I've moved this blog to GitLab Pages. You can continue to read new posts there, as well access all the old posts from previous hosts.
The main reason that I have done this is because I'm now employed at GitLab, so it makes sense to run my web site out of that service.
This GitHub Pages repository will remain online, served under the GH Pages domain https://sinewalker.github.io
Follow me at the same places!
I wasn't going to write this. After all, this COVID-19 thing is mentioned everywhere, in all media, and I'm sick of reading about it. You must be too.
But then I thought better of it. I can't very well pretend that nothing unusual is going on, and a few years from now, an absence of any mention of the world's current crisis will be disingenuous at best.
So, here's Yet Another Coronavirus Story (YACS). In a deviation from my usual style, this is just a stream of thought. It's not a "how to survive and feel good in a pandemic" guide, or even "what I did to get through this". I don't know this, it's not what I'm writing. I'm just writing some thoughts.
I've already blogged about Python 3 and Minecraft, but there are some subtle things which I glossed over in that post. I found when following my own notes that some of the steps are easy to skim over. I could explain a bit better what is going on, and why I was seeing weird errors when I resurrected my environment to work on an experiment with my kids.
Hallow-e'en celebrations are becoming more, and more popular for Australia's youth these days, and it's ticking off a few people here.
But I actually don't think it's all that bad, and might even be good. Here is why.
After yesterday's rant, I took some time today to step back and take stock on what I've got. It's pretty awesome.
The old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times seems to have struck us. I haven't written in a while, sorry. I guess this year's been a bit of a downer, with all the horrible things going on in the world.
UPDATE 2020-04-16 This is not how you should do it
These instructions and tools are great if you're going to use Python 2 and Virtualenv. But Python 2 is dead, and there are better ways to do this in Python 3. I'm still exploring the best ways, but I am leaning towards using pyenv + pyenv-virtualenv (or python venvs, or maybe pipenv?). Pyenv takes inspiration from rbenv which is how Ruby does this, so if you know Ruby then you'll understand it. When I understand better, I'll write another blog post
A while ago I noted that I should write about my shell functions for creating and managing Python Virtual Environments. Recently I was helping my boss set up some python virtual environments for some different projects, and I couldn't remember how to use virtualenv directly.
I really wanted to just share my wrappers with him, and I found that they weren't quite ready to share because I hadn't finished documenting them.
This post is to remedy that.
I've been using pass for a while now and I really like it. But I don't like putting passwords or passphrases into my system clipboard if I can help it: writing code to sniff the clipboard is child's play, so I'd like to avoid that attack vector if possible.
One place that I thought would be simple would be the SSH utility to add keys to your SSH Agent: ssh-add. It should be possible to do something like this:
$ pass github/sinewalker|head -1|ssh-add github/sinewalker
Unfortunately this isn't so: ssh-add doesn't accept your passphrase from STDIN when piped like this.
But, there is a way to do it.
You may be aware: roses don't have thorns, they have prickles. This is a fact that the band Poison were either unaware of, or (wisely) chose to overlook in their song Every Rose Has Its Thorn.
Imagine if they hadn't overlooked it:
Every rose has its prickle
Just like every night, we gotta trickle
Just like every cowboy has a soft place to tickle
Every rose has its prickle.
Tonight I finally converted all the Glossary pages in my mirror of the Jargon File into Unicode (utf-8 encoding) so that they will transmit and display properly from GitHub Pages (or any other modern web server). It was a fairly trivial thing to do in the end, but I am likely to need to repeat this for other things at work, so I'm blogging it.
The Jargon File was converted into XML-Dockbook and Unicode for version 4.4.0, but ESR only converted the front- and back-matter, not the Glossary entries (i.e. the actual lexicon). Those are still latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). And although the HTML rendition begins with the correct header declaring this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
The pages are actually served from catb.org as Unicode (utf-8). For instance, compare /dev/null on catb.org with my mirror of /dev/null.