Neil Gall @neilgall@functional.cafe

Did my first ever parkrun this morning along the western promenade in Edinburgh. Really busy with hundreds of runners - amazing they can draw so many people every week. Personal best 5K of 24:02 which I'm quite pleased with. Will definitely go back and do more.

https://www.parkrun.com/

Walking up Princes Street in Edinburgh I could hear a bagpiper hitting a few bum notes and was thinking he needs some practice. Then got closer and it was a wee kid about 7 or 8 years old! Now I feel bad for having such thoughts.

Grrr! Another bike chain destroyed by salt. This one only three months old. It never used to be like this - there's been some qualitative or quantitative change in the salt used on the roads in winter. Even more annoying is we've had virtually no snow and little frost so far this year. I am tempted to send the city council a bill.

I wasn't intending to practice TDD today but I found myself debugging a failing test then realising, oh, I've not actually written the code to do that yet.

I invented Inadvertent TDD.

I use an app to enforce breaks on my laptop. If I ignore it long enough it drops to the login screen and won't let me back in for 5 minutes. This is great but the upshot is I end up drinking more coffee.

Setup a laptop backup using an NFS mount, autofs and rsnapshot configured to exit if the target directory is not available. But it's unusably slow. After a couple of hours it has only backed up about half a GB, with about 250GB to do in total. What have I done wrong?

I'm trying Spotify again... and finding I hate Spotify Connect again. I don't need it, I don't want it and it just makes using the service more complex. Why can't I turn it off?

Finally setup rsnapshot on my work system. Thought I'd lost half a day's work this morning. Getting it going is pretty easy, and this page on the Arch wiki is a nice walkthrough appropriate to any systemd-based Linux https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rsnapshot

The test framework using docker is working really well but increasingly we need to configure the app under test in new ways, such as this case of setting Java TLS parameters on the command line. The whole thing might need a rethink soon.

Ok, working without TLS, that's enough for today. Tomorrow I need to hook up a Heath Robinson patchwork of configuration plumbing so my automated test can
1. Generate a self-signed cert
2. Run OpenLDAP in docker using the cert
3. Import the cert to a Java keystore
4. Run the app under test in docker, configured to use the just-generated keystore as its truststore.
5. Profit!

Why does pressing the accept cookies button on a page on Their Verge result in a longer delay than loading the page in the first place?

Switched my work Arch system to the LTS kernel today as the kernel updates were coming a bit too frequently. Got distracted and rebooted without rebuilding grub.cfg though - bit of a panic but managed to boot from a USB, mount the partition and edit it by hand, which was enough to boot and rebuild it properly. Phew!

Sitting by the fire with Kindle and whisky. Happy Sunday evening!

In this week's episode of First World Problems we investigate why syncing a Spotify playlist to a wristwatch takes up to 10 minutes and depletes the battery by 15%