Hey Loura!

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 20:50:29 -0500

Some lessons, like keeping footware dry, I fear my kids will never learn…

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 13:32:36 -0500

I’m having some fun with the new Micro.blog premium feature, private notes. I’m trying to figure out what parts of my workflow I can move over 😄

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:13:39 -0500

Currently reading: When Your Child Hurts by Rachael Coakley 📚

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 08:25:23 -0500

Back to Boston Children’s with my daughter. Since the winter storm is upon us and the other patients canceled, I’m hoping the appointment will go a bit quicker than the scheduled five hours. Hopefully the snow isn’t too bad when we head out. ❄️

Private key (AES-CBC) encryption and decryption in Deno

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 07:36:50 -0500

I found myself needing to encrypt a small string on Deno (and subsequently decrypt it later) for a small side project. I checked out a few websites with code samples. But those didn’t work/were out of date. So this is what worked for me:

Note: I am not a security expert and I don’t play one on TV. You shouldn’t trust anything important with random code you found on the internet. Seriously.

1. Save the key

First we generate a key using the standard SubtleCrypto api that ships with Deno. Then export a JSON webkey and save it. I’m putting it in an environmental variable. Make sure it is safe and secure.


const key = await crypto.subtle.generateKey({ name: "AES-CBC", length: 128 },true,["encrypt", "decrypt"]);
const rawKey = JSON.stringify(await crypto.subtle.exportKey("jwk", key));

2. Encrypt a string

Here we take the JSON webkey from our environmental variable that we created in step one and import it. Then using the key along with some random bytes, the initialization vector iv, we encrypt the string. The last two lines deal with getting the encrypted string into a format to save. The iv needs to be random and unique per message but it doesn’t need to be secret. So we can prepend it to the encrypted message.

You could potentially take this one step further and get a hex string from the encrypted bytes and save that. But for my needs I stopped here and stored the comma separated string of numbers.


async function encryptMe(decrypted)
{
    const _appSecret = JSON.parse(Deno.env.get("APP_SECRET"));
    const iv = await crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(16)); 
    const key = await crypto.subtle.importKey("jwk", _appSecret, "AES-CBC", true, ["encrypt", "decrypt"]);
    const encrypted = await crypto.subtle.encrypt({name: "AES-CBC", iv}, key, new TextEncoder().encode(decrypted));
    const encryptedBytes = new Uint8Array(encrypted);
    return `${iv.toString()}|${encryptedBytes.toString()}`;
}

3. Decrypt a string

The next step is to decrypt a string we previously encrypted. After we make a key we will need to separate out the two parts of the passed in message. The first part specifies the iv that was used and the second stores the encrypted message. You can use the Uint8Array.from to re-create the Unit8Array. Then call the decrypt method from the key, use a text decoder and you have your decrypted message. Yay! 👏


async function decryptMe(encrypted) 
{
    const _appSecret = JSON.parse(Deno.env.get("APP_SECRET"));
    const key = await crypto.subtle.importKey("jwk", _appSecret, "AES-CBC", true, ["encrypt", "decrypt"]);
    const ivPart = encrypted.split('|')[0];
    const encryptedPart = encrypted.split('|')[1];

    const encryptedBytes = Uint8Array.from(encryptedPart.split(',').map(num => parseInt(num)));
    const iv = Uint8Array.from(ivPart.split(',').map(num => parseInt(num)));
    
    const decrypted = await crypto.subtle.decrypt({name: "AES-CBC", iv}, key, encryptedBytes);
    const decryptedBytes = new Uint8Array(decrypted);
    return new TextDecoder().decode(decryptedBytes);
}

Permission notice

THE CODE SAMPLE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE CODE SAMPLE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS WITH THE CODE SAMPLE.

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 08:56:32 -0500

This morning I accidentally used mint extract instead of vanilla extract in my berry crisp 🤦

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 15:43:49 -0500

I want to thank seventeen year old me for trying out Tai Chi. I want to thank all the versions of me that kept with it. There are few things that make me feel so at peace. I let the world pass me by and I simply move with the forms.

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 18:05:12 -0500

It’s been a hard and long week. My daughter’s knee injury had an unexpected prognosis and its been tough to wrap my head around it. She’ll be all right, it’s just that the path to get there is longer and the way forward is murky.

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 21:42:45 -0500

Family game night ❤️

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 20:55:52 -0500

My son and I have had friction homeschooling this year. So yesterday morning we spent two hours brainstorming what to do and when he was last really happy with school. Turns out he was happiest when he read all the time. So we’re adjusting and adding in his wonderful choices ❤️📚

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 10:37:31 -0500

Fingers crossed that the CT scan shows enough signs of healing so my daughter can start physical therapy. This girl just wants to get up, run around, climb trees and dance.

Dev Diary 0012: January 1st - 16th 2024

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 12:13:46 -0500

I’ve spent the last few weeks of the New Year, like a lot of others, reflecting on where I’ve been and where I want to go. So this update is a little more rambling than most.

Work

I want to never use Azure Dev Ops again. It is giving me such a headache. I still can’t get our release pipeline working after upgrading our solution to .NET 8. Entity framework is complaining and its convoluted and not my strong suit.

One of the pitfalls of being a solo developer. No one to ask questions or to brainstorm off of. ::sigh::

Personal Projects

My blog

Not too much happening here other than adding in the search-space plugin by @sod on my search page and rearranging how posts appear on the index page as I shared in this update: Some minor blog updates.

The basic Hugo code I used can be found on my paste bin

In general the idea is to group the posts by date with a .GroupByDate

That gives you access to the {{ .Key }} which is the date and then {{ .Pages }} which is a collection that corresponds to that date. Then you need to sort the {{ .Pages }} in reverse. That’s accomplished by {{ range .Pages.Reverse }}

I do have some other updates I want to get around to like adding a blogroll, which I might use the bookmarks feature of micro.blog for and creating a digital garden/wiki.

A CYOA/Gamebook website

This is a very very rough concept right now. But I’d love to code a generic fantasy RPG as a gamebook or a “choose your own adventure” type game. I have the concept and flow chart written out. I also want to do it sans game engine and either code one up myself or craft standalone HTML pages. I also want to make my own artwork for it. I picked up a couple of illustration books to start practicing.

Lillihub

Earlier this week I shared this video showcasing my favorite part about Lillihub, that it works 100% without JavaScript:

I can’t think of any other social media site that can do that. Please let me know if another one out there exists.

Back in 2023 I decided I wanted to flex my front-end coding muscles a bit. I was having lots of fun playing around with my blog design and exploring neocities sites. I went off on a tangent exploring iframes as a bit of a retro website frame system. I still think there is something to that, both as a way to manage a static website and to build very basic local apps. It was fun throwing together a calendar and a little budgeting app with it. That’s actually what Lillihub started as, until I ran into CORS issues. Then when I tossed in a backend with Deno, using my iframe trick didn’t seem useful. So I decided to challenge myself with writing all my own css and doing it all without JavaScript. Version 1 of the app had no JavaScript at all and I learned a ton doing it.

Did you know you can stream HTML to the browser like a video? I didn’t.
Did you know that you can target the action of an iframe to a different element? I didn’t.

It’s been a very fun project to build. Probably my favorite personal project ever. It even beat that time I folded 1000 origami cranes.

Updates

Not too many updates were user facing. The biggest one was probably the editor previewing images as you write markdown. There were also a handful of bug fixes and I’m ordering the posts by date_timestamp, but I’m not sure that fixed the timeline marker issue. I’ll need to investigate further.

Future Roadmap?

I’ve been spending sometime thinking about the future of Lillihub. I feel like I have a solid base to launch off of now. And I’m doing my best to not slide into the thought that I should rip it all to pieces and rebuild it with a brand new latest and greatest framework. So I need to step back sometimes and admire what I like most about it. The fact that it streams HTML, that the UI is a bit different but very usable, that there is no build step and its mostly in one file (I know I know, that probably annoys the other developers who’ve glance at the source code)

So what’s up next? This is a simplified “I want” list, not exhaustive and not a promise to build 😉:

I want to have the highlights incorporated into the bookmarks area and make tagging easier
I want to add books via one of the book APIs out there
I want it to better support the IndieWeb
- Let people bring there own indieauth/micropub endpoints
- Let the editor have a dropdown to add microformats markup for replies, likes, etc..
- Microsub client? Integrated with posts?
Let the PWA accept shares
- Share a URL? adds it as a bookmark
- Share copied text? starts a post
- Share a photo/video? uploads it and starts a post (with the photo/video included). Maybe AI could generate alt text…

The Stats

Lillihub had around 40 users login in the past three weeks.

Final Thoughts

There is a whole new year out there waiting for me. I want to keep playing, keep crafting, and keep my family and friends close.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 20:07:04 -0500

An fun 🐸 Lillihub update I put in yesterday. The editor now previews an image while you write. I find it helpful to see the image while writing alt descriptions 😊

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 20:01:09 -0500

I decided to turn my Hobonichi Avec into a four year journal. I also figured out that nail polish makes a good sticker substitute if you need to cover up dates 😊

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:44:25 -0500

My favorite thing about my side project, Lillihub , is you don’t need JavaScript.

Besides the reply box not auto-clearing, the fancy markdown editor for posts (both which work with textareas), and photo swiping it’s not that noticable without it.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:41:47 -0500

I finally have a chance to sit down and work on something. Choices, choices… Tai Chi, journaling, or coding. Or maybe, all three 😄

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 07:51:50 -0500

🐸 Lillihub update:

You will need to reset your settings.

Improvements:

Editor previews images inline
Editor supports browser spell check
Login on homepage
Added logout

Bugs:

Editor drag/drop/copy images has been fixed
Editor full screen dark mode fixed.

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 11:09:27 -0500

At work I had to port our code base to .NET 8 and deal with all the issues that introduced. Took me the better part of three days. Getting this last error resolved in our Azure Pipeline… still haven’t got it. 😤. So demoralizing. I miss the days when it was a simple FTP the files over…

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 08:58:06 -0500

I got access to the HEY Calendar earlier in the week. Quick first impressions:

I miss the monthly view
I 💖 photos on the day and circling titles
I 👍 the habit tracker and the todo’s
Android app is fine and I 💖 that the photo backgrounds show but no way to upload them in the app

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 16:46:38 -0500

Some minor blog tweaks today. I updated my little pixel avatar and I changed how I was grouping posts (thanks to @jsonbecker for the inspiration 😊).

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 17:18:49 -0500

First snowfall of the season ❄️

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 21:33:59 -0500

Currently reading: Practical Tai Chi Training by Jesse Tsao 📚

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 16:16:06 -0500

I just spent an hour teaching my mother, 70, how to play Animal Crossing New Horizons 💕. She says it’s much better thank Mario Kart 😂

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 17:33:56 -0500

Last year and this year. Time to get journaling ✍️

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 16:49:02 -0500

Rewatched Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey. I already do a few things

✅ Write problems down
✅ Think deeply (I do often wake up with solutions)
✅ Draw pictures 🎨

but l want to add

Read “How to Solve It” by G. Polya
Find two solutions to problems and better understand trade-offs. (I usually stop at one solution)