Linked List # 2

7 August, 2019

In an effort to inject some life back into this blog, I’m opting to do something relatively lazy and start posting semi-regularly with the odd link to anything that I’ve found of value or interest, but which don’t seem to have percolated their way up to the usual places. I’ve stolen the name (although it’s an obvious one) from Daring Fireball and it’s inspired to some degree by Scott Lowe’s “Technology Short Takes”.

aerc: An email client for your terminal. I’ve been a fan of Mutt (and Neomutt) for many, many years. The latter is a valiant attempt at bringing in additional functionality via various patches that have been floating around, but some classic problems (such as lack of asynchronous operations, flaky IMAP support, and so on) persist. aerc is brand new terminal-based email client that solves these problems and rethinks what such a client should do. It’s already perfectly functional and has picked up a decent amount of momentum.
Predictive CPU isolation of containers at Netflix: Infrastructure insghts from the folks at Netflix are always worth a read, and this post is about solving the noisy neighbour problem in granular fashion.
Using nftables to provide Kubernetes API load-balancing: Dan’s been on a roll recently with technical blog updates, and here’s one I found particularly interesting as a worked example of using nftables. I’ve always found packet filtering on Linux to be something of a sorry tale in usability terms, especially when compared to OpenBSD’s pf.
Inlets: Expose local endpoints on the Internet: As someone who runs a public cloud with a paucity of public IPv4 addresses available, I get the problems that this sort of thing is trying to solve.
notqmail: Collaborative open-source successor to qmail. Similar to Neomutt mentioned above, this looks like an attempt at repackaging the plethora of qmail patches that are floating around and also cleaning up some of the codebase. I used to run numerous qmail servers back in the day (I was a huge fan of DJB’s software in general…), so this is of peripheral interest. I say peripheral because running your own mail server in 2019 is a pain in the ass.
up: A tool for writing Linux pipes with instant live preview. You can also combine this with fzf with some pretty nifty results, i.e:

echo '' | fzf --multi --preview='bash -c {q}' --preview-window=up:70