Gee, before I paint this, let me make this cheap hollow luan-sheeted door better with a new doorknob and door stop.

I’ll see if I can fill it with insulating foam, too, for sound-deadening.

Also, it’s sticking at the door-jamb between the hinges and messing up the previous paint, so I’ll fix that somehow too.

See, new solid wood doors cost $320 or so from Lowes, and this house isn’t in a neighborhood where such investment would be returned at resale.

The door stop was $3 and took 20 seconds to replace. While at Lowes, I picked up a new door knob set.

I removed the old door, stripped it of its hinges and doorknob, and proceeded to drill 8 3/8″ holes into each of its 2 long edges for spray insulating foam injection. Six cans of foam, some clean up with razor and sandpaper, and 24 hours later, the inner side of the door and edges were ready to paint chocolate. Painted out in the sun, laid on makeshift saw-horses, I noticed a bit of a bow developing in the door, but shrugged it off. An hour later, my mother called to see what I was up to that fine Saturday. I mentioned the bowing of the door.

“Is it out in the sun?”
“Yes”
“That’ll do it.”

Knowing there wasn’t really anything I could do about it now, I decided I’d just have to see how things settled after drying and test fitting.

After several days of being re-hinged and mounted, the door was still pinching at the door jamb about 6 inches from being fully closed.

Door removal, two Dremel sessions with a sanding drum later, and another separate sanding of the door edge surface to remove ~1mm, the door edge and jamb trim were finely honed to allow the door to close all the way. I even shimmed under the hinges in strategic spots to perfectly center the door within the trim to allow as much room for paint as possible.

I repainted any sanded surfaces with chocolate, then, 2 weeks later, I motivated myself to finally get the paint and paint the outer surface of the door white to match the hallway.

You’re not going to win, door.

Having never installed a doorknob before, I read the instructions. Turns out the semi-old doorknob was through a very rough 2 1/32″ hole in the door and 2 1/8″ is the standard. I decided I’d have to drill a new hole. It also turns out the old bolt receiving plate was at least an inch longer (its mating surface with the door jamb) than the new one, so I’d have some wood filling to do.

How am I going to drill this new 2 1/8″ hole when there’s no material for the centering bit in this hole saw to grab? This saw is just going to jump all over the place and chew the hell out of the door everywhere but where I want.

After, indeed, chewing the hell out of the doorknob area, I went to Lowes ready to pick up a new door slab/blank to start over with. In the door aisle, I barely happened across a slick little door lock installation kit which has a guide you mount to the door for receiving the hole saw. Another I-don’t-even-remember-anymore dollars later, I was at home with the kit and not a new door. I mounted the guide to the door and drilled a nice clean hole. The area around the hole that was chewed up would have to get some wood filler, sanding, and repainting.

Min-Wax Performance Wood Filler to the rescue.

I filled in the entire receiving plate area and filled in the chewed area around the doorknob hole. Though the directions call for only 30 minutes of dry time before sanding, I gave the filler a day to dry then sanded. With some careful marking, Dremel, chisel, and paint work, everything got finished up.

I win.

I’d like to point out up front here that Marek Stój (the InstaFetch author) has been completely forthcoming when emailed for details. This isn’t so much a bashing of InstaFetch as it is a lesson in care needed when installing and using so-called “native apps”.

There are 2 take-aways from this article is: remember to use unique passwords for all sites (duh) and pressure developers of paid apps to make use of secure connections

Is it a big deal if someone gets my Instapaper password? Not really, but yes. It shouldn’t be possible, regardless of the sensitivity level (the data in my Instapaper account). Looking through what is possible as a logged in Instapaper user, I’m not crazy about the idea of someone having my password.

Since I don’t have easy access to a wireless sniffer setup to watch the traffic from my phone, I installed the Android SDK, sideloaded InstafetchPro.apk (I’m a paying subscriber to InstaFetch), and fired up Wireshark to snatch the packets off my home wired network for examination.

Discoveries:

1. InstaFetch does not communicate with Instapaper via TLS (https), yet Instapaper offers it. Your Instapaper account name and password are sent unencrypted from your device to the Instapaper server farm by InstaFetch. There is no option in InstaFetch to enable https to Instapaper.com that I can find.
2. If you email text to your unique Instapaper email address for later reading, that data is stored on Instapaper’s servers and only accessible via an authenticated Instapaper account (of course). Since InstaFetch offers its own transcoding services (it’s not just an Instapaper client), it will send your Instapaper username and password (with other details) over bare http as a base64-encoded (not secure) string value to the variable ctx. The following data may be encoded in ctx: instapaper username, instapaper password (sent ONLY for articles hosted on Instapaper.com; this is needed so that the InstaFetch server can fetch the article and transcode it), flag saying whether it’s a pro app, platform id (Android/Windows Phone 7), app version.

One of the bare http requests to the InstaFetch server is shown below where you can see the base64 encoding of ctx:

GET /nreadability/transcode?
url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fprint%2F%3F%2Fnews%2Ffeatures%2Fcollege-education-2011-5%2F&
rst=newspaper&rmg=xnarrow&
rsi=small&
ctx=Jmluc3RhcGFwZXJVc2VyTmFtZT1qYmxhaW5lQGtpY2tmbG9wLm5ldCZwbGF0Zm9ybT1BbmRyb2lkJnZlcn

Decoding the value of ctx via a simple web-based base64 decoder form gets us the following, where you can see this raw information. Luckily for me, I don’t make use of the Instapaper email drop box and my password is not included in the information:

1. After charging via wall outlet for a few hours, I powered it on and was presented with a picture of a USB cable pointing to an icon reading “iTunes”. I read the ~50 words of printed material that came with the product which indicated the set up process for it involves syncing to iTunes. Okay, so already I have a device I cannot do anything with until I hook it to a computer, install software on the computer, and mate the two together. What if I wanted to power the unit on, configure the Wi-Fi and surf the net?
2. I downloaded and installed the latest version of iTunes for 64-bit Windows. It required a reboot.
3. After rebooting, I hooked the iPad up to my PC via USB cable.
4. iTunes opened up automatically then proceeded to do nothing but show me a “busy” mouse pointer for over a minute.
5. iTunes then showed me the standard iTunes store. Let me read that ~50 word card again… “follow the on-screen instructions in iTunes”
6. Looking through the iTunes application menus, I cannot find anything indicating a way to query for a new device, sync a device (greyed out disabled option), etc. I closed iTunes.
7. I uninstalled iTunes completely and rebooted.
8. I reinstalled iTunes completely and rebooted.
9. I hooked the iPad up to a USB port again.
10. iTunes loaded automatically, and again proceeded to do nothing whatsoever for over a minute, then showed me the iTunes store. I closed iTunes.
11. I held the iPad power button down which brought up a screen allowing me to power the device off entirely. I did that. I then turned the iPad back on and waited.
12. iTunes automatically ran on the PC, did nothing for over a minute, then showed me the iTunes Store.
13. Searching around on the net, I found forums filled with people bitching about iTunes syncing problems with all manner of Apple products hooked to Apple computers as well as Windows-running PCs, yet none indicating any real solution so far.

I have seen the future. It looks just like Windows circa 1998.

• ePub files cannot be viewed in landscape orientation (!)
• None of the “Library” application’s screens can be viewed in landscape orientation (looking at a book shelf, navigating folders under My Files, etc)
• No Flash (Youtube works)
• O’Reilly “Head First” PDF files are missing all images when viewed (images are shown when viewed on a PC with any typical PDF viewer)
• Double-tap in the browser zooms. Double-tap in the PDF viewer does nothing, and could. Dumb.
• “Back” button is in a different location in just about every application that has one
• Browsing “Library > My Files > Pictures” I cannot long-press on an image to set it as my wallpaper (only option is “Open”). Dumb.
• Browsing “Library > My Files > [anything]” if you change the view mode via the upper right menu, you lose your place and are taken back to the top of “media” which contains “My Files”. Dumb.
• There is no real overall consistency. Every application or function appears to have been written by a different group of developers.
• Some files I’ve placed in “media > My Files > Books” result in “Failed to obtain item details” when long-pressed while trying to add them to a shelf or home screen. Awesome.
• “Sideloaded” books (not purchased from B&N) cannot be pinned to the main desktop. This makes the desktop almost entirely useless for me.
• ADDED 1/28/2011: The 1.1.0 update from B&N fixes none of these items.
• ADDED 1/28/2011: Viewing in landscape mode, selecting the quick settings (lower right) changes everything to portrait mode while you change your settings. When you’re finished, everything goes back to landscape mode.
• ADDED 1/28/2011: Pinch-zooming in the browser was added in 1.1.0. It is buggy and inconsistent.
• ADDED 1/28/2011: Moving a web page in order to bring up the +/- zoom buttons, then clicking + (zoom in) almost never does anything at all the first time.

Everything else works well for me so far, but it may be going back to the store or get rooted. The finish quality on the software is really poor.

facter-1.5.8:beijing> ruby install.rb --destdir=/net/silmaril/export/puppet
...
facter-1.5.8:beijing>

Good.

puppet-2.6.4:beijing> more README
Documentation (and detailed install instructions) can be found
online at http://docs.puppetlabs.com/.

Additional documentation can also be found at the Puppet Wiki:

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/

Generally, you need the following things installed:

* Ruby >= 1.8.1 (earlier releases might work but probably not)

* The Ruby OpenSSL library.  For some reason, this often isn't included
  in the main ruby distributions.  You can test for it by running
  'ruby -ropenssl -e "puts :yep"'.  If that errors out, you're missing the
  library.

  If your distribution doesn't come with the necessary library (e.g., on Debian
  and Ubuntu you need to install libopenssl-ruby), then you'll probably have to
  compile Ruby yourself, since it's part of the standard library and not
  available separately.  You could probably just compile and install that one
  library, though.

* The Ruby XMLRPC client and server libraries.  For some reason, this often
  isn't included in the main ruby distributions.  You can test for it by
  running 'ruby -rxmlrpc/client -e "puts :yep"'.  If that errors out, you're
  missing the library.

* Facter => 1.5.1
  You can get this from < http://puppetlabs.com/projects/facter >

Maybe there’s a good reason, but why are you telling me all of these minimum requirements instead of just checking for it in the build/install process?

puppet-2.6.4:beijing> ruby install.rb --destdir=/net/silmaril/export/puppet
which: no ronn in (/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/bin)
Could not load facter; cannot install
puppet-2.6.4:beijing>

WTF is ‘ronn’? This is a fully loaded RHEL 5.5 box I am on.

puppet-2.6.4:beijing> ruby install.rb --help
which: no ronn in (/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/bin)
Could not load facter; cannot install
puppet-2.6.4:beijing>

Awesome!

puppet-2.6.4:beijing> ruby install.rb --fdgfsdgfds
which: no ronn in (/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/bin)
install: invalid option: --fdgfsdgfds
install.rb:92:in `mkdir': Permission denied - /etc/puppet (Errno::EACCES)
        from install.rb:92:in `do_configs'
        from install.rb:492
puppet-2.6.4:beijing>

So you got an invalid argument, and continued to try to mkdir? That doesn’t seem smart.

I guess I’ll look at the source for install.rb in order to find the ronn reference?

# install.rb
# ...
begin
  if $haverdoc
    ronn = %x{which ronn}
    $haveman = true
  else
    $haveman = false
  end
rescue
  puts "Missing ronn; skipping man page creation"
  $haveman = false
end
# ...

So much for displaying that error message. Why wouldn’t you also display that along with ‘$haveman = false’ after the else clause?

Whatever, let’s just try to address the fact that Facter is not found. I’m not chasing the ronn rabbit down a hole, even though it’s not clear to me if I need it or not or what the hell it is.

puppet-2.6.4:beijing> find /net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr -name fac\*
/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/bin/facter
/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/facter.rb
/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/facter
/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/facter/facterversion.rb
/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/facter/util/fact.rb
puppet-2.6.4:beijing>

Apparently /net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/bin being in my PATH does not mean anything to the Ruby library search logic. This obviously isn’t Puppet’s fault.

Digging around, I find that I can set RUBYLIB for non-standard places holding Ruby libraries/modules.

export RUBYLIB=/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib
    ruby install.rb --destdir=/net/silmaril/export/puppet = FAIL
export RUBYLIB=/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib/ruby
    ruby install.rb --destdir=/net/silmaril/export/puppet = FAIL
export RUBYLIB=/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby
    ruby install.rb --destdir=/net/silmaril/export/puppet = FAIL
export RUBYLIB=/net/silmaril/export/puppet/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8
SUCCESS

And apparently search for Ruby libraries only works at some unknown-to-me level of directory traversal. This, too, obviously isn’t Puppet’s fault.

So far, this is a pantload of fun.

Update: See comment below from Allen @ O’Reilly. It’s in the works.

An aside to really pick on O’Reilly now, searching on oreilly.com for “errata” provides absolutely zero useful information on how and where to submit errata for an O’Reilly book.

This flies in the face of the following tweet. Tim, practice what you preach!

Here’s the mentioned Report An Error website from the tweet.

Update: O’Reilly is going to take care of this, according to Tim O.

Update: Jeremy also pointed out the following story to me, from Lifehacker : Get Perks from your Favorite Apps.