Automation

haskell-kata’s Quickstart now has this neat little ditty at the start: 1 2 git config --local alias.build '!sh -c \'for file in *.hs; do ghc -o "${file%.hs}-bin" "$file"; done\'' git build Git is the gift that keeps on giving. I was on the hunt for a subdirectory-scoped alias, and I just discovered this incredibly flexible way to create new Git subcommands. History: 2 years ago I read through the 1200 page behemoth Haskell Programming from First Principles. (Recommended!) I walked out of that with some 1300 Anki flashcards that I have been chewing through ever since. ...

For some reason, my daily archive of Finland’s “clear news” broadcast didn’t work today. Why not? TL;DR: Just a Git snafu. Quick recap of the archive: There are 3 Git repos: selkouutiset-scrape simply scrapes the HTML https://yle.fi/selkouutiset at 6 PM every day via a Github Action. selkouutiset-scrape-cleaned pulls in scrape and turns it into a stack of translated, properly-named Markdown files, by the magic of shell scripts, systemd timers, and a tiny VM in a datacenter somewhere. selkouutiset-archive wraps scrape-cleaned into a comfy Hugo theme, again with the magic of systemd timers and a tiny VM, and publishes it to Github Pages. Which part of the chain broke? ...

I’ve discovered one big downside of [putting systemd times into ~/.config/systemd/user/][1]: They stop running when you log out. Two ways around this problem: Bite the bullet, and install the timers into /etc/systemd/. This means giving up chezmoi version control, making the overall system more snowflake-y. I’m not crazy about it. Remote in with tmux, instead of ever logging out, just use C-b d to detach from the session. I’m going with #2. The lead developer of ktty is known not to like tmux, so there’s probably a way to detach long-running SSH sections inside of kitty itself – but I haven’t found it yet. Have you? ...

Some more updates to the main repo of this TIL site today, in particular I have added a new fzf-tags.fish script. til uses this script to Scrapes all the YAML tags: frontmatter from all current Markdown posts, Puts me into a multi-select fzf menu containing them, and Puts anything I select into the tags: of the new blog post. Tags form natural breadcrumb trails throughout a blog as it grows organically over time. Many an afternoon have I spent reading one or two particular tags of interest from a prolific blog. But, if you don’t remember to reuse the tags in the first place, you’ll never build the trail in the first place. ...

Tonight I was hacking away at some more little automations to make this TIL nice and presentable over at https://til.andrew-quinn.me/. Git has a wonderful system called “hooks” which live under .git/hooks/, come loaded with examples so you can remember how they all work, and – surprisingly – don’t contain a local post-push hook! There’s post-receive, but that expects to be able to run a script on the server side – not helpful when I’m pushing to one of Github’s many, many anonymous boxes. ...