DevOps for Your Development System

Posted on 2015-09-14 by jcs

I’ve written before about Howard Abrams’ posts on Literate DevOps and his very nice video illustrating the techniques. As I mentioned in the video post, we can all benefit from these ideas in our day-to-day work.

Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder offers a fine example of this. He has taken the long and error prone process of provisioning a development machine and turned it into a Literate DevOps process. You can, if you like, download his complete setup from GitHub but his process is necessarily idiosyncratic. In the first place, it’s for OS X. In the second, it’s targeted, as it must be, at the type of applications that he needs for his work.

Even if you aren’t using a Mac and your workflow is completely different from Rettke’s, you can use his file as a framework for your own. Besides setting up your own machine(s), Rettke’s ideas would be very useful for setting up standard development machines for your shop. Individual engineers would doubtless want to tweak things to their liking but at least everyone will have the same base system and all the needed tools.

I really like these kind of articles. They always give me ideas for simplifying my own work and indulging my innate laziness. Read over his file and take away what works for you. Org mode is a wonderful thing and we should leverage it as much as we can.

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They Always Lie

Posted on 2015-09-13 by jcs

I.F. Stone famously told us that “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” It’s easy to write that off as tin foil hat fodder but, in truth, the facts support him. The latest such facts involve the Boston Police Department. Recently, investigative reporter Kenneth Lipp reported that despite promising to end the program, the BPD was continuing their liscense plate scanning program.

Fortunately, the liars are usually as incompetent as they are dishonest. In this case the BPD’s deception was discovered because they had the plates in a publicly facing data base. The police like to say that driving your car on public roads mean that you are part of an investigation. Those who are not members of the thought police are inclined to demur. Regardless, the police promised to end the program but continued to collect the data by other means.

Remember this when they tell you that you can trust them when they come asking for authority to stick their noses into your business. Don’t give it to them because they will abuse your trust. Always.

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The Dangers of Government Held Master Keys

Posted on 2015-09-12 by jcs

The government continues to press the tech sector to give them “golden” keys that they can use to decrypt our communications. One of the main arguments against these proposals is that they will inevitably be compromised and make us less safe.

Now we have a dramatic demonstration of just that. In locksmithing, golden keys are called master keys because they can be used to open many different locks. A few years ago when the TSA was merely annoying they persuaded luggage manufacturers and travelers to use locks for which the TSA had master keys. Recently, the TSA allowed the Washington Post to take a picture of the keys. But once you have a picture of a key it’s trivial to make a copy (and, indeed, that has already happened) so now no one’s baggage is safe from, say, a dishonest baggage handler1.

Does anyone doubt that some equally incompetent government agent will similarly reveal the golden keys that the FBI so fervently desires? If you do, how much do you think criminals or unfriendly nation states would be willing to pay for those keys? As Bruce Schneier says in the post linked above, the problem with backdoors, whether cryptographic or physical, is that they’re fragile.

Footnotes:

1

Matt Blaze’s point about the safety of these locks

is beside the point. What matters here is that the government asked for special access and then was careless with safeguarding it.

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Using Emacs Keychords

Posted on 2015-09-11 by jcs

I don’t really believe this but it is funny:

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The Death of RC4

Posted on 2015-09-11 by jcs

I’ve always liked the RC4 cipher. It’s easy to understand and implement and has been in wide use for almost 30 years. Sadly, RC4’s run is over. It’s long been suspected that the NSA could break it and recent attacks are able to break RC4 in a matter of days or even hours.

Now Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla have announced their browsers will stop supporting RC4 in early 2016. The good news is that most servers support other cipher suites so RC4’s demise will go mostly unnoticed. There are, apparently, a few servers that support only RC4. These servers will stop working once the browsers refuse to negotiate its use.

I’m sad to see it go but RC4’s usefulness has clearly come to an end. If you have any apps still using it, it’s time to upgrade or replace those apps.

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Writing

Posted on 2015-09-10 by jcs

This seems familiar

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Emacs Macro Counters Tutorial

Posted on 2015-09-10 by jcs

Eric James Michael Ritz has a nice, short tutorial on using Emacs macro counters. I’ve written about this before but Ritz’s tutorial is a nice reminder if you haven’t used macro counters for a while. Definitely worth a read.

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A Backdoor by Any Other Name

Posted on 2015-09-09 by jcs

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Org Basics II

Posted on 2015-09-09 by jcs

As I wrote previously, Ben Maughan is writing a tutorial on Org mode basics. He continues the series with a very basic introduction to tables in Org mode.

This post covers just the very basics like how to enter tables, how to import them from a non-table region in your file, and how to export them to various formats. Once you’ve got these basics down, all the other power of tables is open to you. Maughan hints at these and promises to cover them in subsequent posts.

Again, if you’re new to Org mode, Maughan’s simple tutorial is a good way to learn the basics. Afterwards, you can branch off in whatever directions meet the needs of your workflow. I can’t overemphasize how useful and powerful Org mode is and spending a little time learning about it will repay you manyfold.

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Using Org Mode as a Lab Notebook

Posted on 2015-09-08 by jcs

Erik Clarke over at pleiotropy has a couple of nice posts on using Org mode as a lab notebook. The first post lays out his requirements for a digital lab notebook. As you can probably guess, these include

  • Permanence
  • Citations
  • Ease of use
  • Discoverability

By citations he means the ability to include BibTeX-like citations in the notebook and have the full citation included when the notebook is exported. Discoverability means that it should be easy for him or others to search the notebook to find entries on some desired topic.

The second post is the code and configuration data that he used to implement his notebook. It’s straightforward and easy to understand and is therefore easily adapted to your particular needs. Clarke uses Papers, a research paper repository tool, and added a bit of applescript to export his bibliography from Papers1. He also added a hook to automatically commit his notebook to version control whenever he saves it. That last step is an important part of the permanence requirement.

If you’re in the sciences and the idea of an easily searchable and printable lab notebook is appealing to you, you’ll want to take a look at these posts. Clarke’s solution probably won’t fit your needs exactly but his ideas constitute an excellent infrastructure for you to build your own solution on.

Footnotes:

1

Papers is also available for Windows but I don’t know what scripting ability it has there.

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