IRIS2, SonarQube, Matrix, MSAL/OIDC, OPAL2SED, FDE, Thunderbird

1. EU planning it's own satellite network for sovereignty. Infrastructure for Resilience, Inter connectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²). Direct competitor for Starlink and OneWeb, yet with much smaller number of satellites planned. Utilizing several multi-orbital options, using LEO, MEO and GEO satellites.

2. SonarQube (@ Wikipedia) - Analysis - Did run SonarQube for several projects and check the reports it generates for code quality improvements. I really low the product, it's very well made, easy to use and the scanner part of itself is great. I did expect it to require much more setup effort than it did (even if run locally). At it unsurprisingly pointed out that some of the large methods are large and very complex. Just the parts of the code I personally hated for exactly those reasons. Yet because those just organically grew up and nobody wanted to pay for refactoring and it "just works", those were left there. Refactoring those to operate in smaller independent segments would have been beneficial in terms or reducing the code complexity.

3. Matrix 2.0 (@ matrix.org) Looks good, but practically isn't Matrix project is pretty stalled and they haven't been able to remedy many of the issues haunting the project. At least the MegOLM crypto is now mostly working.

4. I managed to integrate MSAL / OIDC (@ Wikipedia) into one of my new new web development project in less than a day. MSAL / OIDC looks really complex to begin with. But with good documentation and great library, it wasn't that bad at all. I expected the task to take much more time than it did. Some of the hardest parts were quite simple, how to make sure that sessions can be properly logged out (JWT (@ Wikipedia)) and what identifiers should be used by the application from the MSAL data so that the "right" identifiers are being used, instead of something like email address.

5. New workstation build: BtrFS SubVolumes OPAL 2 SED auto snapshotting. Soo much tuning, but getting it done. Hardest part is usually gaining the understanding what's happening, what's necessary and what isn't and especially why. Just doing stuff without understanding what's happening is the thing I mostly hate people doing.

6. Full disk encryption for all media. Today, I got the file systems in order, snapshots, backups... And backups to external drives. Next up is software configuration - Firefox, Thunderbird, etc... Then scripts and all other stuff, of which there's quite a lot. And finally, there's data organization - I transferred a huge amount from the old machine to the storage SSD... Some of the stuff is probably duplicated three times since it wasn't well organized on the old system. There was just so damn much disk space... ;) But having lots of space doesn't mean it should be messy... ;) But it was. Because there was no need to clean up.

7. Mozilla Thunderbird (@ Wikipedia) is broken, now sending email doesn't work. But the reason is different than earlier. Previously it was caused by Microsoft's requirement to use OAuth2 and Thunderbird not allowing to select that option without going through loops and hoops, like changing server name, restarting client and other nice things. Now the Thunderbird setup is totally clean, but it still fails to send any messages and the reason seems to be that the message doesn't even get saved to drafts / outbox for some strange reason. Tried several troubleshooting guides, always the same result. Thunderbird has been having awfully lot of these crazy problems lately. - After quick Googling, this seems to be systemic issue. It's just badly made and broken. - I even did put the client in offline mode, select local folder for drafts, and try to save a draft. - Still failed - Quality - Based on the endless discussions on the topic, this seems to be very common issue and there's no definite fix for it. I did try all the stuff, like deleting IMAP and local sent / drafts / unsent messages folders and so on, nope, still broken. - I've got plans to tighten Thunderbird sandbox, but the funny stuff is, that I haven't done a thing YET. Which is kind of hilarious, because I could have expected problems like this, if my sandboxing would be too tight. Absolutely great work, multiple overlapping stupid problems. Quality software they say. - UX / boarding process was exceptionally bad, I assume that every normal user would give up.

2025-06-01