Last week, I visited London for the January Docker meetup, which was the first time I'd attended this group. It was a talk-oriented format, with around 200 attendees packed into Shoreditch Village Hall; free pizza and beer was provided thanks to the sponsors, which was awesome (and makes logistics easier when you're travelling there from work). There were three talks. First, Andrew Martin from British Gas spoke about how they use Docker for testing and continuous deployment of their Node.js microservices - buzzword bingo! But it's helpful to see how companies approach these things. ...

Kate's been reading a book by KonMari. Hence we've rehomed lots of clothes, books and DVDs to charity and various places. I am told the key is to ask, "Does this item bring me joy?" Then if it doesn't bring you enough joy, it goes. The nice thing was, it was actually exciting to reveal the gems among my bookshelves, which were previously hidden by a load of second-rate books. True story: I was sitting downstairs deciding whether to splash out £25 for a particular book. Was called upstairs to make some 'joy decisions', and saw the very same book on the shelf already. Fast delivery!

I have a tendency to forget what I've been up to - so I made a list for 2014. I started the year having recently watched many 30c3 videos online - these were fantastic, and I really should get round to the ones from 31c3. January is traditionally the peak time for the recruitment industry, so at work we were kept busy dealing with all the traffic. We'd recently switched the main job search to use Solr rather than MySQL, which helped - but we did spend a lot of time during the early months of the year converting tables from MyISAM to InnoDB. ...

This weekend I moved my blog to a different server. This meant I could: Enable IPv6 Enable SSL Set up a pump.io profile I've tested it, and it's working. I'm hoping that I can swap out the Node.js modules one-by-one for the Debian-packaged versions.

[The story so far: I'm packaging pump.io for Debian.] 4 packages uploaded to NEW: node-webfinger validator.js websocket-driver node-openid 2 packages eliminated as not needed: set-immediate - deprecated crypto-cacerts - not needed on Debian 1 package in progress: node-databank Got my eye on: oauth-evanp - this is a fork with two patches, so I need to investigate the status of those. node-iconv-lite - needs files downloaded from the internet, so I'm considering how to add them to the source package dateformat/moment - there's an open discussion about combining Node.js modules, and I'm wondering if these are affected. Thoughts Currently I'm averaging around one package upload a day, I think? Which would mean ~1 month to go? But there may be challenges around getting packages through the NEW queue in time to build-depend on them. ...

I intend to intend to package pump.io for Debian. It's going to take a long time, but I don't know whether that's weeks or years yet. The world needs decentralized social networking. I discovered the tools that let me create this wiki summary of the progress in pump.io packaging. There are at least 35 dependencies that need uploading, so this would go a lot faster if it weren't a solo effort - if anyone else has some time, please let me know! But meanwhile I'm hoping to build some momentum. ...

Last night, I went to the London.pm tech meeting, along with a couple of colleagues from CV-Library. The talks, combined with the unusually hot weather we're having in the UK at the moment, combined with my holiday all last week, make it feel like I'm at a software conference. :) The highlight for me was Thomas Klausner's talk about OX (and AngularJS). We bought him a drink at the pub later to pump him for information about using Bread::Board, with some success. It was worth the long, late commute back to Southampton. ...

You've installed apt-transport-tor to help prevent targeted attacks on your system. Great! Now you want to build Debian packages using cowbuilder, and you notice these are still using plain HTTP. If you're willing to fetch the first few packages without using apt-transport-tor, this is as easy as: Add 'EXTRAPACKAGES="apt-transport-tor"' to your pbuilderrc. Run 'cowbuilder --update' Set 'MIRRORSITE=tor+http://http.debian.net/debian' in pbuilderrc. Run 'cowbuilder --update' again. Now any future builds should fetch build-dependencies over Tor. ...

apt-transport-tor 0.2.1 should now be on your preferred unstable Debian mirror. It will let you download Debian packages through Tor. New in this release: support for HTTPS over Tor, to keep up with people.debian.org. :) I haven't mentioned it before on this blog. To get it working, you need to "apt-get install apt-transport-tor", and then use sources.list lines like so: deb tor+http://http.debian.net/debian unstable main Note the use of http.debian.net in order to pick a mirror near to whichever Tor exit node. Throughput is surprisingly good. ...

Today I attended the Don't Spy On Us campaign's Day Of Action at Shoreditch Town Hall in London. I'm not sure how much actual action there was, but the talking was interesting. Retrospective Day of Action drinking game: drink every time you hear the phrase "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." The spooks have a really good marketing department. I don't write a lot on the internet any more - something I regret, actually. It can't even be because there are alternative places I am writing, because over the last couple of years I have been closing most of my social media accounts. I just share much less of myself online. ...