#160

Work

This week we got another couple of big bits of the integration work done, or near to it:

• Vectors of Trust (RFC 8485): merged and deployed. We’ve actually had this ready for a few weeks, and were waiting for the auth service to finish their implementation. When they did, things worked first time: perfect.

• User data migration: implemented, and we’ll shake out any bugs when we start migrating test users. The tricky thing here is that, when users migrate to the new auth system, all the identifiers will change. So we need code in place to recognise old data and upgrade it to use the new identifiers.

• Joined-up cookie consent: in review. We think it’s silly to show users two cookie banners when they move between different parts of a single, larger, service, just because the service is built by two different teams. And the GDS privacy team agree. So the technical work to pass consent back and forth is being reviewed, and should go out early next week.

That’s… kind of it. Unless something unforeseen comes up when we start testing user migration, all that’s left to go is to prepare all the production configuration, so we can switch over when it’s go time.

Books

This week I read:

• Fall of Light by Steven Erikson, the second of the Kharkanas Trilogy.

  This took a little while, but I think mostly because I’ve not been reading huge fantasy books lately. I finished Malazan in February and have mostly been reading shorter books since then. I’m out of practice.

  But once I got into it, it was great. A lot of interesting revelations which play into the main series, plus some twists and turns which ran counter to my expectations. I’m very much looking forward to book 3, Walk in Shadow, when that comes out.

Gaming

This week I ran a session zero for my new Traveller campaign, where we talked about the sort of game we want to run, and then got through character creation. No deaths in character creation this time, but my players have already thrown me a bit of a curveball: two of them got ships as benefits. So I’ll need to figure out how to handle that.

I’m planning to run this campaign as much more of an episodic sandbox style game than I’m used to, so I’m looking forward to things taking off. It’ll be a bit linear in the beginning, as I present them with a series of adventures and missions to help embed them into the game world but, once they start making NPC connections and learning about things going on elsewhere, I hope to be able to turn them loose and make the campaign more-or-less entirely player-driven.

Miscellaneous

This week I discovered that you can get systemd to create a FIFO for the stdin (or -out, or -err) for a service, which is handy for things like a Minecraft server where being able to send text directly to the running process is useful (and, indeed, necessary some times).

You just need to define a socket service, like this minecraft-stdin.socket:

[Unit]
Description=stdin for Minecraft Server

[Socket]
ListenFIFO=%t/minecraft.stdin
Service=minecraft.service

And attach it to your unit file, like this minecraft.service:

[Unit]
After=network.target
Description=Minecraft Server Service

[Service]
Sockets=minecraft-stdin.socket
StandardInput=socket

(...boring other service definition stuff here...)

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