Cat Skinning, Made Easy

[Click on the story, above, to enlarge it.]

My friend, Debi, wants to put a newsletter article about herself on her LinkedIn page. All she has is the pdf for the entire magazine issue. She doesn't even have a PDF writer on her Windows box.

Impossible?

Piece of cake.

1. She mails me the pdf.
2. I use Ubuntu's Document Viewer to bring up the PDF.
3. I print page 2 to a file, as PDF.
4. I use convert(1) to turn that pdf into a png.
5. I import the png into my blog.
6. We verify that she can see it, and that it suits her needs.
   
7. We use Blogger to create her a blog, put the same png into her own blog entry, and point to it on her LinkedIn page.

Google Voice

Well, okey doke. Google's finally bringing GrandCentral back as Google Voice.

Let's see if their new call button works.

Grand Central

I'm not posting regularly, but once in a while something is a must-post. This is one.

In the Marine Corps I was a radio operator, which required acquiring the skill "push to talk." Finally, this reflex returns in a way I wouldn't have predicted.

Jeff Bezos has a call-me button? Me, too.

Kevin Kempter

I met Kevin Kempter at a CLUE Installfest.

Kevin was hauling around gear in a great, Marine Corps bag. I thought, "Hah! Another jarhead. Hey ... how can I get one of those bags?"

He'd had the same thought. On a visit to MCRD, he saw a guard with the same bag, and asked him where he could get one.

"They're only for active-duty Marines, so I'm not allowed to tell you that if you go down that way one block and over two, you'll find the PX. Sir."

"Interested in giving a BLUG talk?" I asked Kevin.

"Sure."

"What would you talk about?"

"Postgres."

Turns out, people are interested in Postgres.

Kevin played to a standing-room-only crowd last night.

He told us he has one client who's now pulling in a terabyte of data a day, and expects to expand this by a factor of 100.

Apache Status

You can get your apache2 (and, I suspect, apache) server to display status information on prefab server-status and server-info pages by loading the status and info modules and tweaking the configuration files to pay attention to them.

Having done that, http://localhost/server-info and http://localhost/server-status
will tell you what modules are loaded and what they do. With little more work, you can also permit access to these pages by other boxes.

I set this up yesterday at work, but haven't done it at home because this laptop isn't serving up web pages at all.

Gitosis

I spent part of the weekend playing with gitosis, a tool for administering remotely-accessible git repositories.

Access revolves around ssh and public/private key pairs. You give me your public key, and I can grant you selective permissions, repo-by-repo, if I'm the gitosis administrator. Once I do, it's painless to check stuff in and out, since all the permissions stuff is under-the-covers. Much nicer than Subversion's cacheing of passwords in plain text.

One of the coolest things is that the administrative data, including public keys, are kept in a git database. If I'm the (or an) administrator, I can administer access remotely, with git pull and git push -- including adding new users and their keys -- using gitosis itself for the repo access.

Error-handling, again.

Here's a better version of my error-handling shell functions. Maybe I am educable, after all.

# common error-handling functions

if [ $_gripe ]; then return 0; else _gripe=1; fi # include guard

warn() { printf "$* at line %s file %s: $msg\n" $(caller) 1>&2 ; }
die() { printf "$* at line %s file %s: $msg\n" $(caller) 1>&2 ; exit -1; }

I have an include guard so I can include it in other shell functions that may be included with one another. I use if, rather than a [test] || alternative construct because I'm often running set -e, and don't want to die because of the test itself.

I have die() printing its own message, instead of calling warn(), so that it reports where it's invoked. Otherwise, warn() announces it's being called by die(). Duh.

It amazes me that after doing this for so long, I can still be fixing bugs in my own code -- and code as basic as this.