Unlink after creation

On POSIX systems, it’s possible to unlink a file right after creating it, and before closing it. This removes the filesystem entry without closing the file handle, so it ensures that only the processes that already had the file handle open can access the file’s contents. It’s strongly recommended that you do this if you do not want any other processes to be able to read from or write to the Tempfile, and you do not need to know the Tempfile’s filename either.

From Ruby’s Tempfile documentation. In Ruby/POSIX parlance, unlink means delete, so this was surprising to me.

• things I don’t have that many do — Lists like these always make me reconsider whether I really need certain things in my life. Of course, I have most of the items listed, but I had this in mind when I got my hair cut shorter recently, and when considering other purchases. I worry a little about Leo not having health insurance, though.
• GitHub Notification: Happy to help with maintenance — I was very happily surprised to get a response from my “looking for maintainer” ad within a day.
• AMD acknowledges plans for ARM-based embedded chips — The processor space is getting interesting…
• Should I Upgrade to Ubuntu 13.04? — Yes, they could have added more features, but I’m happy they focused on fit and finish. It’s noticeably faster, even running on a USB stick, so I’m considering upgrading from 12.04 LTS.
• B&N NOOK Color gets official CM10.1 nightlies (Android 4.2) — I considered getting one of these tablets just to run Cyanogen Mod (back before I decided on Nexus 7). I’m happy that these can stay useful longer; who knows what garage sales they’ll show up at…
• Sony bring stock Android to Xperia Z smartphone with AOSP Project — Good to see larger involvement in Android open source.
• iPhone 4 “antennagate” settlement checks arriving in the mail — Funny, I tried to get a bumper, and it never really worked out. Not that I’ve had huge problems, though.
• BitTorrent Sync Keeps Your Files In Sync, Skips the Insecure Cloud — Really interesting idea; could be great for personal music libraries, etc. Not sure how it would work on tablets and phones, though.
• How an Energy Audit Saved My Family $2,400 a Year — A coworker had a similar experience once. Heating oil is something to watch out for. Stories like this make me nervous when considering housing options.
• KISSDB: Tiny database — Very short code, seems like it could be useful. I’d love to see example uses.
• Monty changes roles, goes big with MariaDB–and gains Wikipedia as a user — Oracle’s role in MySQL (and OpenOffice) make many people wary; good to see this fork gain momentum.
• Can I Get DRM-Free Movies and TV Shows Without Pirating? — Pretty much sums up the state of things. I’m still unhappy about a TV season I bought in iTunes; I’m avoiding purchase of digital video unless they’re free from DRM, and you should consider doing the same. Rental is an okay option (e.g. Netflix, etc), but doesn’t seem like the end of the conversation.
• Chicken meets egg with Facebook, Chrome WebP support — I’m really hoping WebP and WebM can catch on. It seems very reliant on finding a good scheme of browsers declaring what formats they understand, and a good option for users.
• Why "The Gap" Is the Personal Finance Number That Matters the Most — I read a treatment of this a few years ago, and it’s still something I keep in mind today.
• Genius ideas – Imgur — Reminded me of last week’s MacGyver tricks.
• Lee.org – [Feedly] Comment Stuffing by Sockpuppets — Makes me unsure of Feedly, and happy that I’m using Tiny Tiny RSS.
• LeVar Burton on Why ‘Reading Rainbow’ Was Cancelled (Media Beat 2 of 3) – YouTube — I already knew that No Child Left Behind was bad, but I didn’t know it’s what killed Reading Rainbow. Interesting discussion, although I don’t think an iPad app is going to reach the kids who need it. Good for teachers (and teachers-to-be) to watch. :)

But when we first started using Puppet with Vagrant, Puppet was freaking out.

We resolved most of the errors quickly, but we couldn’t figure out what to do about this error message:

can't convert String into Integer at /tmp/vagrant-puppet/modules-0/puppet/manifests/init.pp:11 on node localhost.localdomain

Immediately, we tracked it down to a use of the fqdn_rand function.

minute => fqdn_rand(60),

The easy fix was to cheat and just put in a number by hand.

minute => 42, # fqdn_rand(60),

That got us by, but it felt dirty. We knew the problem was only happening when we tried to use Puppet in conjunction with Vagrant. Since FQDN stands for Fully Qualified Domain Name, it seemed like Puppet needed more information, but the documentation wasn’t too helpful on how to provide that.

I had found out how to set the hostname to provision Vagrant boxes as different nodes, so that was my first attempt.

config.vm.hostname = 'vagrant-foo.example.com'

Alas, that didn’t fix the issue. What other options were there? Use another function for random numbers?

The trouble is, the only random number function we could find for the Puppet language was fqdn_rand. There wasn’t anything else, and that’s really weird. Something like mac_rand (using the MAC address) would make sense, but all we could find was abandoned tickets in the Puppet Redmine, if anything. (That’s becoming a theme in our experience, actually…)

We went back to doing the dirty solution, and just avoided committing that file. That went on for at least a week.

I got fed up with it again today, and searched some more. It turns out that you can set the FQDN using puppet.facter, and there was a bug with this before Puppet 3. We are currently using 3.1.1.

This is what we had to do to get Puppet to stop complaining. Note that this didn’t work for us without both the hostname and the fqdn values set.

Update (2013-04-26): It seems like FQDN doesn’t play as big of a role as I first thought — the problem seems to go away with just hostname set when using Puppet 3.1.1.

# File: Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure('2') do |config|
  config.vm.box      = '[...]'
  config.vm.hostname = 'vagrant-foo.example.com'

  # [...]

  config.vm.provision :puppet, :module_path => %w(modules) do |puppet|
    # fix `fqdn_rand` error
    puppet.facter = { 'fqdn' => config.vm.hostname }
  end
end

And now our Puppet is happy again.

(Keep in mind that Vagrantfile settings like these might require a vagrant reload or a vagrant destroy --force && vagrant up.)

Puppet is a little hard to understand sometimes, and this solved a long standing issue for us. It’s worth noting that this could also be used for testing virtual hosts, as mentioned in the vagrant-puppet README.

• Four-part series shares story of Guitar Hero's Iowa roots — I had always been curious about Budcat, especially as an Iowa City company that made something so recognizable. Sad that it ended without warning, but I’m hopeful for what the former team members have made since then, especially the Ouya game.
• Top 10 Awesome MacGyver Tricks That Speak For Themselves — I really want to try sealing a plastic bag with an old bottle cap, and the cable catchers.
• Three Big Tips for Inexpensive Spring Allergy Relief — Generics are always a good choice to consider, plus the other tips.
• Geeksphone Keon Firefox OS phone hits the FCC, user manual included — Although I’m not sure how it will do in the American market, a phone “built of the web” is still very intriguing. I hope it catches on (and is installable on Android-based hardware).
• It just works: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Linux Ultrabook review — I’m happy to hear Dell is being a good member of the open source community; I had chosen System 76 instead because of what I had heard aobut Dell in the past. I’d really like to see Ubuntu catch on as a desktop for developers, and it’s great to see this as a realistic, well supported option. If only the hardware could be configured (maybe 4GB RAM instead of 8?).
• Canonical Axe Ubuntu Discs for Non-LTS Releases — Kind of sad; I wish I had one of the older discs as a collector’s item. Hard to believe they used to ship them for free.
• 10 Best Ubuntu 13.04 Features – From Social Lens to Window Snapping — More an incremental release than anything, but in good ways. I’m happy about the performance improvements; it’s noticeable on my machine in the beta.
• Apple remembers where you wanted to get drunk for up to 2 years — Creepy. This type of thing should stay on your phone, in my opinion.
• Ouya $99 Android game console gets the FCC teardown treatment — I’m really hopeful for the Ouya. Here’s hoping openness makes it a winner, and that great games really make it catch on.
• Lilbits (4-17-2013): Old computers never go out of style — Too many people throw out old computers, rather than repurposing them. Although many of these are ancient by many people’s standards, I think it’s worth remembering that you don’t need the fastest machine on the block to do useful work.
• Lilbits (4-16-2013): Netflix to go HTML5, Xiaomi to go international — Finally Netflix isn’t dependent on Silverlight, although increased DRM in browsers isn’t a great development for consumers…
• blog.izs.me: Unix Philosophy and Node.js — I’ve never felt that Node.js has ever embraced Unix as much as Ruby has, but this article made me rethink what the Unix philosophy means in practice.

My favorite quote from the event: “not only do we create here, we are also creating here“.
The Creative Corridor is what we make of it, after all, so let’s make the most of it.

Below is a video they presented at the event, which I think turned out very well. Here’s hoping it helps de-mystify Iowa to those living outside the Midwest!

The event is open to the public. RSVP on Meetup.

• Cable Companies Can Now Force You to Rent Set-Top Boxes. Here Are Your Alternatives. – Makes me happy to have ditched cable companies years ago. Ridiculous.
• How Your Commute Affects Your Bottom Line – Many people seem to drive to work just out of habit, forgetting about walking, biking, or taking the bus. A daily walk to work is a great thing!
• the future of advertising – One of Leo’s first posts in a while. I can certainly agree with his perspective, but so many people have become so used to pervasive advertising in return for free goods or services that going the opposite direction is an uphill battle…
• How to create near-infinite clones of your favorite tomato (or any) plant – I remember doing this as a kid, but this article made me excited about being able to garden again in the future.
• Alienware Joins the Ubuntu OEM Family – Clearly, it’s a good thing that Steam for Linux was released. It’s exciting to see major vendors picking up Ubuntu, although it has quite a ways to go before becoming mainstream.
• Unless Apple changes its rules, Facebook won’t have a Home on iOS – One of several reasons my next phone won’t be an iPhone. Not that I want Facebook Home that much — but it’s nice knowing that it’s an option. Although it may be rubbing Google the wrong way, I see it as a major win for the Android ecosystem.
• I'm Cory Doctorow, and This Is How I Work – The working habits of a visionary SciFi author, which are surprisingly similar to my own. However, I can’t see myself making breakfast like that every morning.
• A Seven Year Old Learns About Credit Cards – Thinking about credit cards this way is second nature to me at this point. Worth reading as a reminder!
• Your Degree Isn’t a Ticket to a Career – I know this is especially true for software engineering. You always need to be constantly improving and pushing yourself to become better at your craft (including networking with others in your field).
• Buy Your Groceries Sensibly – A reminder that Trent (the author) lives in Iowa too. Fareway and Aldi are always great baselines (I tend to prefer Fareway, as they’re based in Iowa)… however when you need more than staples, you sometimes need to shop elsewhere (your local food co-op isn’t a bad place to start, if you know their sales).

Sometimes, something as simple as mkdir fails without reason:

The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.
Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!

mkdir -p '/vagrant'

Other times, rsync completes, but then it immediately terminates the instance:

[default] Rsyncing folder: /home/ben/aws-sandbox/ => /vagrant
[default] Terminating the instance...

I’m still hopeful that it can be useful to us in the future. Like I said, there’s a lot of promise in this young project.

At any rate, we took some time to research how to get SSH agent forwarding working, which is valuable for us when remote pairing. We were getting stuck with errors like this:

Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic).

It turns out that vagrant itself ignores anything but identity files, which was key to getting agent forwarding to work. This can be inspected using vagrant ssh-config

It turns out that lib/vagrant/util/ssh.rb can be modified like so:

--- a/lib/vagrant/util/ssh.rb
+++ b/lib/vagrant/util/ssh.rb
@@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ module Vagrant
         # IdentitiesOnly option. Also, we don't enable it in plain mode so
         # that SSH properly searches our identities and tries to do it itself.
         if !Platform.solaris? && !plain_mode
-          command_options += ["-o", "IdentitiesOnly=yes"]
+          command_options += ["-o", "IdentitiesOnly=no"]
         end
 
         # If we're not in plain mode, attach the private key path.

There’s a related change that can be made to make vagrant ssh-config match, but it seems to be cosmetic:

--- a/templates/commands/ssh_config/config.erb
+++ b/templates/commands/ssh_config/config.erb
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ Host <%= host_key %>
   StrictHostKeyChecking no
   PasswordAuthentication no
   IdentityFile "<%= private_key_path %>"
-  IdentitiesOnly yes
+  IdentitiesOnly no
   LogLevel FATAL
 <% if forward_agent -%>
   ForwardAgent yes

That was enough to get our SSH agent forwarding to work. These changes make sense in the context of AWS, but probably not in Vagrant at large. I’m tempted to make a pull request, but the above changes are a little half baked — and vagrant-aws still needs some fine tuning before the change can really be tested.

Seen at TriNet (HR Passport site).

My review of Stormcloud for Chrome:

4 out of 5 stars. Beautiful so far. Been wanting a trial in the Ubuntu Software Center as well, but I’ll take the Chrome version. :)

The preferences look nice but are hard to use. I wouldn’t have found out that I had to click the “check” next to my newly-added city to get it to stick if I hadn’t read it on a blog post. That needs a fix ASAP, as I’m not the only one running into it!