Latest posts

Auto-refreshing Google Chrome on file changes.

I am known for being an lazy ass, one of the ways of coping with this horrible disease is automating any repetitive task that takes more that 5 minutes of work. So, in my free time, when I’m not dreaming of eating cake on a magical dessert island, I …

Ditching Wordpress and becoming one of the cool kids

I’ve been a Wordpress user and developer for a long long time but lately this nagging idea kept crawling in the back of my head, why not switch my website to a statically generated one? Well, a 3 hour train journey and a lot of boredom finally pushed me …

Building a messaging framework for Django

As you might have noticed, one of the key usability features that we were missing on Iconfinder was the ability to display so called “flash messages.” Flash messages are one-time notification messages shown to the user after processing a form or handling other types of user input, so the user …

Launching services after Vagrant mount

I recently had to set up a Vagrant project where all the configuration files for services like nginx, supervisor, mysql where symlinks pointing to files residing on the Vagrant synced folder. This turned out to be a bit of a problem, when the Vagrant box boots, one of the last …

Move fast and break things

Move fast and break things is one of the founding mantras of Facebook and I think it defines a company culture that can apply to almost any technology startup. It is a culture who’s principles embody, promote and encourage communication, constant and fast iterations, tight feedback loop between the …

Getting the IP address of a specific interface in puppet using facter

One of the problems that I find annoying in puppet is that you can’t easily obtain the IP address of a specific network interface.

Let’s say that you want to define a class or type to which you wish to pass a interface name and use it’s …

Vagrant and SSH agent forwarding

I haven’t even started yet and I can already hear you muttering over there, “What the hell is this Vagrant thing and why should I care?”. Well, Vagrant is a wrapper around VirtualBox, the virtualization software, that can create homogeneous development environments automatically without any effort from the developer …

Copenhagen and my r’bad_luck’

To tell you the story of my string of bad luck and my first week of internship in Copenhagen, I’ll first have to start with my last week. It was Saturday, the day before I had to leave for Copenhagen, I was there minding my own business, when my …

About stuff

I moved to Denmark, from my home country Romania, exactly two years ago to the day with just a small suitcase and a backpack. In them I had a hand-full of clothes, a few personal belongings and my laptop.

During the past couple of years things started to accumulate, I …

Generating password hashes with puppet

Puppet expects the user’s password to be encrypted in the format the local system expects, for most modern Unix-like systems (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc.) this format is a salted SHA1 password hash.

To generate a password hash to use with puppet manifest files you can use the mkpasswd utility …