Adventures in Yak Shaving

The stuff I have to do to do the stuff I do See: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?YakShaving

[yakshave-blog]

Today's yak shave: rebuild the eclipse+android development kit environment from scratch to latest versions.  Why?  Because entropy.

[yakshave-blog]

Proper yak ordering Pt. 1: dependent gems with chef

Go see http://blog.async.io//2013/03/18/important-step-if-you-want-to-use-the-chef-database-cookbook-with-postgresql for useful info on today's yakshave

[yakshave-blog]

Herding the Deferred Yaks

I have had it on my to-do list for a long time to get the following things automatically happening in my node.js-based server for a while:

Running jsLint (or jsHint) against the codebase

Having the client-side javascript in the app run through the Google closure compiler

I finally got around to shaving those yaks today.  Fortunately, the excellent grunt tool and some plugins made that comparatively painless to get up and running.

Except for the 0.4 version of grunt package breakage that broke the closure compiler plugin.  And finding the specific configuration settings of jsHint to get it to shut up about node-specific variables and an odd global I've got in my files, and some other specific stuff.  Oh yeah, and apparently my code is not very consistent stylistically so there's lots of stuff to change in my javascript source tree to get jsHint to shut up.

And closure needs a java VM on the OS, so that requires a vagrant update.  Then my vagrant VM got hung so I had to destroy and up it to get it back.  And then re-install the npm packages globally that I had because I haven't automated that with chef yet.

So I got a bunch of good stuff done today, but I now have some newly fugitive yaks to hunt down, round up, and shave.

[yakshave-blog]

Hi, I'm Chef. Welcome to 1987

Working with chef and chef-solo to do devops work feels very much like writing C code in 1987.  Edit.  Compile (and go away while it takes a few minutes to do so), then run and collect the printf (log, in chef's case) output.

Lather.

Rinse.

...wait 3 minutes...

Repeat.

So yeah, this is still accurate in 2013, it's just that the target has moved:

[yakshave-blog]

NameError: Cannot find a resource for converge_by on ubuntu version 12.04

So when you get this error when using chef (and Vagrant), it means that your Ubuntu Precise VM is using an older version of the chef gem than it needs and you have to update them to 10.16.4 (or thereabouts, that one fixed it for me).

https://twitter.com/sethvargo/status/268106052724199424 is the oblique reference I figured it out from.

[yakshave-blog]

All I want is to write some python client code...

I'm starting on a new project where I have to write a few different components that interact with each other.  The first one is a python utility to pull data from a few different sources.  I need to install a few existing python utilities and libs to get a sane environment.  So today--as I expected *AND* budgeted my time--has been spent wrestling with chef and vagrant to get a new VM + environment config up that loads python's pip tool.  It has been painful.  More on that later.

[yakshave-blog]

CORS-ame Street

Today's yak shaving is brought to you by the acronym CORS and the port number 80.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing

[yakshave-blog]

This is not the iOS Device You Are Looking For

So to develop a mobile app, it probably has to run on iOS if I want to get any traction.  But I don’t want to commit to a 2-year phone contract and would rather not pay full boat for a new unlocked phone.  Found one supposedly unlocked used, but needed a microsim.  Bought one and stuck it in, then found out the phone isn’t actually unlocked.  Now to try and get it unlocked…

Reminding myself why I hate iOS and iDevices, and especially carrier-locked cell phones.

Oh yeah, and to top it all of, when you finally have the device, you *STILL* need to get an Apple developer license.  It's yaks all the way down.

[yakshave-blog]

We Interrupt this Yak Shaving

Hurricane Sandy

[yakshave-blog]

You can't just move the git repositories

Today's yak shave: while trying to accomplish the otherwise pointless task of moving a bunch of stuff from one server to another--only not pointless here because the origin server is being decommissioned--I find out that the package I was using to manage git access called gitosis has been obsoleted in favor of gitolite.  So in addition to having to move the repositories I also have to migrate my setup from gitosis to gitolite.

[yakshave-blog]

Tumblr Yak Shave

First yak shave: apparently, tumblr changed the DNS settings you need to have to use a custom domain name to point to a tumblr site.  So I had to make a bunch of DNS settings updates to my other tumblr site's domain DNS settings to make it work again.