out and about
Interview in The Setup (its Hacker news comment thread)
(Other more interesting interviews in The Setup: William Gibson, Stephen Wolfram, MC Frontalot, _why the lucky stiff )
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Interview in The Setup (its Hacker news comment thread)
(Other more interesting interviews in The Setup: William Gibson, Stephen Wolfram, MC Frontalot, _why the lucky stiff )
UPS farce
This is not the kind of place I live, though I don't mind a visit.
I'm not bothered by a more rural life, I thrive on peace and quiet, and
am not bothered by needing to haul my water, split firewood, or spend an hour
just mowing my driveway.
I bought a GPS the other day, and it doesn't know where my driveway is..
or where the road leading to my driveway is..
or even about the highway leading to that road!
The only thing that really bothers me about living here off the map is that I'm in the middle of a food desert too. The nearest semi-decent grocery store and produce market are 40 minutes away. There's one restaurant worth eating at, and while a very congenial place to eat rustic food while watching the river flow by, it serves almost no vegetables. Adding to the problem, my fridge is a rather expensive propane model, which is about half a normal size, and has no freezer. Managing a healthy meal plan is a constant struggle, though I do have time to cook, at least, thanks to not having the kind of commute that is typical around here.
Well, the food desert was my only real problem. Now I can add to that the UPS emergency. A week ago, a package left Shenzen China for here. It quickly passed through Anchorage Alaska, and with a few days had arrived an hour and a half from here. Getting it here has taken the whole rest of the week.
I only knew UPS attempted delivery because a neighbor told me. Seems they took one look at my driveway and turned around. They never tried again, and they didn't bother to leave a note on the mailbox, or anything. Now, the US postal service is happy to drive up this driveway; they drive a sensible 4x4 around here. I think DHL and Fedex have been here too. (Contrary to John Goerzen's experiences) My compact car is not bothered by my driveway either...
But UPS's brand involves large brown trucks, even where inappropriate, and damage to them from such things as low-hanging branches apparently comes out of the driver's paycheck. And while normally UPS leaves small things in my mailbox, or with a neighbor, this was an important package from China, and it needed a signature. But really, a post card? "emergency"?!
So, I bought the GPS to find UPS, because my package was in an industrial park in some town I've never been to. And on Tuesday I was within an hour of there and swung by. And it was closed. UPS's website had not mentioned this; other businesses are open the day after Memorial day. That turned out to be a really annoying day all around. When I got home, after a night away, I found my fridge's fire had blown out, and nearly all my food was only fit for the dog.
Today I went out to try again (and buy groceries). When I reached the UPS depot.. it was closed! Until 3 pm. At this point I felt this story was reaching full-on farce.
After cooling my heels in a library for three hours, I was finally able to open the most over-packed package I've probably ever seen.
My kickstarter reward sample looks good.. I'll be ordering a lot more, but not to this address.
As a coda to the UPS farce, arriving home today I checked my mailbox, and found the UPS postcard had finally arrived. It included mention of the 3 pm opening time, and noted that I had until tomorrow before they'd return my package to China.
The coda to the coda is that on my way home from this second annoying day delivered courtesy of UPS, I stumbled on a restaurant overlooking a waterfall, just outside the town where I get my groceries. It serves food that satisfies both my Cajun and healthy cravings. Now I just need a larger fridge..
California postcard 2012
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build a dynamic webapp in Yesod in just three days
This screenscast shows what I built. Scroll down for my Yesod braindump.
I've been astonished how quickly this went together. This is my first time using any sort of web framework, and I used a still unusual one, Yesod. It's my first time using Bootstrap too. It's also the first time I've done any AJAX programming!
Bootstrap was something I'd heard of and seen some suspiciously similar looking sites built with, but it was really a pleasant surprise. Being able to make things that work and look good on the web without struggling with CSS is such a nice change. For the first time, it makes the web feel like a UI toolkit to me.
As I've learned Yesod, I kept seeing problems the web framework solves that I either solved in an ad-hoc basis in Ikiwiki, or didn't realize were problems. In the former group are things like having a consistent way to store a URL to redirect to after an action (such as logging in) finishes, and generating urls programmatically in ways that avoid broken likes. In the latter group are things like exploiting types to guarantee mistakes can't be made. And also the abstraction of widgets, which combine html, css, and javascript, in a way that can be composed with other widgets.
Overall, I'm really enjoying Yesod, and it's making me productive in new ways.
I also see a lot of potential in Yesod to improve from where it is.
Probably the biggest improvement would be generating javascript from haskell code, so the type safety extends to the javascript side.
There have been many tries at doing this, the first one I'm really tempted to use is Fay. Rather than build a heavy haskell runtime on top of javascript, it essentially uses javascript as its runtime, and offloads type checking to GHC. This lets it generate javascript code that is short and often comprehensible enough to give insights into what the original haskell code does.
I'm betting this will be integrated into Yesod eventually. They have an active wiki page about it.
There's a WAI library for building local webapps with Yesod, but it was not suitable for my needs (for one thing, it lacks security; for another it kills the haskell program when the web page is closed); so I built my own webapp library. A problem with my current pace of development is that I'm building lots of reusable libraries, but I don't have the time to stabalize them and make them generally available. That one goes in the pile of 2k+ lines of such code.
Yesod needs a version of the Hamlet markup that can be edited by people who only understand html. That means it should allow closing tags, and tabs, and not have nasty whitespace gotchas. I think this would be easy to build, starting from Hamlet. It could be called "Hecate".. I don't have time right now.
The compile time error messages are often beyond atrocious. Seriously, I'm tempted to write a filter to filter out common patterns where there's one line about a syntax error in a Hamlet file sandwitched in between 150 lines of type error gobbly-gook and generated code.
Some really nice things could be done integrating Yesod with Bootstrap. Like the ability to build entire sites by just composing together Bootstrap components, with no need to write a single line of html or css. I'm very tempted to try to build this library.
webpage = bootstrap Dynamic $ do setTitle "FooCorp" login <- getLogin navbar [FixedTop] $ do brand "FooCorp" link AboutR link BlogR nav [PullRight] $ link . maybe LoginR ProfileR login div [ContainerFluid] $ content login where content Nothing = heroUnit $ do para $ "We're the FooCorp for you." button "Register Today" [Primary, Large] SignUpR carousel [ amazingFeatures , aboutFooCorp , pricing ] content (Just user) = do para $ "Welcome back " ++ name user ++ "!" showProfile user
ghc threaded runtime gotchas
That's a seemingly simple question I started asking various people two weeks ago. I didn't get many useful answers, but now I have experience doing it myself, and so here's a blog post brain dump.
I have been trying to convert git-annex to use GHC's threaded runtime, for
a variety of reasons. Naively adding the -threaded option resulted in a
git-annex command that seemed to randomly freeze, but only sometimes
(and, infuriatingly, never when I straced it), and a test suite that froze
at a random point almost every time I ran it. Not a good result, and
lacking any knowledge about gotchas with using the threaded runtime, I was
at a loss for a long time (most of DebConf) about how to fix it.
I now know of at least three classes of problems that enabling the threaded runtime can turn up in programs that have been developed using the non-threaded runtime.
MissingH has some code similar to this, which works ok with the non-threaded runtime:
forkProcess $ do
debugM "about to run some command"
executeFile ...
In the above example, debugM accesses a MVar. Doing that after
forkProcess can result in a MVar deadlock, as it tries to access a MVar
value, that is, apparently, not accessible to the forked process.
(Bug report with test case)
So, using System.Cmd.Utils from MissingH is asking for trouble.
I switched all my code to the newer and, apparently, threaded runtime
safe System.Process.
Even when not accessing a MVar after forkProcess, it's very unsafe to
use. It's easy to miss the warning attached to forkProcess, when the code
seems to work. But with the threaded runtime, I've found that most
any call to forkProcess will sometimes succeed, and sometimes freeze
the whole program. This might only happen around 1 time in 1000.
Then you'll find this warning and do a lot of head-scratching about what
it really means:
forkProcess comes with a giant warning: since any other running threads are not copied into the child process, it's easy to go wrong: e.g. by accessing some shared resource that was held by another thread in the parent.
The hangs I saw could be due to laziness issues deferring code to run
after the forkProcess that you'd expect to have run before it ... or
who knows what else.
It's not clear to me that it's possible to use forkProcess safely in
Haskell code. I think it's notable that System.Process runs the whole
fork/exec in C code instead.
According to most of the documentation you'll find in eg, the Haskell wiki,
Real World Haskell, etc, the only difference between the safe and
unsafe imports in the FFI is that unsafe is faster, and shouldn't be
used for C code that calls back into Haskell code.
But the documentation is out of date. Actually, if you're using the FFI,
and the foreign function can block, you need to use safe. When using
unsafe, a blocking foreign function can block all threads of the program.
In my case, I was using kqueue to wait for changes to files, and this
indeed blocked my whole program when linked with -threaded. Marking it
safe fixed this.
The details are well described in this paper: http://community.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/conc-ffi.pdf
Somewhat surprisingly, this blocking only happens when using the threaded
runtime. If you're using the non-threaded runtime with unsafe blocking
FFI functions, your other pseudo-threads won't be blocked. This is because
the non-threaded runtime has an SIGALARM timer that interrupts (most)
blocking system calls. This leads to other troubles of its own (like
needing to restart interrupted FFI functions, or blocking the other
pseudo-threads from running if the C code ignores SIGALARM), but that's
offtopic for this post.
Converting a large Haskell code base from the default, non-threaded runtime to the threaded runtime can be quite tricky. None of the problems are the sort of thing that Haskell helps to manage either. I will be developing new programs using the threaded runtime from the beginning from now on.
By the way, don't take this post to say that threading in Haskell sucks.
I've really been enjoying writing threaded Haskell code. The control
Haskell gives over isolation of state to threads, and the excellent and
wide-ranging suite of thread communications data types (MVar, Chan,
QSemN, TMVar, SampleVar, etc) have made developing a complex threaded
program something I feel comfortable doing for the first time, in any
language.
I am become Joey, destroyer of drives
To add to the fun of being in Nicaragua, my laptop's solid state drive died the second day here. Seems this is the failure mode for a SSD, get a little slow, and then a switch flips and it stops accepting any writes, at all, becoming a read-only media. Never was there an indication of a problem in SMART etc.
Did you know that Nicaragua has neither names for most roads, nor addresses? Rather than trying to shoehorn the directions to my hotel into the address fields of Amazon.com, I shipped the replacement SSD to home, and thought I'd limp along.
I destroyed my second drive one hour after getting it working. A borrowed USB flash drive, which seems to have melted under the unusual load while I was away at lunch. Perhaps putting an ext3 filesystem on it was a very bad idea, although I have successfully run other USB flash drives that way for years. Perhaps it was a cheap drive that only pretended to hold 32 gb.
For several days I happily used the third drive, a USB hard drive, as my temporary root filesystem. Until I destroyed it by knocking it off my bed.
Now my netbook is running from a Debian Live USB key, with a second USB key for my customisations. So far I have not managed to destroy these, but there's still a day left in my trip..
debian-cd work at DebCamp
I've been working the past two days on debian-cd, which was the main thing (besides git-annex assistant) I planned to work on at DebCamp.
Yesterday, Steve McIntyre and I cleaned up some cruft in debian-cd's package lists. This freed somewhere in the area of 30 mb. I also took a grep through d-i and made sure the CDs include packages that d-i can optionally install in some situations.
Today, I investigated how Recommends are ordered on the CD, and concluded it's as close to optimal as can be easily achieved. So was not able to save space there, but I did find a way to reorganize the desktop task that avoids needing to include a lot of printing stuff and some other stuff on the first CD. While that helped some, it still didn't get either Gnome or Kde to entirely fit, so getting there will probably involve rebuilding 100 or so packages with xz, if someone decides to do that.
So it's stil TBD whether Gnome or Kde will fit on a single CD in Debian wheezy. At this point I think most of us are getting tired of fighting this increasingly losing battle every release, and so other options like only having a desktop DVD are looking more appealing, as they solve the problem long-term. This would also free up the first CD for other interesting use cases, perhaps xfce, or perhaps a CD targeted at server users, and/or containing high-popularity non-desktop packages.
git-annex-assistant milestone
I reached a nice milestone on my git-annex assistant in my first day's work at DebCamp in Nicaragua. Here's a screencast demoing it.
git-annex-assistant.ogg (12 MB)
By the way, the weather, food, and people here are all excellent.
notes for a caretaker
I recently had the sort of weird experience of a recent blog post being on the top of Hacker News and there being a fair amount of interest in the details of my wacky living situation.
I could write a detailed post explaining everything, but that'd be boring .. instead I'll tease the stalkers with more oblique references to it. So here's my notes for a caretaker who will be here while I'm away at DebConf.
Please make yourself at home!
AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA. You may
have to enter this information manually.) Slow is normal.trying obnam
Obnam 1.0 was released during several months when I had no well-connected server to use for backups. Yesterday I installed a terabyte disk in a basement with a fiber optic network connection, so my backupless time is over.
Now, granted, I have a very multi-layered approach to backups; all my data is stored in git, most of it with dozens of copies automatically maintained, and with archival data managed by git-annex. But I still like to have a "real" backup system underneath, to catch anything else. And to back up those parts of my user's data that I have not given them tools to put into git yet...
My backup server is not my basement, so I need to securely encrypt
the backups stored there. Encrypting your offsite backups is such a good
idea that I've always been surprised at the paucity of tools to do it. I
got by with duplicity for years, but it's increasingly creaky, and the
few times I've needed to restore, it's been a terrific pain. So I'm excited
to be trying Obnam today.
So far I quite like it. The only real problem is that it can be slow, when there's a transatlantic link between the client and the server. Each file backed up requires several TCP round-trips, and the latency kills the bandwidth. Large files are still sent fast, and obnam uses little resources on either the client or server while running. And this mostly only affects the initial, full backup.
But the encryption and ease of use more than make up for this. The real
killer feature with Obnam's encryption isn't that it's industry-standard
encryption with gpg, that can be trivially enabled with a single option
(--encrypt-with=DEADBEEF). No, the great thing about it is its key
management.
I generate a new gpg key for each system I back up. This prevents systems reading each other's backups. But that means you have to backup the backup keys.. or when a system is lost, the backup would be inaccessible.
With Obnam, I can instead just grant my personal gpg key access to
the repository: obnam add-key --keyid 2512E3C7. Now both the machine's
key and my gpg key can access the data. Great system; can't revoke access,
but otherwise perfect. I liked this so much I stole the design and used
it in git-annex too. :)
I'm also pleased I can lock down .ssh/authorized_keys on my backup
server, to prevent clients running arbitrary commands. Duplicity runs
ad-hoc commands over ssh, which defeated me from ever locking it down.
Obnam can be easily locked down, like this:
command="/usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server"
This could still be improved, since clients can still read the whole filesystem with sftp. I'd like to have something like git-annex's git-annex-shell, which can limit access to only a specific repository. Hmm, if Obnam had its own server-side program like this, it could stream backup data to it using a protocol that avoids the roundtrips needed by the SFTP protocol, and fix the latency issue too. Lars, I know you've been looking for a Haskell starter project ... perhaps this is it? :)
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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