A Guide To Stand-Up Meeting – Part 1

people around you are not blind...

I’ve been doing daily stand-up meetings for all but 1.5 years of my time in the software development industry, and I had plenty of chance to observe the good and bad habits during the stand-up.

For this part, I’ll just highlight the need to keep what you say relevant to the project, to not pause too long and too often, and to not unconsciously perform politically incorrect hand movement where no one wants to pair-program with you afterward.

The above panel was drawn this morning while waiting at Caulfield Station. I’ll do part 2 on the next down time, whenever that is.

Known Hosts Issue With Net::SSH

This issue bit me twice within a month, and each time I had to spend a couple of hours to figure out the cause of the problem, mostly due to the obscurity of the error messages.

So I was using net-ssh-2.0.15 and jruby-openssl-0.5.1 for a piece of code that’s supposed to perform some remote operations. The Net::SSH usage itself was straightforward…

Net::SSH.start(@host, @username, :keys => @keys) do |ssh|
    ...
end

When I ran the above snippet on Windows XP, it gave this error message without any further information…

The system cannot find the path specified

Not exactly helpful, eh? And after some sleuthing around, it came down to add(host, key) method in lib/net/ssh/known_hosts.rb :

def add(host, key)
  File.open(source, "a") do |file|
    blob = [Net::SSH::Buffer.from(:key, key).to_s].pack("m*").gsub(/\s/, "")
    file.puts "#{host} #{key.ssh_type} #{blob}"
  end
end

This method is trying to add an entry to the known_hosts file, which location is stored in source variable. In my case, the variable resolved to C:/.ssh/known_hosts . But the problem was that the .ssh directory didn’t exist. So I simply created it.

Lo and behold, when I ran this piece of code on a Solaris box weeks later, I hit another error message…

No such file or directory (IOError)

which turned out to be caused by the exact same thing, but this time the location is <script_home>/.ssh/known_hosts . The workaround was the same, I simply created the .ssh directory.

So there you go, hopefully it helps whoever else was confused by the unclear error messages.
And in terms of a long term solution, it would be nice if add(host, key) checks or even creates the .ssh directory before attempting to write known_hosts file.

On Rude Customer Service

... yep, robots, preferably configurable via Hudson.

I never understood the point of having humans doing customer service if they can’t be polite and friendly to fellow human.

p.s. Introducing LatteGirl. Here’s her attempt at drawing CoderBoy and herself.

Adelaide Getaway 2009

Some photos from my Adelaide getaway sometime late last year. Enjoyed a nice breakfast at Briccone, Rundle Mall, somewhere in the eastern side of the CBD. But the highlight of Adelaide was Glenelg, a beautiful and relaxing suburb by the beach.

Originals are available from the photoset page on Flickr.