[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

The “slave” ter­mi­nol­o­gy is un­for­tu­nate, but the utility of running a Jenkins build on a node that you’ve configured at Amazon’s EC2 is undeniable.

#2 in a series on Jenkins Pipelines

We needed to install system packages on our build nodes, such as Docker or Postgres. For obvious reasons, Cloud­Bees—our Jenkins hosting provider—­won’t let you do that on their systems. You must provide your own build nodes, where you are free to install whatever you like.

We already use Amazon Web Services, so we chose to configure our CloudBees account with EC2 slaves. We had a long and fruitless detour through On-Premise Executors, which I will not detail here.

Ultimately, …continue.

[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

The MetaBrite dev team migrated most of their builds from Atlassian’s Bamboo Cloud to Jenkins Pipelines in late 2016/early 2017. This is a series of blog posts about that experience.

Four-year-old Amanda McCready has dis­ap­peared. Her aunt, desperate to find her, engages PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro to find the child. The mother, Helene, is drunken, slatternly, and neglectful: in short, unfit and un­sym­pa­thet­ic. Kenzie and Gennaro don’t want the case—the odds of finding Amanda alive and unharmed are low. They’ll go through hell before they succeed.

This book veers from blackly funny to gutwrench­ing. Kenzie and Gennaro come up against the worst of the worst and against decent people doing wrong for reasons that seem right to …continue.

I’ve been using a knee walker for the last couple of weeks. For the first time, I took public trans­porta­tion by myself to attend Papers We Love tonight. I rolled myself from 1st Ave S & Washington up to the Pioneer Square station, took the Light Rail one stop north to the University Street station at 3rd & Seneca, then rolled down the hill to 2nd & Spring. It’s a trip I wouldn’t have thought about twice if I were walking nor­mal­ly—and I probably would have walked the entire way rather than take the Light Rail only one short stop.

It’s a different matter on a knee scooter. I said …continue.

“Don’t be silly,” Bob, said Mo, “everyone knows vampires don’t exist!” Thus opens The Rhesus Chart. We quickly come to realize that vampires do exist and we come to wonder why everyone in the Laundry is so dog­mat­i­cal­ly sure that they don’t. One of the nest of baby vampires that sets the plot in motion is Bob’s toxic ex-girlfriend, Mhari, who manages to convince the Laundry that they should recruit her clutch rather than ex­ter­mi­nate them. But there are old vampires who have …continue.

I found something very useful in the dingbats range of Unicode characters: the negative circled san-serif digits, ➊ ➋ ➌ ➍ ➎ ➏ ➐ ➑ ➒ ➓ .

I’ve started using them to label points of interest in code. They play well with the code-block directive in re­Struc­tured­Text.

sudo docker images --format '{{.Repository}}:{{.Tag}}' \    ➊
    | grep $IMAGE_NAME \                                    ➋
    | grep 

I was trying to get some structured in­for­ma­tion from docker images, hoping to replace some ugly Sed and AWK trickery. I could have used the docker-py library. Instead I chose to use the poorly documented --format option to docker images (and some other Docker CLI commands). Adrian Mouat gives some useful starting points at Docker Inspect Template Magic and notes that formatting is built around Go templates.

I quickly figured out that this format would meet my immediate need.

sudo docker images --format '{{.Repository}}:{{.Tag}}' \
    | grep $IMAGE_NAME \
    | grep -v latest \
    | head -1

That’s fine, but I …continue.

A major American fun­da­men­tal­ist preacher has drawn dis­turbing­ly close to the British Prime Minister, and the more the Laundry looks, they more alarmed they become. Hacker/com­pu­ta­tion­al de­mo­nolo­gist/Laundry agent Bob Howard is leveling up with the Laundry and he has been assigned to “External Assets”, the wing that deals with deniable freelance agents. Bob, Persephone Hazard, and Johnny McTavish are sent to Colorado to in­ves­ti­gate Golden Promise Ministries. There they find a hidden cult within the church where the members are possessed by alien parasites that …continue.

Bob Howard is a com­pu­ta­tion­al de­mo­nolo­gist who works for the occult British spy agency informally known as the Laundry. He’s a computer hacker who’s starting to get some field experience, but nobody would confuse him with a suave la­dykilling man of action. A bil­lion­aire is intent upon raising an eldritch horror from the depths of the sea. Only Bob, who has been “destiny entangled” with a sultry American operative, can stop him. Bob is the last to realize that Ellis Billington …continue.

Trump was in­au­gu­rat­ed as 45th President on Friday, drawing smaller crowds than either of Obama’s in­au­gu­ra­tions. There were prompt, easily disproved lies from Trump and his press secretary that Trump had drawn record crowds.

On Saturday, huge crowds all over the US and elsewhere marched in opposition to Trump and his agenda. 500,000 marched in Washington DC—far more than attended the Trump In­au­gu­ra­tion. That crowd included my 4-year-old niece, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin, as well as other friends from all over the country. 170,000 marched in Seattle. It’s estimated that more than 3,000,000 people marched in total, making it the largest protest ever. Trump can pull yuge crowds after all.

Emma and …continue.