Tools on Adam Koszek - Personal Website

Agent Glass

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I built Agent Glass.

Beautiful, isn’t it? This baby has three panes: Sidebar with all the stuff you need right away. Click around, don’t be scared. The list of stuff you’re supposed to be looking at is the middle pane: think of it as an index of everything that you went through with AI agents. All your conversations will be listed here. Most of your eye’s time will be on the main pane, which is the content. This is where the transcript of all your AI divagations live.

SSH VPN on OSX with SSHuttle in 3 minutes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You will learn how to setup SSH VPN with sshuttle quickly here. SSH VPN people say is “poor man’s” VPN, but I view it as a great tool, since you can’t always spin OpenVPN easily. If you have the SSH keys installed on the server, there’s no need for any other configuration. No certificates, no drama. I’m using OSX for the purposes of this article.

(Photo by Rishabh Varshney via Unsplash)

The best OSX file manager

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Even if you don’t like Windows, some tools there are great. One of them is WinAmp, probably the best audio player around. (do you know a replacement for OSX? Let me know!)

Another is Total Commander–the 2 pane file commander. Total Commander can do anything you can think of for file management. Its UI was like Norton Commander’s: the “blue background” file manager for DOS.

You miss a lot if you don’t use these tools, since they’re huge time savers. There isn’t a similar functionality built in the OSX, so you’ll have to do your homework. You can use Finder, of course, and I do like Finder and its preview feature. Also the the embedded image editor is very useful. However for shuffling files Finder is terrible. To move one file from one directory to another, you must open two windows. Or you must open tabs. Selecting files is terrible. I can’t count how many times I’ve selected 20 images and they all were accidently opened. Or you select many files and want to move them to the directory on the very bottom of the current screen. Good luck with that. For file-system management, Finder sucks. You must admit it.

Dealing with large jobs on Travis-CI

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m releasing all my projects through continuous integration, so I end up working with Travis-CI a lot. Travis provides a corresponding diagnostic page for each project I have linked to it from GitHub. For example one of my GitHub projects is here and its Travis-CI subpage would be here. If you look at the link format, you’ll understand what I mean. In there you can see what the output of your job was. Most of the jobs are fairly simple and finish within short period of time. For these jobs debugging the build steps is easy: just look at the console output and see what’s wrong. It’s what I do 95% of time. Below I give hints on how to handle 5% of other cases.

What Docker really is

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It felt strange when Docker first came out, since I couldn’t really understand what it is. It is an interesting feeling when people market and brand a new technology in a way which makes it obscure and hard to understand. So below you have my explanation of Docker, the way I would like to see it couple of months ago.

Docker in one paragraph

Docker is a manager for isolated buckets of software called containers. I gives you a way to say: “My software is based on Ubuntu; it must have these 4 packages installed, and these 5 commands must be executed to make it run continually”. These steps will be done at “build” time, during which your ~1GB image will be created. From this image containers with your software can be started on many OSes.

Use as few tools as possible

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Choosing a technology stack is an essential part of building and engineering your software product. This is the matter you’ll be stuck in forever. Unless you build a 2-line program it’s important to make good decisions at this stage.

I see a lot of “technical fashion” in the computer world. People come up with new and different solutions to the same problems, depending on things like programming language or a method itself. And then they start encompassing their new creations into new products. Thus we see new wave of computer languages, tools and transpilers which essentially do the same, but in a different way.

How to ask questions on Stack Overflow?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This year I want to contribute to Stack Overflow. I’ve been using this site for years, but have never answered any questions, rated answers or posted replies. I want to change this.

I went ahead and made myself several tags with topics I’m good at. And as a break from work, I try to answer questions. There is a lot of good questions, but most of them are bad. People make it hard to help themselves. They either give a lot of data, but don’t formulate the problem, or state the problem, but give no information about their setup, environment and conditions. Stack Overflow is no different than any other technical forum. Mailing lists and GitHub Issues are another examples. But you must communicate clearly to really benefit from them.

How to store SSH passphrases in LastPass

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Passwords are a terrible authentication mechanism. Even though this mechanism exists in computer systems for years, frankly there aren’t too many solutions to address the password problem. If you’ve dealt with more than three different APIs I bet you must have committed confidential data to GitHub at least once. SSH with its keys isn’t any better, and is used in more critical places.

Below I attempt to address the SSH passphrase problem. My setup is based on LastPass. LastPass stores a binary bundle with all your passwords in the cloud. Bundle is fetched on your machine, and you decrypt it with a master password. During decrypting phone-based 2-factor authentication is used for increased security. If your master password is weak, you’re baked. Upon decryption you have an access to all your passwords, including SSH passphrases. The script automates the management of ssh-agent and key adding.

How I use transparency during development

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The 13” MacBook Air isn’t a perfect development environment, yet I still need to do some work done outside of the house. I’ve been experimenting around and that’s what I’ve came up with:

In the background you have a Web browser with middleman-livereload. Each time I make a small source code change in Vim and save a file, the live-reload updates the site in the background. We could call it “real-time”. The advantage of this method is that you can use it without any special configuration: default Terminal in MacOSX or Xterm client being able to display transparency will work. And you must have some environment for web development where Livereload works. Transparency I have isn’t shown percentage-wise, but it’s set to around ⅓:

Quiz: portability of “find” command

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On MacOSX:

wk:/w/repos/dockerfiles&> find wkoszek -type d -depth 1
wkoszek/base
wkoszek/nginx

On Linux you get:

find: warning: you have specified the -depth option after a non-option
argument -type, but options are not positional (-depth affects tests
specified before it as well as those specified after it). Please specify
options before other arguments.

Hint: compare manual pages of both commands.

Quiz: do you know offhand what’s the correct fix?

My GitHub Wishlist: Consolidate Request

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you develop any sort of software nowadays sooner or later you’ll end up on GitHub. On one side a business, on the other: great part of the Open Source world. I’d claim that GitHub was an integral part of the distributed software development revolution. For me, GitHub is the first source of contact if I want to see who already wrote software bits I need for my next project.

Git and GitHub dominate today, since they’re basically so much better than anything else. When I started to work on software, most of the projects used CVS or Subversion, and while they had some pros (an ability to fetch only some project’s directories) the cons were many. Nowadays everybody is migrating to Git or Mercurial, and old services such as SourceForge or Google Code are becoming more of a ghost sites (Google de-featured Google Code already).

Pastebin adds DOS new-line separators at the end snippets

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend I was finally starting to get my head wrapped around automated backups on my Synology DS214. This was supposed to be a ten minute project which of course extended due to some trivial problems along the way. For example: I needed a Python script for fetching data from the Internet over HTTPS so I made this for myself:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import urllib2, sys
urlstr = sys.argv[1]
fname = urlstr.split('/')[-1]
response = urllib2.urlopen(urlstr)
f = open(fname, "w")
f.write(response.read())
f.close()
print "written " + fname

And I pasted it to PasteBin:

Command Line Interface to GoDaddy.com

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For quite some time now I’ve been a user of GoDaddy. I remember my frustration with the Polish registrar holding some of my .pl domains: their user interface was terrible, since after logging to your account all you could see was an advertisement:

The website with an ad always loaded very quickly. Then you had to switch to “Control Panel”, which was always very slow. I could complain more about the amount of time I have spent trying to do basic things there, but I’ll leave it as a topic for my usability website.

How the best companies do Continuous Integration

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing but the successful result of compilation delivers this unique feeling of accomplishment. There are multiple stages of project’s success, yet each feedback on a positive program build is exciting, since it is just one step from actual program execution–the ultimate goal.

Yet when done too frequently, building becomes a problem. Especially when projects grow, you become dependent on many other libraries. Maybe even whole projects. Building simple application nowadays requires inclusion of many 3rd party modules, and this process is not always easy. And this is how building becomes problematic, since it starts to be slow and boring. Feedback loop, which usually is really tight for small programs becomes really long and slow; in the process you start getting distracted, and cheat yourself that you can multitask, but you really can’t.

Fixing Middleman-spellcheck

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes when you make a change to the software, it is interesting to predict how long will such change take. Fixing Middleman-spellcheck was initially only about letting myself to select words which I would consider correct and do it from within the front-matter of each Middleman’s article files. It ended up taking more than I anticipated, and below is short description on what went wrong.

Middleman plugin infrastructure lets one to run a filter on several stages of the build process, and Middleman-spellcheck runs at the end, once all files are converted from .md to .html files.

Figuring out confusing assembly instructions — Koszek trick #2

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s post will be very simple, maybe trivial. One of the hacks that I came up with, when I encountered confusing arcane of ANSI C, or when I played with assembly for fun and profit.

Problem: isolate ANSI C construct or in-line assembly block, so that upon a translation to intermediate assembly, block will be exposed more easily in a visual manner.

So imagine you want to isolate memory reference within ANSI C and figure out what the corresponding assembly line is. Assume given portion of the code:

Cross-compile GNU assembler for MIPS

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Just a short note, not to have to walk through the Web each time I want to get some strange opcodes generated.

Today “strange” means “MIPS”. “Nobody uses MIPS”, you say? Well – I still believe MIPS is the cleanest RISC architecture available today. So yes, I want to have something translate:

_start:
	addi	$2, $2, 123
	addi	$3, $3, 321
	add	$4, $2, $3

	addi	$5, $5, 1
	addi	$6, $6, 2
	or	$7, $5, $6

	addi	$8, $8, 0xf
	addi	$9, $9, 0x3
	and	$10, $8, $9

To:

Funny mistakes and The Toyota Way

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This article has a strange mix of UNIX and methodology and mental problems of post’s author, related with inspirations from the The Toyota Way. I read The Toyota Way, since I tried to find something related to couple of things I’m interested in: (1) how companies work (2) Japanese culture (3) computers. (3) I involved myself. The way I think about stuff in “The Toyota Way” is that I’ll not only get to know how Toyota solves problems, but I’ll bring experiences from the book to my problem solving, mental toolset and I’ll transmute them to my daily job with UNIX systems.

Unfriendly IT, or how to get Perforce diffs e-mailed to you

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Work for a big corporation can be very challenging sometimes. This touches me especially when I have to request something, and IT department doesn’t agree for providing me this functionality. Sometimes things are very simple, sometimes are more complex.

In this particular case, I tried to provide myself a way to review Perforce commits other person working with me was doing. Solution, which we all know to be pretty darn good, is to have diffs e-mailed to you, just like we do on: