This weekend we attended CasItConf13. I had a blast at met a lot of really cool people. I attended presentations on Logstash, IPv6, Chef and more. Jordan Sissel, in particular, did a great job of presenting Logstash. After his talk we met up and had a neat conversation. He showed me an app he had created called fingerpoken. Its a bit out of date and we had to do some hacks but I was able to get it up and running in a half-hour lunch break and still have time to demolish some tasty lunch provided by the wonderful folks over at Puppet Labs. Fingerpoken is an app that lets you send mouse and keyboard events to a computer with a smartphone.
And thats really what its all about. Is the tool simple and easy enough that you can get it going in a crunch? Are all the nonintuitive parts ripped out and replaced with sane defaults and the tool just 'goes'? In fingerpoken's case not really. We had to do some:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libxdo.so.2 /usr/lib/libxdo.soBut, what is the point of having the author of your tool nearby if not to tell you to do that? And yes, the abi is evidently close enough to just work in that case.
I am very impressed that I was able to get such high-level functionality out of a tool in a short period of time and under pressure. If your tool passes the 'setup at lunch at a conference' test, you're doing pretty dang good. If it doesn't, look for places to streamline it. I'm happy to test your random tool, please let me know.
My talk, on the Computer Action Team/Braindump, is available on my github and you can download the pdf from here.
In other news, it seems that github no longer allows you to download the raw files out of repositories if they are above a certain size. Possibly more on that later.
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