Category Archives: Software

Revision control and sheet music

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Musescore is a wonderful tool. It has made a huge impact on my musical development over the past couple decades. Sheet music is the primary way I communicate and record musical ideas, and Musescore the tool and musecore.com have combined to make a process that works for me and my musical needs.

I have also spent a few years writing software, and the methods that we have learned to use in software development have evolved due to needs of scale and flexibility. I would like to apply some of those lessons to how I manage sheet music. But there are disconnects.

The biggest issue I have is that I want the same core song in multiple different but related formats. The second biggest issue is that I want to be able to make changes to a song, and to collaborate with other composers in making those changes.

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When to Ansible? When to Shell?

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Any new technology requires a mental effort to understand. When trying to automate the boring stuff, one decision I have to make is whether to use straight shell scripting or whether to perform that operation using Ansible. What I want to do is look at a simple Ansible playbook I have written, and then compare what the comparable shell script would look like to determine if it would help my team to use Ansible or not in this situation.

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Cleaning a machine

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After you get something working, you find you might have missed a step in documenting how you got that working. You might have installed a package that you didn’t remember. Or maybe you set up a network connection. In my case, I find I have often brute-forced the SSH setup for later provisioning. Since this is done once, and then forgotten, often in the push to “just get work done” I have had to go back and redo this (again usually manually) when I get to a new machine.

To avoid this, I am documenting what I can do to get a new machine up and running in a state where SSH connections (and forwarding) can be reliably run. This process should be automatable, but at a minimum, it should be understood.

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Remotely checking out from git using ssh key forwarding.

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Much of my work is done on machines that are only on load to me, not permanently assigned. Thus, I need to be able to provision them quickly and with a minimum of fuss. One action I routinely need to do is to check code out of a git server, such as gitlab.com. We use ssh keys to authenticate to gitlab. I need a way to do this securely when working on a remote machine. Here’s what I have found

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Print the line after a match using AWK

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We have an internal system for allocating hardware to developers on a short term basis. While the software does have a web API, it is not enabled by default, nor in our deployment. Thus, we end up caching a local copy of the data about the machine. The machine names are a glom of architecture, and location. So I make a file with the name of the machine, and a symlink to the one I am currently using.

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