Present Perfect

I'd totally try and be the intern for pinboard.

The money is great for a summer job, but that's not the important part. pinboard seems interesting, it's a real service, and it's (I assume) small enough to understand from top to bottom. Contrary to, say, a Google Summer of Code project, you get to touch a real existing service, and from what I can tell from the blog you get to do it with a smart and funny guy.

You've got five weeks left; even if you're in the middle of exams right now, apply!

(And if you do, why not add the features to merge and rename tags while you're at it?)

I'd totally try and be the intern for pinboard. The money is great for a summer job, but that's not the important part. pinboard seems interesting, it's a real service,...

Yesterday, I was wondering if there shouldn't be a new Fedora out by now and if it would fix a bunch of my current GNOME 3 annoyances.

So I checked, and lo and behold, the final release date was yesterday! Excellent.

Let's do some completely unscientific scoring this time around. In part one, it's bound to get ugly because you always run into the negatives first when doing an upgrade.

First challenge was finding the torrent links for the full DVD. Apparently the DVD is now a well-hidden option, and the torrent even more so - I had to google for it, I couldn't find any links on the download site. -1 and -1. I appreciate that there is a small CD with a live installer and everything, but I have to upgrade 3 computers in total so I prefer to download once as much as I can - although it's likely all of them will need to upgrade gazillions of packages soon after.

The second issue: after booting, by default it gives you the second option - test media and install. I didn't realize that, and just hit Enter. Then anaconda starts counting something without telling you what it's doing, at which point I figured it would be a media check as it was really slow. But if you hit Esc to abort it, you get dropped into a rescue shell, instead of just continuing. Err, OK. I don't know if anyone out there really uses or prefers the media check option, but I never do.

Reboot, make sure to go up to select the first option (which, really, should be switched to the second if you're not going to default to it ?)

-1 for being confusing and defaulting to wasting my time.

This is the first anaconda that is actually full-screen on my laptop, nice. +1

The first impression of anaconda is that it looks good and it looks very GNOME 3-y. Not entirely sure I like the 'things popping up on my screen as anaconda presumably checks stuff' without telling me, because there's potential for getting it wrong (-1), but I'll accept it for now. Definitely liking that it figured out my network connection automatically, if NetworkManager is behind it then I'll be darned - yay for NetworkManager! (+10 alone for that one, so NetworkManager pulls out slightly from minus infinity.)

Date & Time, since you now can rely on network possibly working maybe you should look me up by IP as a sane default instead of New York ? Network Time was on by default, but no. No points for or against though.

On to partitioning. I've always used a custom layout. The new dialog scares me a little; I checked "I don't need help" but the only option forward is 'reclaim space', so I'm not sure it's not going to do anything bad to my drives. -5

On the next screen, I see a tree with New Fedora 18 Installation, Fedora Linux 15, Fedora Linux 16, and Unknown. I typically have two or three root partitions so I can test different Fedora versions and fall back to older ones when I'm upgrading. It's a little confusing to use the tree, but basically I figured out how to go through the Fedora Linux 15 config and get it to move the ones I wanted to use to the New Fedora 18 Installation. I definitely see the potential for this being easier to use than the old way but it needs a bit more documentation or tooltips or explanation to make it really feel safe to use. Maybe it would help too to have a final overview page when finishing partition so you can confirm that it looks like it's going to do the right thing. -1 for the confusion, but +5 for finding partition info from all my roots.

It's a small touch, but it's nice it's asking for your root password *while* already installing packages. Makes it a little faster to get it done. +3 guys! I'm wondering if it couldn't do more of that - your time zone config for example ?

The redesigned anaconda really looks nice, and fits in well with the GNOME 3 experience I'm now used to. Gutsy move, but this is going to pay off in the long run. +10

After waiting for the packages to install, I clicked Reboot, and it dropped me in a text mode that said [terminated]. oh well, nothing's perfect I guess. -2

On a hard reboot, I got greeted with a reasonably nice GUI that had managed to pick up my old boot options - even the Windows partition I have on this machine. +5 The text looked ugly and stretched (-1), but it could have been worse.

Firstboot starts and greets me first with a big white square around my cursor (-1), and then the nice-looking GUI. Firstboot asks me for date and time info again, not sure why. Maybe an oversight. -1

And then we're on to the login screen. And it definitely looks nice! +5

Logging in. Being told there are updates. Holy crap - 218 updates - for a release that's a day old. Does the word 'release' mean anything anymore? -5. Seriously, freeze that crap for a few days, only real security issues or facepalm bugs.

My updated failed to process - because I had installed the rpmfusion rpm and it doesn't have the GPG key. Yet again, by default updating packages fails completely when anything in the config is not working, instead of at least getting me the updates that can be installed, in the name of, you know, security. -10 because this is a persistent attitude problem for yum.

Create some missing symlinks, and the upgrade can continue. So I leave for lunch.

And when I come back, I am greeted by some kind of lock screen. It looks pretty. (+3) It's like a video game, those arrows. Yes, that's it - it reminds me of when I pretend to be Batman in Arkham City and I'm on a mission and it's telling me to glide down in the direction of the three floating arrows. Except, it's not actually acting like a lock screen - when I click it, something happens and I go to a user selection ? It looks like I got logged out behind my back ? Really ? Is it doing some kind of automatic logout after upgrading ? I hope not, that would be horrible as a default. No clue what happened. -5

I log in again, and recover my vim sessions that got so brutally killed.

I start running the install commands that are part of my general upgrade checklist. In the meantime, I check out this rumour I heard that Fedora 18 installs with kernel 3.6 by default but the one day old upgrades install 3.7, so I run rpm -qa | grep kernel.

Oh my. It's spewing db errors halfway through the query. Three times in a row. Contrary to popular belief, rpm is really robust, and you really need to do evil things to get it to corrupt, like drop your hard drive or kill -9 during package installs. But here it just fails simply querying, presumably for the first time in my experience it can't handle querying while installing ? -5

After letting it sit there and install some more, I get that lock screen again. I click it, and some arrows flash. Maybe I'm supposed to drag it up or something ? But before I can do, the screen flashes, and I'm back to the login prompt. Oh, so even worse - this new lock screen crashes my whole desktop somehow ? Ouch. -5

Evolution forgot my sort settings (per folder) and 3-pane window. -3 for making me suffer through having to sort every single folder by date, descending again (really, is unsorted a sane default to anyone ?)

The lock screen looked cool at first glance, but after what feels like lifting up the door to my garage four times today already it's getting on my nerves. -3 Same with the 'pressure-triggered' notification area, which is starting to cause pain in my hand on my laptop, and I never have that kind of trouble. I wonder if these things got designed with a console joypad as an interface, where you could accept that pressure-triggered actions make sense. -3 for sucking and another -3 for making me think originally that it looked cool until I actually had to use it.

My first login as a 'fresh' user (I don't mount my real home until I'm sure all the basics work ok) is very zippy and GNOME 3 looks tidier. +5

However, my second login, with my old user, takes a good 30 seconds before anything at all appears beside the desktop. I don't know which dead weight I'm dragging along from before, but this upgrade is not liking it one bit. No feedback whatsoever on what's going wrong though. -3

Total score so far: -13.

It didn't pull back to breakeven, but don't despair - now that the basics are done, it's bound to get better in the next part.

(editor's note - see if you can tear this whole article to pieces by pointing out a counting error in the score, cleverly invalidating my already unimportant opinion!)

Yesterday, I was wondering if there shouldn't be a new Fedora out by now and if it would fix a bunch of my current GNOME 3 annoyances. So I checked,...

After piecing together the security story of CouchDB as it applies to mushin, I secured the mushin database on various machines. This serves as a quick setup guide for security for mushin, but I think it's useful for other people using CouchDB.

Stop using Admin Party

This is easy to do in Futon (link only works if you run couchdb locally on port 5984, as per default). Jan's blog post explains it perfectly, including screenshots.

Under the hood, couchdb will actually rewrite your local.ini file to add this user - all admin users are stored in the config files. (I'm sure there's an obvious reason for that)

Given that you most likely will use this password in Futon, make sure you pick a unique password - as far as I can tell this password goes over the wire.

Create a user object for your user

explains the basics. You need to create or update the _users database, which is a special couchdb database. You can get to it in Futon. If, like most people, you're still on a couchdb before 1.2.0, you have to fiddle yourself to calculate the password_sha field, but at least the page explains how to do it. Not the most user-friendly thing to do in the world, so I'm considering adding commands for this to a different application I'm working on.

Allow this user to read and write to the mushin database

Again, the best reference is the CouchDB wiki, but the information is easy to miss.
Every database has a _security object under the database name; in the case of mushin, you can get to it in Futon. _security is a special document that does not get versioned, and doesn't show up in listings either. In fact, it is so special that Futon doesn't let you change it; when you click save it just resets. So your only option is to PUT the document, for example:

curl -X PUT -d @security.json http://admin:sup3rs3kr3t@localhost:5984/mushin/_security

Oops, see what I did there ? I had to specify my admin password on the command line, and now it's in my shell history. I did tell you to choose a unique one because it's going to be all over the place, didn't I ?

security.json is just the contents of the _security document; just adapt the example on the wiki, and put your user under readers, and leave the role empty for now.

test denial

This one is simple; just try to GET the database:

$ curl http://localhost:5984/mushin
{"error":"unauthorized","reason":"You are not authorized to access this db."}

If you did it right, you should see the same error. If you're brave, you can retry the same curl command, but add your username and password. But you know how we feel about that.

After piecing together the security story of CouchDB as it applies to mushin, I secured the mushin database on various machines. This serves as a quick setup guide for security...

I pretty much never drink and hack, and last Friday's evening is a good reason why. I was having a rare beer and managed to spill part of it on my keyboard and desk. So I turned the keyboard around, started cleaning it as fast as I could, forgetting to actually unplug it. I called it a night because nothing good was going to come from that night anymore.

And on Saturday morning I noticed that my INBOX was gone. Hm, is it really gone? Yep, gone from my laptop too. Crap, must have deleted it on the server by accident while cleaning my keyboard...

And because my NAS is a little full lately, I haven't been as diligent with backups as I normally have been. Hm, and the modest cache on my N900 isn't very useful either...

Luckily, evolution on my work machine was shut down for some reason, so yay, it has a reasonably fresh cache of my INBOX!

Except that it's not all that straightforward to actually get this cache back into Evolution. Just copying its contents to an existing or new folder doesn't do anything. The files themselves are split up versions of the actual email, assumingly because the evo guys thought it would be faster to search header and body by splitting them off from the attachments and saving them separately, inventing their own caching format. Which is fine, but makes it impossible to actually restore a backup with...

After lots of Googling, I stumbled upon this tool that did the trick for me. A lot of hours wasted over a bunch of emails... But what would happen if I really lost my IMAP server mail ? Run this script by hand on all the folders ? Shudder...

I pretty much never drink and hack, and last Friday's evening is a good reason why. I was having a rare beer and managed to spill part of it on...

I've been having fun recently on a new project where I put myself through all sorts of pain by nesting git submodules into team submodules into platform submodules and so on. The goal here is to be able to tag a root repository and thus identify exact commit hashes of all the submodules to any level. This was an idea Andoni had when he was working on livetranscoding in response to a request of mine where I want to be able to use a single 'tag' to identify a complete deployment.

That's been working better than I expected, and I even hacked git-submodule-tools so that I can do git rlog and get a recursive git log between two root version tags, and get a list of every commit between the master and all submodules. That's pretty neat for writing out release notes.

However, the way I embedded submodules causes a bit of pain when going back and forth. One of my hackers once gave me a PS1 bash prompt that includes info of which git branch you're on in your shell prompt. So today I decided to extend that a little, and I now have this:


(b:release-0.2.x d:deploy-pro-2012-03-29) [thomas@otto platform]$ ls
Makefile platform puppet RELEASE-0.2.1
(b:release-0.2.x d:deploy-pro-2012-03-29) [thomas@otto platform]$ cd puppet/pro/
(s:puppet/pro b:release-0.2.x d:v0.2.1) [thomas@otto pro]$


This is showing me submodule name, branch, and description of the current commit.

If you want this for your prompting fun too, here's the github repo

In the near future, simple portknocking for fun and profit with bash!

I've been having fun recently on a new project where I put myself through all sorts of pain by nesting git submodules into team submodules into platform submodules and so...