I had a thought the other day about the fact I keep mentioning to people how easy it is to setup a simple web service to sign Puppet certificates via an API. So I thought I’d write a simple prototype to demonstrate how easy. It’s incredibly basic but has scope to be easily extended to do a variety of things and needs better output and cleaner error handling. I called it PSigner and I hope it’s useful to someone.

I launched the Puppet Online Linter last week as a beta. It didn’t do much that was useful initially: uploading files for parsing and lint and the same functionality via an API. The longer term plan though was to extend these capabilities to be a more well rounded web service. I’ve just made the first of these additions, a GitHub Post-Receive hook. When a new commit is made to a repository with the hook enabled the Linter will download the new or modified files, parse and lint them and then send an email report of the results to the commit author’s email address.

Last night I was playing around with ways to lint Puppet manifests automatically.1 That led me to an idea: Why not automate Puppet linting online. So I quickly created the Puppet Online Linter. It has two modes of operation: Upload one or more manifest files and submit them for linting. The error output will be returned on screen. Send a manifest via the API I have some plans to add display of the manifest itself for each error.

A Twitter buddy posted this article a while ago and that started a somewhat rambling 140 character discussion about what home and place actually mean. Some of the post resonates with me. I do miss friends and family and it’s hard to watch as you become disconnected from them. My partner is watching her niece, nephew and cousins grow up via photos and Skype. I’ve certainly been in that conversation with other expats laughing over some of the differences between one home and the other (what’s with tomato ketchup dudes?

First there was this post. In summary: “The cloud (actually Heroku) sucks and I went physical”. Then there was this post: “The cloud (actually Heroku) is AWESOME and can make you coffee and bagels”. Now there is this post. My immediate response to both posts was: Really? The cloud isn’t for anyone? Or alternatively the cloud is for everyone? Every time? It’s a total infrastructure panacea? Or it’s not? There’s not a single pro or a single con depending on who is making the argument?