Posts
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Google Oauth Tokens in Golang
I’m pretty sure I’ve run into this before and worked through it. But for some reason my searches didn’t land on something that clicked till I was a few iterations in. So I’m putting down a simple example so that when I search for it next time I’ll find it… hopefully.
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Service Container Manipulation
The Github actions functionality has been pretty spectacular, in particular service containers for setting up a test environment. One bit of annoyance though can be trying to do setup on a container. When the container gets created the repo hasn’t been checked out yet. So I can’t do the normal mount of some init into a postgres container like I would using docker-compose locally. There are lots of ways to work around that, but I just ran across an example that uses docker on the runner image and info from the job context to exec a few tasks on a service container.
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ktool for Building OSDev Samples
The other day I packaged up a build of cross-compile tools for i686 bare images using the instructions from the OSDev wiki for making a cross-compiler suitable for building bootable images and kernels. I had started fooling around with dockcross to do the builds, but some of the OSDev samples explicitly complain if you use a compiler that can be used to build for a Linux target. So I just packaged up something of my own and made a super simple wrapper script to make it less cumbersome to run.
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Using Docker to Cross Compile
I’ve been poking around with a bunch of low level programming stuff. Looking at old source code and playing with some newer examples, like Alex Parker’s fantastic example of a boot loader with assembly and C++. There’s lots of interesting stuff out there. But I never like having to setup a cross compiler on my system. I used to do a ton of that, and the toolchain would always get messed up somehow.
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Booting MMURTL in VirtualBox
I was looking through some of the old books on my bookshelf when I ran across my copy of Developing Your Own 32-Bit Operating System. I spent a bunch of time playing around with the code when I picked up the book, uh… more than 20 years ago. Wow. Eventually Linux took over a lot of that interest however and I haven’t looked at the book in decades. It was a wonderful learning system that I picked up a ton of experience from. And that was back before we had decent emulation and virtualization services to work with. I wondered if the code was still floating around and if anyone was using it.
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Finished a Program 29 Years Later
My parents were getting ready to sell their house a few months ago, and while I was there I grabbed a few super old computer books from when I was a kid. Nostalgia I suppose, and I figured they would be cool to have around. What I didn’t expect was that I would find a printout and a few pages of handwritten notes from a program I was working on when I was 9. But of course, once I did, the only rational response was to see if I could finally get it working. Which it now is.
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Firefox OS with App Manager
One of the nice things about getting FFOS 1.2 on my device is being able to use App Manager instead of the simulator plugin to do development. Given that the App Manager replaces the Simulator Dashboard in the newest versions of Firefox, it seems like the kind of thing developers should have access to. So hopefully ZTE figures out a way to get a 1.2+ release on their developer phones.
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FirefoxOS 1.2 on ZTE Open
I picked up a ZTE Open Firefox OS device a little while ago. Given that developer hub says it’s a “powerful device aimed at developers and early adopters worldwide” I figured it would be good for some hackery. I read the specs, so I knew that “powerful” should be pretty suspect. I was surprised to find out that it’s not really for developers, and increasingly doesn’t seem to be all that open.
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knife-block for Chef Testing
A few weeks ago Nathen Harvey was kind enough to stop by and give us a critique of how we do Chef automated testing and some workflow suggestions. We had been using chef-solo to do some of the recipe development and automated testing, but all our real deployments were done using chef-client. And the differences between solo runs and chef-client runs kept biting us. We had seen the stuff Lookout Mobile has done to run a VM for the chef server in addition to the node during testing. But that seemed like an awful lot of overhead. Fortunately Nathen gave us the awesome hack of using different organizations for the different developers of chef rules, different organizations for CI, and then the production organization. That gives us complete isolation of the different working areas, but still keeps setup relatively simple. w00T!
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Scaling Technology
A few weeks ago Arte and Mario asked me to swing by to chat with folks participating in the Momentum accelerator to talk about scaling technology. While we were talking I pointed folks to a few posts and videos of talks I consider to be some of the root nodes of a lot of other conversations. I’m not sure I’ve ever pulled this together before.
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