“Look at it. How am I supposed to run this thing from that? We’ll need a proper office. I want a new one, Tommy. You’re going to buy it for me.” - Turkish, Snatch
The day started like any other. Checking the email alerts, checking the job boards, working the Freelance alerts… That’s when it started.
I started the day off wiring up my writing software to automatically set up a data template for my blog, then send a command hook that allows me to publish right from my writing software. Now with a keypress (and a confirmation I added), it copies it to the Linux platform, commits it to git, pushing it, and firing off CI/CD to make it live on the website.
With all the reports lately of people being hacked by job interviews and by work related data, I had been putting off setting up sandbox procedures. This day was going to point out how much I needed to do it.
One job had me needing to test some user-written code. It wasn’t malicious, but a couple of unfortunate typos made it one elevated permission away from breaking an entire system. Anyone who would have just run it with the wrong privileges. Even running it in a container would have broken the container instance. They just wanted to sort files, it would have sorted ALL the files.
Later I had a task I had to skip on because it required setting up some software that was already present on my system and had a lot of customizations. It would have taken way too much time and energy than was budgeted for in order to do the task. I had one of those situations involving windows, and another situation using a Linux GUI environment, and I had no spare systems available and WSL can’t do the job.
After I was finished with the freelancing for the day, I set up a staging system for untrusted files in Linux using Docker and WSL. After a stretch searching the job boards for W-2 work, it was time to do this in windows. I learned how to use Hyper-V, and set up a Windows 11 VM image. This had me thinking that while I was in there I could also set up one for Windows 7 for a family member who was discovering retro computing and wanted to try it. Unfortunately Hyper-V can’t handle graphics acceleration, and couldn’t show off Aero. So then I learned about VirtualBox and set that up so it could run a VM for Win 7 there. Success!
I then spent some time showing the family member how to use the VM on my machine, and how to RDP in from theirs. Smiles all around.
Then I decided to set one up for a full GUI Ubuntu instance. That was not a success. I was able to figure out that a lot of the settings that need to be tweaked to set up a machine aren’t available in the wizard screens. I deleted that machine, created a blank one, installed the image in there, updated and tweaked it a bit, and then took a snapshot.
17 hours had passed, and all I had was a bologna sandwich in all that time. It was time to take some notes about my day and post about it and go crash. It felt good, but wow I was tired.
Blog post automation, job search, freelancing, learning how to use and set up two VM platforms, setting up Docker automation, two failed VMs, and Three Golden Machines.
“What’s happening with them offices, Jon?” “Five minutes, self!” “It was two minutes seventeen hours ago.” -Me (paraphrased from Snatch)