Getting nokogiri to install was failing for me. I'm using bundler and needed nokogiri. Gem is trying to compile it and failing on libxml2.

At first I tried using the libxml from brew, that that didn't work, so specified where to find XCode's version of libxml in my bundle config.

~/.bundle/config
BUNDLE_BUILD__NOKOGIRI: "--use-system-libraries=true --with-xml2-include=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.14.sdk/usr/include/libxml2"

We build our Jenkins from a docker container, setting up that with code requires setting up the plugin from groovy. I didn't want to figure out how to translate our config for the plain mailer plugin to the email-ext plugin. I started using the plain mailer plugin but decided I'd like to send the email in HTML format. Once again, Jenkins docs were terrible, but reading the code, it looked like mimetype was supported.

I came up with the following code to send an HTML email from the Jenkinsfile

I needed to checkout some code from another repository into my project, but I only wanted a specific directory within the other repository.

As usual with Jenkins, the docs are lacking, but reading the source for a bit I came up with the following:

Talk I gave at #LISA2018. I've given this talk as a half day tutorial, at LISA2018 I gave it in 90minutes. The bulk of the talk is laying a solid foundation on how Linux works. Slides

My iPad got updated to 11.3 and I lost the ability to use my usb-midi interface reliably. I had an M-Audio Uno which worked great on 10.3.3. On 11.3 it keeps stopping and a dialog is displayed stating that the "accessory is unsupported".

I think this is related to the M-Audio using more than 100mA. My lightning adapter couldn't inject voltage, so I looked at getting a Bluetooth MIDI adapter.

I made a data_hash backend for hiera that uses the puppet certificate certname to connect to a remote http service and retrieve hieradata for a node. The http backend is up to you, in my implementation I also verified the certificate was signed by the Puppet CA.

This backend uses data_hash, so that it only looks up hiera once per catalog compilation. If it finds hieradata for a node, it updates the hiera cache.

The github repo is located here https://github.com/uphillian/http_data_hash

I wanted to export my playlists with Plex, I installed Export Tools and ended up with CSV files.

I looked around and couldn't find something to convert those to m3u. I did get a m3u8 file but it didn't work with my devices...

I made a quick python script to convert the csv to m3u...it's possibly useful to someone else...maybe.


#!/usr/bin/env python

import csv
import getopt
import sys

I find this really useful, just a call out to sed so I don't have to remember the syntax.


ssh_delete_key() {
sed -i -e ${1}d ~/.ssh/known_hosts
}
alias sshdel=ssh_delete_key


While at LinuxFest Northwest I picked up an Old Raspberry Pi from the Yard Sale. I didn't realise it was a Model A...took me a while to figure out a use for it, not much memory or processing power.

I use a USB camera on my work laptop and the camera sometimes doesn't show up in my video conferencing app. I verified that the camera is showing in the usb list with lsusb (a script I got from https://github.com/jlhonora/lsusb which is great btw).

dtruss showed that the VDCAssistant was being accessed by my apps, so I tried killing that and boom the camera shows up.

So now I aliased camkill='sudo pkill VDCAssistant'