I’m involved in a lot of projects both in and out of work, and people have often asked how I keep it all running at once. The simple answer is I don’t. This post came to me as I was driving back from a fast food place and thinking about where my time management strategy has broken down. First off, the phrase “out of spoons” is one that my parents and grand parents have said before, but I have to give credit to my manager at work who used it recently to describe the situation our operations group was near with the number of projects we were committing to.

Debian has an autoinstaller. With some difficulty, you can even get it to automatically install Debian. What the autoinstaller actually does under the hood is interesting in its own right since Debian doesn’t technically install from Debian, but instead from a different operating system that uses a distinct package collection and its own distinct package manager. This distinct system, which as far as I am aware doesn’t really have a name beyond “debian-installer” is a very compact system that is not designed to be particularly user editable, after all its sole purpose is to install Debian, which is designed to be extremely user modifiable.

Though I don’t have a huge amount of time for playing computer games, I do spend a lot of time playing minecraft, as well as a number of retro games and point and clicks. As my desktop is optimized for compiling code and having many terminals up, it doesn’t exactly fit the bill of a gaming optimized machine. It doesn’t help either that I built my most recent desktop at the height of the 2019 GPU craze.

I was recently going through deprecation warnings and doing some housekeeping in one of my personal projects, NetAuth. In the process, I came across that I was using a deprecated import for the protocol buffers support libraries. As the major version number hadn’t changed, I assumed that the update was safe and changed my import. Given that the import was changing from github.com/google/protobuf to golang.google.com/protobuf I made the assumption that the import path had been changed for aesthetic and branding reasons.

I am fascinated by most network technologies, and having spent several years at this point looking at the latest and greatest I’ve now decided to look back at some of the technologies that got us to here. Circuit switched networks have always fascinated me and as I’ve recently gotten into running my own local phone systems, dial-up networking seemed like the logical place to jump in head-first. First off, lets define some terms and concepts that are central to this kind of network.