Holiday Twabble
A few years back I linked a number of drabbles and twabbles I had written. So a new one for the holiday season and the relaunch of the Drabblecast: “All the reindeer finally loved him. They all shouted with glee. Rudolph grinned at them all. He released his tentacles.” Also in writing this I reread the old contributions and realised “Different” would be better if I changed just one word (see if you can spot it): Read moreThanksgiving 2018
I had this idea I would start doing more regular blog posts last year but that seems to have failed. Maybe next year! I had help with this year’s troff adventures so thanks to Catherine for this year’s 2018 cookbook. There are some recipe errata I need to do - but those are all mine. Essentially I winged (sorry) the turkey burritos on the day and what I actually did vs what I vaguely considered doing early Saturday morning did not line up. Read moreThanksgiving 2017
Another adventure with troff generated a menu. By all reports people had a good time. I was a bit more adventurous this year and did biscuits - a variation on Allen’s. This meant I had to cook one dish 10 minutes before dinner so timing of everything else became a bit more strict. It worked however and people liked them. The rice cooker and the slow cookers really did make the timing issue less stressful this time. Read moreFollow-up to cube root trick
Following up on the cube root trick post, I wrote a version that speaks the number in Chrome. It’s an experimental API and I doubt I’m choosing the voice very well. But it does train how to do the trick better than reading the cubed number on screen. On browsers that don’t support this API it degrades down to the way the previous version worked. I also updated the old tool to take input once the second number is typed in - with that I got down to a sustained 3. Read moreCube root trick
After reading how to get cube roots in your head in a particular set of circumstances I learned the trick while stuck in traffic. But it then says you have to practice a lot so I wrote a tool in C to do that. But then I realised a web version might be a bit more accessible to people so here’s one. Made the trainer work nicer on mobiles thanks to Kae’s suggestion. Read moreAuto-loading modules in Python
Since switching to vcsh I’ve been writing more personal scripts since they’re pretty easy to ship around to each machine. Plus more things have REST APIs and python’s slumber makes it dead easy to talk to them. However I then have to make sure modules like slumber are installed since it’s not in the python standard library. This adds a level of awkwardness to the scripts in my ~/bin. While looking for something else I came across this answer on stackoverflow and it fit what I wanted to do. Read moreThe thugs on both sides
I wrote the following in a comment on a discussion about the protests in Charlottesville. Some people felt that protesters on “both sides” were “thugs.”
I went to school in Kansas. And if you go into the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka you’ll see an imposing mural of a thug: John Brown He was an abolitionist who (sadly unusually for the time) actually believed in equality - and he walked his talk.
Read moreWhy vim was opening markdown files slowly.
A few months back I upgraded my vim configuration to use pathogen for managing my vim plugins. Since adding plugins was now a doddle I found a few lists of “super-duper useful vim plugins you must have” and just installed them blindly. Along the way I also configured how various plugins and the like were configured. This included a one-line change to associate .md files with markdown (by default they associate Modula-2 which I haven’t written code in for 20+ years). Read moreLeo’s apology
Leo Sherlock’s apology leaves something to be desired. It’s an image which I think he believes is hard to search for (sorry, search engines do OCR on images) and printed so it’s hard to read.
To help rectify this and offer links to his apology and those affected, I wrote this up. Do feel free to copy and paste all of this and post it far and wide.
Read moreMaking Go easier
This is just a simple thing, but it makes working in Go’s source tree way easier. Particularly since I use repos from three different sites that start with “git.” In zsh there’s a thing called cdpath with zsh will use to complete a cd command. For the longest time mine was set to cdpath=(~ ~/src) so if I typed cd foo and there wasn’t a foo in the current directory zsh would go look in ~ and then in ~/src. Read moreSupporting Team Future
Step one was to stop sending money to Team Past. So got rid of Sky and will be working on reducing spending on some other utilities. But on a more positive note, I tried to figure out how to spend money on Team Future - people, organisations and companies who support good journalism, civil rights organisations, research, education and entertainment. Private Eye does good investigative journalism in the UK. (subscribe) The Sunday Business Post is one of the remaining independent media orgs in Ireland. Read moreReview of Jackie
I hadn’t heard about Jackie before I noticed it in the list of films at the cinema. I had been looking to see if Loving was out and came across this. This review won’t really be spoilery, but obviously if you want to go into the film completely blank I’d skip out now. Just know it’s a really well done film on a tough topic. The film is disconcerting at first because Natalie Portman’s acting is so artificial. Read moreContinuous Integration repo reminders
For a number of projects I work on I pull in third party tools. Sometimes they’re straight copies - that’s what I inherited in some PHP projects I work on. But in others I use git subtree to pull them in. However there’s a problem. I need a way to remind myself to check for updates. And generally I like things related to a project to live in the project. For my home projects I use Gitlab and their CI system. Read moreUUCP mail
I’m doing a bit more open source development and some projects insist on updating code bases on mailing lists with patches. And they generally react badly to html email. Using mutt works best with them. And that’s fine, it’s not too hard to get mutt working with gmail. And you can use pass to pull in the password in your .muttrc like so: 1 password=`pass gmail/acct/mutt` So no need to keep a password resting in cleartext in your homedir. Read moreThe Less Scary Guide To Google Authenticator and PAM
Modifying low level authentication is a worrisome thing. If you do it wrong the fear is that you can’t log back in to fix it. So unlike some other guides out there I’ll point out the danger points here and some ideas on how to address them. This is kind of long so a high level overview is this: install client software, install server software, activate server software, generate key, done! Read moreThe vcsh write-gitignore command
I’ve been using vcsh for a few months now and am very happy with it. Currently I’m using two repos - a home repo which is really just a continuation of my old mercurial (previously subversion) home dir; and a past repo which is where all my history files are stored. One issue I had was that while vcsh st worked fine, vcsh home st really didn’t - showing me all the files that weren’t tracked by git. Read moreThanksgiving 2016
A little known fact: Irish Thanksgiving is the Saturday following the American Thanksgiving. The legend goes that after the rather sterile and serious Puritan Thanksgiving a few of the Irish attendees hopped on an Aer Lingus flight back to Ireland a few days later and had a proper dinner and craic. No idea if it’s true or not of course, but sounds plausible. Before filling the feeding troughs this year, I took a stab at some troff and produced a menu for tomorrow’s festivities. Read moreVersion control for ~ (v3.0)
For a long time I used NFS for my home dir. That worked great at home and at work where I’d have a desktop and server. But then I got a laptop and that stopped working. For a while I’d rsync things but then I came across a “version control your home dir” article (this one?) and was hooked.
Read moreDocker Versus a Fossil
Docker is essentially “container tooling 2.0” following the 1.0 attempts of LXC. And it now has a number of competitors - including the original LXC project. All of them look interesting and rapid feedback loops are making them better.
Containers themselves aren’t really magical. They’re based on a number of newer namespace services in the Linux kernel. If you’re curious, Julia Evans has written some great pieces on how containers work with Running containers without Docker being a really good starting point.
Her articles show an interest in exploring and learning why things work as they do. A new tool shows up that could be useful and she dissects it to see how it works. A good, positive approach to an industry rapidly changing.
Read more