What's it all about, Alfie?

I have been doing some manual tasks that I decided today I really wanted to automate. The problem was, it was updating a few rows in a database, and so I didn't really want to expose an endpoint that achieve this, just on the very slim chance that the service might get hacked. I know, we protect these things carefully with Google Cloud Tasks, but I just felt these tasks needed to be done outside the scope of the running service, and it was possible, but tiring, to do it manually. First, with psql, and then with a bash script which took command-line options, and then called psql, and made the updates.

In all, it wasn't a bad idea. And it was working just fine - except for the tired part. 🙂 So while I didn't want to set up a crontab job on my laptop, I could set up one on a Cloud VM that is only accessible by me based on an RSA key. That is secure, and it's out on the network, so I don't have to worry about my internet service going down.

So I needed to have some way to replicate my entire development environment onto my iPad Pro, and then from there use the tools I've pulled together to try and make this happen, and decided to push it that last little bit.

Starting with Working Copy on the iPad, I have a complete, stand-alone Git client that has created local directories on my iPad so that an editor like Textastic on the iPad can access these files, save to them, and Working Copy will detect the changes. Additionally, Textastic can upload the files to a hope using scp, so I can edit and save, upload and test, and then make a PR, and push up to GitHub.

I needed to be able to run Node, and a few more watching commands on the box, so I had to get everything up on the Ubuntu 22.04 box in the Cloud, and then wrangle everything to get it all going. The most troublesome thing is that mosh, the Mobile Shell that I use with Blink on my iPad, doesn't allow for SSH Key Forwarding. It's something about mosh, and I understand the reason, but I also know the mosh folks are working to fix this - but it is annoying not to be able to use git within mosh because the SSH keys aren't carried up in the communication stack.

Still, with conventional ssh, they are carried, and I can use that, as needed. Someday soon, there will be a way to use something like Guardian Angel for the SSH key forwarding in mosh, but for now, this works.

At this point, I can edit locally... push to the cloud, have nodemon restart the server on any change... and hit the service on the standard Node port 6543. But then I needed to get nginx forwarding HTTPS to port 6543, and that's another challenge for another day.

What I can do is to run the bash scripts on the Cloud VM, and then crontab the runs so that I can never again have to worry about being so tired from running these commands at odd hours. 🙂

Nothing major, but I did notice that 14.4 was the stable release of Postgres, and so I decided it was time to upgrade to the latest from Homebrew. And it really is very easy (again):

  $ brew upgrade postgresql

and then after all the downloading and installing, we have:

  $ psql --version
  psql (PostgreSQL) 14.4

Then we are good to go! 🙂

Interestingly, this time I didn't have to run:

  $ brew services restart postgresql

for when I did, it told me it was already running. Nice - it restarted on it's own. 🙂

I was doing a little Node/JS coding on play.js on my iPad Pro this week, and ran into a few issues that I wrote to the developers about. They weren't all that big a deal, save one:

• Logging is iffy - using Node/Express, their default is the debug logging package, and yet you can't see any of the log messages in the console in the app.
• Running nodemon doesn't reload on changes - it would be nice to have a way to auto-reload changes in the files - specifically because the editor is saving them.
• Exceptions aren't logged - if there's an uncaught exception, it's not logged/printed in the console at all. Just silence.

And it's really the last one that's the kicker... no way to see if there has been any exceptions... that's something that would make it very hard to find errors in the code.

They wrote back that there would be updates that were coming soon that would fix most of these, and that I should sign up for the CodeSandbox Beta program and look for the updates. Well... this morning, I saw that they had an update, and changed the name of the app on iPadOS to CodeSandbox. So I fired it up to see how things had changed.

There were lots of changes, but the key problems I was having haven't changed, and they have really moved it away from what I liked about it, and towards another style, with different goals. It's OK... it's their app, but it's not the direction I was hoping they were going.

So... it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer to see what comes up as a development platform for the iPad...

This morning I was looking into the Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 LTS upgrades, and decided that it was probably a good time to see about the latest version of Postgresql for my laptop. Thankfully, it's a minor version upgrade from 14.0 to 14.2, and this is something that Homebrew can do quite nicely:

  $ brew upgrade postgresql
  $ brew services restart postgresql

and then after all the downloading and installing, we have:

  $ psql --version
  psql (PostgreSQL) 14.2

Then we are good to go! 🙂

I haven't had a need to use the local Postgres server a lot in the last year or so - using a Google Cloud instance for a while, but it's nice to have all the client support, and to have something local as that's still the best insurance to off-the-grid development.

This morning I did a little searching about how to disable any Auto-Complete in Sublime Text, as there are a lot of times that I really don't want to have any autocomplete happening, as it just gets in my way. So I was very happy to find that all I needed to do was to add:

  "auto_complete": false

to the Settings file, and that will turn it off.

Blissful silence. 🙂

Thankfully, Ctrl-Space will bring it back, and that's exactly the thing I was hoping to find. Then it's at my command, as opposed to simply appearing. Once again, less is more... coding is what I do, and I know what to type... so Sublime Text is again my favorite editor. Wonderful. 🙂

I have been using the iPad Pro for two generations now, and my current model is the M1 iPad Pro, and during the pandemic, it has really proven to be a great Zoom, Meet, etc. box. It has a nice camera, and with Front and Center in iPadOS, it really makes it easy to have a good presentation, or meeting. But it's really so much more.

With the GitHub app, I can get PR notifications, review them, and merge them. With the GitHub Workflow Actions, we have continuous deployment, and that is really quite amazing to me. Of course there are the shells to boxes, and that is great, but even offline, there is so much to like about this machine.

It's rugged - compared to my MacBook Pro, and the screen is a lot easier to clean. I'm not saying my MacBook Pro isn't nice... it's just that in some respects, the iPad Pro is nicer.

What a really amazing device. 🙂

With the update to macOS Monterey, the previous macOS command-line program for generating UUIDs, uuid, has been replaced with uuidgen. I'm not at all sure why the change, but I was glad that a little investigation with ls /usr/bin revealed something that turned out to be the winner.

With this, one of my favorite aliases is now:

alias uupb="uuidgen | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy"

which generates a new UUID, lower-cases all the characters, removes the trailing new-line, and then puts it into the paste buffer for pasting in an editor, or on a form... as many times as you need.

I don't know if there are even release notes about the changes at this level of macOS, but they usually get figured out - one way or another. 🙂

I knew it was coming... they warned me with macOS 11 Big Sur... but it was still a bit of a surprise this morning to reconfigure Apache 2 to use userdir, which macOS Monterey doesn't enable by default, and undoes if you have it already configured. That's OK, it's not a huge deal to turn it back on, but the big news was the complete loss of PHP.

I haven't used it in many years, but it was the one tool that shipped with macOS that I could talk to Postgres, and script, but hey... things change, and they did warn me. 🙂

I guess it would be nice to have something like Node automatically handled, but then that would likkely clash with the Node devs and the nodenv installs, etc. So I'll live with Apache 2, and the userdir, and then just serve up static content on port 80, and leave the other stuff for the development environments.

I did a little digging over the past few days to see what's new in the latest release of Blink (v14.0.2) - the terminal/shell for iOS and iPadOS. It's a nice tool - has even more features than I initially thought. It's really a nice subset of a Unix shell without needing to connect to any other hosts. But that's not really the point of this dig... I was hoping that they had implemented SSH Agent Forwarding in mosh connections so that I'd be able to use git on the remote machines. If you don't forward the SSH key, then you have to have them on the remote hosts, and ssh-add them there. That's not ideal for me, as it opens up the location of the key to a somewhat untrusted host.

I read the release notes and it seems they have re-written the SSH Agent component, and yet they didn't get very specific about the Mosh improvements, so I did a little more digging on the mosh-client code itself, and it seems that there's a bit of a disagreement about including Agent Forwarding in mosh due to security reasons. The conveneince of using git and SSH keys for git operations means that most folks want to have the key forwarding. And you can do it in simple ssh connections.

But for mosh, eventhough it's built on ssh, it seems they don't want to add it. Odd. But hey... it's their code, it's their choice, and that's why I have the workflow where I do the commits on my iPad, and use Blink with mosh just to run the code. It would be nice to have SSH Agent Forwarding, but the durability of mosh trumps the need for agent forwarding... so I'll just stick to what I have now.

But it sure would be nice... maybe they'll figure it out.

This morning I was looking to visualize some time-series data from a Plaid Asset Report, in preparation for some work at The Shop, and I thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to use the xkcd Chart package. I like the way it's clearly trying to be a little less serious, and it seems like just the thing to try out for this visualization.

The data from the endpoint I created is returned as a sequence of tuples:

{
  accounts: {
    'Checking': [
      [ '2021-09-05', 115.4 ],
      [ '2021-09-06', 115.4 ],
      [ '2021-09-07', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-08', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-09', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-10', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-11', 110 ],
      [ '2021-09-12', 110 ],
    ],
    ...
  }
}

these are really the closing balances for each date for the account, and I just wanted to be able to visualize them so that any calculations can be validated by looking at the data.

The graph turned out pretty well:

This is just exactly what I'd hoped for. 🙂