has released a massive dataset on pro_kremlin propaganda and disinformation ecosystem.
Coda
This is how the week went for me. Come say hi if you are on
Take care of yourself and do not succumb to pessimism.