Rapid setup of new machines

Posted on October 6, 2011 by richo

There are tons of solutions about for rapidly deploying new infrastructure (chef, puppet, blueprint, babushka- the list is nigh on endless), however for a collection of home machines there are few options that support updating as frequently and mixing and matching configs the way I do.

My workstation died yesterday, and while I had a machine I could use temporarily, I knew I’d be getting a new box today. Knowing that I’d need to provision two machines in such rapid succession got me thinking about the best approach, and while my homedir itself is very portable (my pull_ext system for nesting arbitrary source control methods), the underlying platform is significantly less.

The solution I decided upon was staring me in the face this whole time, Debian’s packaging system. I created a stack of meta-packages to support underlying subsystems, for example:

    richo-environment, provides the dependencies for my shell environment (tmux, zsh, etc)
    richo-x11, provides my X11 environment (with my fork of openbox and urvxt, + other misc tools)

And so on, finally tied together with a richo-all package for when I want the whole shebang.

For anyone who’s curious the source is up on github and the packages are available from psych0tik’s public repo

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Hackathon begins

Posted on September 23, 2011 by richo

In just a few scant hours our hackathon will begin.

I’m currently working on setting up the radio, we hope to see you all in #hackathon on the IRC network.

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First psych0tik hackathon

Posted on September 11, 2011 by richo

psych0tik will be hosting it’s first hackathon on the weekend of the 24th of September! We’re passionate about hackery and want to dedicate a weekend to it.

For those not familiar with the term, a hackathon is generally when a group of people get together to churn out code for together, often- but not necessarily- on the same project. We’re proposing a social gathering, organized in both meatspace and the IRC to work on things together for a few days. We’ll be meeting in #hackathon for the event, and are organizing a few local meetups.

Melbourne, Aus. richo is organising a meetup, somewhere near the Melbourne CBD. We already have a few confirmed inners, but more are always welcome, as are venue suggestions. All we really need is some space, wifi and power. If anyone is planning to do anything involved with hardware could they let us know?

Dallas, Texas. samurai and NineClaw will hacking at things.  No physical meetup has been organized, but it’s not out of the question.  We can sort something out on the IRC and make it happen as we see fit.

Canada CarbonLifeForm will be participating, but at this stage no physical meetup is organised.

We’ll update this page if any more chapters get started

We put together a brief FAQ for anyone with questions, but if this doesn’t help, find us on IRC or leave a comment!

Q: What do I need to do to participate:
A: Find something to hack at, and show up! Your favorite open source project, a piece of hardware, even new firmware on your phone. The goal here is to focus on development in a friendly environment with a bunch of hackers, and potentially collaborate and get a new perspective on problem solving.

Q: I live nowhere near society!
A: No matter, join us on irc!

Q: I’m just starting a language, I don’t have a project yet. What do?
A: Work through some exercise projects with us, one of us is bound to know the language you’ve chosen and will be able to advise you on the finer points of your language du jour.

Q: What kinds of projects will be worked on?
richo: I’m setting the bar ludicrously high for myself, because there’s a lot I want to get done.

  1. I want to release a public version of pyBawt, since he has a pretty usable API
  2. I’ve got some features I want to implement in
  3. I want to get a few things working in openCog

samurai:

  1. Finishing up the pE-API
  2. Storm IRC upgrades
  3. Other stuff too be determined between now and then

CarbonLifeForm:

  1. Certificate Authority management scripts
  2. Updates to psych0tik services
  3. Improving IPv6 connectivity for psych0tik services
Posted in psych0tik IRC, psych0tik News | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Blog updates!

Posted on September 11, 2011 by samurai

After nearly 2 years, we’ve finally gotten the time and put in the effort to turn this boring, default WordPress blog into something a bit more unique.  (Took us long enough, didn’t it?)  The new banner was custom made and the new layout should make the site more accessible to visitors.  On top of the layout and other aesthetics, you’ll also notice we’ve added a fair bit more content to help cover the many facets of psych0tik.  Various projects have been added as pages and elaborated on, we’ve begun a long term project to be as open as possible about our privacy, and general psych0tik questions have been answered.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

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psych0tik’s Debian Repo

Posted on August 31, 2011 by richo

I’ve been using this privately for a while now, but it’s time to open it up to the public, I think.

You can include it with the following line in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://packages.psych0tik.net/apt/ sid main contrib non-free

At present this repo serves as an endpoint for

  • Packages I want to be included upstream, but are in progress
  • My forks of packages (Upstream, with my patches)

Packages are available for i386 and amd64, and by and large are tagged with -psych0tik.n in the version, however this is something I’ve still got to backport to some older work I did.

Current packages include openbox, rxvt-unicode, and vimpc (A developmental project by boysetsfrog), but I will soon have some form of RSS sorted for package updates.

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Haikuports ii-1.6 package (with SSL!)

Posted on August 29, 2011 by samurai

I’ve been playing with different operating systems on my netbook, trying to find a fun one to suite it  and I’ve come across Haiku (alpha3.)  It seems that Haikuports is the primary package manger Haiku and all it includes for IRC options is a broken echat package.  Haiku comes stock with Vision, a GUI client, but it doesn’t support SSL.  As I’m new to both Haiku and porting software, I figured I’d pick something small and simple that I was already familiar with – so I pulled down the source code to my friend ii.

After a few hours trying to sort out where Haiku stored the needed headers, feeling out the differences in those headers, and trying to conform to the new build environment I had a working IRC client with SSL support.  To save myself and others the frustration of doing this again, I took a look at Haikuports’ package system (a simple directory structure and shell script) and made ii-1.6 a package.

Too add this package to your system, untar the package taraball under net-irc (in my case this is /boot/develop/haikuports/net-irc/.)  Then to install, use one of the following commands:

For the SSL version: haikuporter –install ii-1.6-ssl –yes

For the non-SSL version: haikuporter –install ii-1.6 –yes

Things don’t seem to have that many moving parts, so assuming you haven’t gone wild and moved directories around I believe this should work on any Haiku Alpha3 system with Haikuports.

 

Posted in Guides, Hax, psych0tik IRC | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment