Year: 2016

dotfiles – your unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub

Warning: you will lose a lot of sleep if you follow the link below. :)

No matter how well you know Vim, bash, git, and a whole slew of other command line tools, I promise you, you’ll find something new, something you had no idea existed, something that will help you save hours and hours of your life by shaving off a few seconds here and there on the tasks you perform on a daily basis, in the repositories link to from this site.

I think I’ve spent most of my Sunday there and my dotfiles are so different now that I’m not sure I should commit and push them all in one go.  I think I might need to get used to the changes first.

Some of the things that I’ve found for myself:

  • PHP Integration environment for Vim (spf13/PIV).
  • myrepos – provides a mr command, which is a tool to manage all your version control repositories.
  • bash-it – a community Bash framework.
  • Awesome dotfiles – a curated list of dotfiles resources.

… and a whole lot of snippets, tips, and tricks.

P.S.: Make sure you don’t spend too much time on these things though :)

Amazon Linux AMI : Let’s Encrypt : ImportError: No module named interface

Let’s Encrypt has only experimental support for the Amazon Linux AMI, so it’s kind of expected to have issues once in a while.   Here’s one I came across today:

# /opt/letsencrypt/certbot-auto renew
Creating virtual environment...
Installing Python packages...
Installation succeeded.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt", line 7, in <module>
from certbot.main import main
File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 12, in <module>
import zope.component
File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zope/component/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
from zope.interface import Interface
ImportError: No module named interface

My first though was to install the system updates. It looks like something is off in the Python-land. But even after the “yum update” was done, the issue was still there. A quick Google search later, thanks to the this GitHub issue and this comment, the solution is the following:

pip install pip --upgrade
pip install virtualenv --upgrade
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python27 venv27

Running the renewal of the certificates works as expected after this.

P.S.: I wish we had fewer package and dependency managers in the world…

JSON API? No … HAL!

Wait, what?  That’s exactly what I said when I read this blog post.  I am still making my way through the JSON API specification.  And now it seems I might be wasting my time, as I should be learning HAL.

Whereas JSON API is almost like an “ORM over HTTP”, HAL does a lot less for you though, so it’s not really an apples-to-apples type of comparison.

HAL really is just a document format for a hypermedia API, like HTML is for hypertext. It doesn’t tell you how to express your domain model, and doesn’t really tell you how to use HAL to submit changes.

Sometime I think that I should just stop learning.  What’s the point?  By the time you learn a thing or two, it’s already obsolete and somebody somewhere has created something better, or wiser, or cheaper.

Meh…