InquiryLabs
Politics, Programming and Possibilities
Archive for November, 2009
Sign the Get FISA Right Open Letter
Author: Duane Johnson25 Nov
This open letter is the product of a long and thoughtful process that I’ve been paying attention to, associated with a mailing list led by Jon Pincus.
Please add your name to the list of concerned Americans if you care about restoring our right to know when we’re being wiretapped by the government (unless there’s a warrant), and especially if you believe the “national security letters” should be done away with.
I think it’s a terrible thing for a government to be able to systematically silence citizens who oppose it, and this open letter seems to be a positive action in that direction.
Reading a File with Node.js
Author: Duane Johnson23 Nov
I’m playing with Node.js right now for one of my side projects and found that it was a little more difficult to read a file than I had anticipated. First, I looked for an “obvious” function that would read in an entire file, but there didn’t seem to be anything like Ruby’s IO.read (I was wrong, however, see the posix.cat solution below).
In order to get the benefits of Node.js’s event-based system, we have to use the posix utilities. Here’s what I tried first:
var prepareTemplate = function(file, callback) {posix.open(file, posix.O_RDONLY).addCallback(function(fd) {if (fd) {posix.read(fd, 100000, 0).addCallback(function(data, bytes_read) {var template = jsont.fromString(data);callback(template);});posix.close(fd);} else {sys.puts(”Unable to read file: ” + file);}});};
Node.js croaked with the following error, however:
/Users/duanejohnson/Projects/hello.js:15posix.open(file, process.O_RDONLY);^TypeError: Bad argument
Contrary to these presumably out-of-date slides, the documentation shows that the O_CREAT, O_RDONLY etc. constants are to be found in the “process” namespace (not the “posix” namespace). That was easy to switch…. but same error. It turns out the “mode” parameter is not optional:
var prepareTemplate = function(file, callback) {posix.open(file, posix.O_RDONLY).addCallback(function(fd) {if (fd) {posix.open(file, process.O_RDONLY, 438).addCallback(function(fd) {
The “438″ in there is simply octal “666″ (read/write permissions) turned into decimal.
Last but not least, I found that there is a “trick” to loading files if you don’t care about concurrency (for example, when the server starts up and you want to load templates):
var data = posix.cat(file).wait();
Alternatively, you can use addCallback() instead of wait() to get around the concurrency issues.
End the Fed Rally Chicago
Author: Duane Johnson22 Nov
Kelty and I just went for a walk in Millenium Park and happened across an End the Fed rally. It was neat to see support for Ron Paul’s “Audit the Federal Reserve” bill there.
Sent from my iPhoneAudit the Fed Bill Approved
Author: Duane Johnson19 Nov
This is a snippet of the good news:
The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.
Thank goodness Rep. Mel Watt’s anti-transparency measure was given the no-go.
