Emacs Blogging

I have been trying to figure out how to turne-blog into the perfect bloggingclient for myself. It was missingmarkdown syntaxand the ability to not have to enter my username and passwordeverytime.

Markdown Syntax

I added some code to e-blog to have it pass the post through a filterprogram before posting it to blogger. Using python markdown andhtml2text I was able to accomplish this. It now converts frommarkdown to html on the way up to blogger and then html to markdown onthe way back. The markdown that comes back is slightly different thanwhen it goes up due to the markdown having several ways to representthe same thing. In practice that hasn't been a problem, I'm sure I'llstart writing markdown the way that python-html2text writes it if Ireally start editing my posts much. I doubt I will.

Credentials

This problem was slightly easier than the one above. I just had tofigure out the variables it was using and make them customizableparameters. Now they are stored in my emacs.el and passwords.elfiles. I don't worry about people reading my passwords.el file as myhard drive is encrypted. But, if one were worried about that, settingthe username is a good enough time saver.

General

Generally speaking, I'm taking the week off. So much rest for me!!I'll probably start hacking cobbler a bit tomorrow or play with TurboGears. I'm not sure, depends on how the spirit moves me.

New things in emacs land

I've finally using more of emacs. I'm now using erc, wanderlust, and elscreen. It is a pretty incredible switch. I'm still having problems with it. But over all, its pretty nice. The biggest problem is organizing the buffers so that I can get work done. I'm using elscreen to get things properly organized, but sometimes it doesn't do things quite right and my buffers get all screwed up. It is interesting, but I'll eventually figure things out.

Also, ERC is not playing nice with my IRC Proxy bip. I basically have two IRC servers with the exact same connect line, except the passwords are different. ERC seems to know that there are two servers, but things spill over between the two. It is a rather odd little behavior.

It is kind of hard figuring various bindings out, but it is getting better over all. I'm excited about this.

Flyspell mode on Fedora 11

So I have been dealing with flyspell-mode not working since I reinstalled my laptop and desktop with F11. I've not spent too much time trying to debug it because generally I don't care. But I finally got upset enough at it to search for why it is happening. When you call flyspell-mode, it doesn't really give you any decent output as to what is wrong. But if you call ispell-buffer, it tells you exactly what is wrong. In my case, I didn't have aspell-en installed. Now, I have it installed and flyspell-mode works perfectly. Hope this helps someone else.

The error was "Enabling Flyspell mode gave an error"

More neglect

It comes to no surprise that I have neglected this blog further. I simply don't have the time to keep up with things. Though, having the emacs interface makes it much easier to post. I'm going to need to try shorter posts and figure out how to mark stuff as draft.

New workstation at work

So I recently got a new Dell Precision T7500n as my workstation at work. It is a pretty nice box that has had only one problem getting setup, and some nice unexpected surprises. First the unexpected surprise. This morning I logged into to be greeted by a popup from Fedora saying that I had a failing hard drive. The utility is called palimpsest and it is pretty nifty. It said that SMART had detected some errors and that the hard drive would fail soonish. So I called up Dell and told them about the SMART errors. A new drive should be showing up here sometime tomorrow. Very nice experience over all.

Now, as for getting Fedora 11 running on this new system, it was relatively easy. First thing is when you boot it up, go into the BIOS. All sorts of wonderful things are disabled or set to be conservative. You should enable VT, SMT, and tell the hard drives not to run in quiet mode at the very least. But feel free to play around in there. When you install, make sure you only have one monitor hooked up. The nouveau drivers work pretty well if you only need one screen. But, if you plugin a second screen, you get a hard kernel lock, and if you boot up with two screens attached xorg locks the card. So if you want dual screen, go with the Nvidia drivers. I look forward to being able to use the nouveau drivers when that bug gets fixed. Other than that, it is a beast of a machine. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a new workstation.

Cobbler and what I'm going to be doing to it make it skynet

So this is my second post in as many days, kind of a surprise to me. But I had some ideas running around my head about cobbler and I thought it would be nice to set them down.

Cobbler Deploy

So a few weeks (maybe a couple months ago?) I sprung a new cobbler feature on the world. The feature was deploy. Basically the ability to push new virtual guests out to hosts. Cobbler 2.0 will have this feature if everything goes as planned.

It is ok, but I think I painted the feature into a little bit of a virtualization corner that might not be such a good idea. After a quick 30 seconds of googling, there seems to be command line tools for playing with the management console of IBM blade centers. It would be very nice to be able to use the deploy feature to simply push out a provisioning to a blade center. Having to log into the blade center's management console to tell it to boot PXE next boot and reboot the blade. It would be so much nicer if cobbler did it for me. So I think I'm going to rename the current virt parameters used by deploy and add a few more. Then I'm going to take a shot at a deploy module for IBM blade centers. Should be a good time.

Cobbler Storage

The next feature that sprung to mind (a few days ago no less) was for cobbler to provision storage along with the hosts. I've posted to the list about it, but I thought I would flesh out a few of the ideas that have been bouncing around my head tonight. Basically we have storage pools that are a container for information about how to put storage there and should probably contain some information about the actual storage backing that pool. Then profiles and systems would have a storage grouping similar to interfaces. They would have things like the storage pool to grab from, the size of the storage, what to format it (if at all?), and mount point. I'm sure we can figure out more to throw there, for the first pass the above should be good enough.

As a quick aside, this would be a good thing to tie into the deploy code. Say you want your new virtual guest to live on a SAN Lun, well attach storage to the profile from which it is created and then when it is provisioned, it will get that storage provisioned imediately. Should be a nice little plus.

Anyway, this opens up a nice first storage module to help flesh out the overall API without messing with too much external hardware. I would think that LVM over ssh or func would let us experiment with the idea without dealing with any vendors or hacking some noninteractive interface over top of an interactive one. In my book that sounds sane.

What is cobbler?

The above plus a suggestion brings up the question of what is cobbler becoming? Someone on the devel list suggested that cobbler start managing switches. With deploy, network, and storage, it should have enough information to manage ethernet switches and fiber channel switches. That makes cobbler into something more than a provisioning server. It suddenly becomes a datacenter management application. Your entire datacenter can be managed by cobbler. I don't know how much of that is possible, or even desirable, but it is an interesting idea. Is it not?

An update

This is going to be a very general post on life. I'm going to touch on a bunch of subjects, basically just to get in the groove of blogging and getting my thoughts out. I basically have ideas for blog posts all the time, but in the past it has been to hard to get them out. I'm going to try to fix that.

Fedora 11

I've been running F11 for a few weeks now. It is pretty nice. Much nicer than F10 was. Things don't crash, I have working dual screen out of the box, and over all it seems much more polished. I guess that is just the cycle of releases, some are good, some are bad. F11 looks to be a very good release. I will likely end up leaving it on my computers unless F12 offers some superiour feature.

Having said the above, I will probably be going F12 when it hits preview because there are a couple of nice features already there. First, Emacs23. I am currently running E23, but it is much nicer if it is in the repos and I don't have to go hunt down things. The second is WebKit based Epiphany. I've been itching to try that out. I switched to Firefox in the F10 time frame because I'm trying to be more standard and install as few packages on new systems as possible. Generally, that means Emacs, Thunderbird and a few miscellaneous packages that I have found useful. Epiphany got crossed off the list because Firefox3 was good enough. WebKit may be enough to get Epiphany back on the list, but that will have to wait for F12.

Other Stuff

I've been following the Virginia off cycle elections pretty closely because I'm originally from VA and because things bode well for the GOP. I am a staunch Federalist with very conservative leanings on the local level, so the current state of affairs in the national government in the U.S. is not really to my liking. I would really like to see the GOP take back the Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012. The thing is, Barak Obama has been a terrible President so far. For all the insults that the left threw at the Bush White House for being incompetent, it really is amateur hour at the Obama White House.

There is also the recent killing of an abortion doctor. That is something that I am very opposed to, but not for the reasons that most people are. I don't think it is the christian way to kill another person to save a life. It is very human to do this, but I firmly believe that Christ would not have done such a thing. If you look at the history of the early church, they did not raise a hand against the Roman government, even though that government was killing Christians. My heart goes out to the family of the doctor.

Having said that, back to politics for a bit before I close down this post. It seems that I, as an American Tax Payer, will now own a majority share in GM, and will do so for the foreseeable future. This is, of course, a bad thing. The United States does not need three car makers. The American market is simply too small to maintain such beasts, especially one that is permanently hobbled by the policies of the Democrats. I like that Ford is the only American car company not to take the government funds, and I will continue to buy Ford in the future. I just purchased a Mazda 3 a couple months ago, and Mazda is owned by Ford.

Emacs and e-blog

I really like e-blog so far. I just wish I could write posts in markdown. For now I am simply using writing HTML to do markup on my posts. It is good enough for the time being and for the most part I can ignore things, which is good.