Blog posts from April 2009...
I'm writing this from a plane, somewhere over New Mexico,
headed home from a few days working in Las Vegas. My last
few days, actually. As I write it's Friday (the posting of this is now Sunday), and
on Monday (tomorrow), I'll start
work for Canonical,
the company behind Ubuntu.
I will be working on Launchpad,
specifically joining the team working on the app's
bug tracker component.
While I have great friends I'm leaving behind at Greenspun,
I know the time is right for me to move on. My heart has always
been in free software first and media somewhere after that. The
group I've worked with is a progressive segment of the news/media
world, but at the end of the day, I've been doing closed, proprietary
development for the last few years. I'm excited to lend my hand
to free/open source software development again. I feel a bit like I
did when I joined the Samba Team, though experience has given me a
different set of eyes through which to view this coming change.
There will be plenty of challenges and new things to learn, certainly,
and I plan to just dive in, work hard, and contribute whatever I can
to Launchpad.
I will continue to work from home. Most of Canonical works from
home offices, and that will be a nice change, having so many peer
telecommuters. My day will be time shifted, with me starting earlier,
to better sync with my largely European teammates. This is a positive
for me, since I'll finish work earlier and have some time in the afternoon
with the kids after school. Because I'll be starting so early, I don't
plan to work from the attic office I was using, the one that also
houses my wife Wendy's business.
So there is the new job to start in the next few days, but also a whole
world of changes happening around that, all of which are positive and
exciting, and I truly can't wait to log on IRC Monday and get started.
Link | Posted by deryck on April 12, 2009 | 0 comments
I'm setting up a latop with a fresh install of Ubuntu.
I haven't done a clean install on a real machine in
who knows when, and over the last 3 months or so I've become a huge fan
of PPAs. I have
several PPAs to keep up to date with packages I use that have frequent
updates beyond what's available from Ubuntu updates. Since I'm adding
several at once, I'm adding a lot of PPA keys. Doing this reminded me
of a simple trick I use when running a frequent command. (Some form of
this is common among developers or sys admins, but if you're less
experienced with a shell or Linux this may be useful to know.)
First, the command for installing a PPA key is...
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com [KEY]
...where [KEY] is the PPA's key finger print.
So the easiest way to use this is to cycle back through your bash
history and replace the previous run with the new key and run again.
For me, I know I won't remember the particulars of this command in a
month or two when I need to run it again and it's no longer showing up
in my bash history. I'll end up having to consult a man page or the
Launchpad help pages. Not a
big deal, but with things like this -- commands I use semi-regularly
but not enough to keep in memory -- I usually add a little bash
script. For example, with this command I created a script called
add-ppa-key:
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Usage: add-ppa-key KEY_FINGERPRINT"
exit 1
else
FINGER=$1
fi
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com $FINGER
I always add the usage test with each command like this, just so I
can use tab completion to find the command, run it with no arguments,
and get back a statement of what I need to do. I have a "bin"
directory in my home directory and append $HOME/bin
to $PATH in my .bashrc. I have several of these type of
scripts in this bin directory, for building software or even for simple
to remember but frequently used rsync commands or PythonPath export
statements. Not only does this make commands reusable without having
to completely remember them, it's also nice for documenting commands.
So the next time someone asks me what the command for installing a PPA
key is, I can do cat ~/bin/add-ppa-key and paste the
output into IRC, IM, or what have you.
Link | Posted by deryck on April 1, 2009 | 0 comments
