Fri, 11 Jul 2008
Bootstrapping Kickstart for Free
Having spent a (very) little time over the last month fiddling with an
existing FAI setup
(which is used to install Debian machines) one amazingly insightful
feature of Kickstart (a provisioning tool for Redhat and Fedora) has
earned a place in my heart - /root/anaconda-ks.cfg.
It might not seem like much, but by having the interactive installer produce a working config that can be reused, the barrier to entry is seriously lowered and makes experimentation much easier. If you want to add a feature to your new machines then just add it to the test install and crib from the config file. Excellent.
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Posted: 2008/07/11 22:22 | /operatingsystems/linux | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Replacing The Opening Talk at Conferences
Over the last couple of years (apart from this year oddly enough) I've
been to a fair few tech conferences and one of the most annoying things
about them (especially YAPCs) are the opening talks. If you're lucky you
get a good keynote. Otherwise you get either a bad sponsor session or
even, don't be afraid - you don't have to attend, a "Getting the most
out of a YAPC" talk.
So now I've whinged about it what's my suggestion to fix it? Have a short session where each speaker who's presenting at the conference gives a brief peek (and a chance to hook people in) to their talk.
This should be no more than a minute or two, 3-6 slides at most, all using the same laptop and lined up in the front row of the audience to keep it smooth and fast. Although a lot of people already know what they want to see doing this will help people to spot the speakers who have an... "incompatible with the audience" presentation style and may even change their mind about what to see.
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Posted: 2008/07/11 22:19 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Randexp - Generating test data with Ruby regexs
While paging through reddit programming recently
(seems only fair since they linked to me ;)) I stumbled on to the very
nifty Randexp gem, a
library that uses regular expression patterns to generate data that would
satisfy the pattern. Or in less tech terms - a really good test data
generator.
# install randexp
$ irb
require "rubygems"
require "randexp"
# simple fake phone number -
/020(7|8) \d{3} \d{4}/.gen
# build a reusable class.
class Randgen
def self.version()
/\d{1,3}\.\d{1,4}/.gen
end
end
# and use it.
/[:version:]/.gen
I especially like the ability to make your own character classes. I'm not a ruby guy but I can see this being very useful in lots of little data generation scripts and test harnesses.
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Posted: 2008/07/11 18:29 | /ruby | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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