Today I setup declarative gmail filters using some Google internal tooling. I'm
now adding labels to messages from Critique, Sphinx, Ganpati, "The Daily
Insider", messages sent directly to me, and more. These labels are applied
server-side.
On the notmuch, client-side, I'm support saved queries for these newly created
gmail labels.
I can already tag emails with `+` and `-`. Here I'm defining KBDs for moving
messages from my inbox into: action, review, and waiting. I'm also mutually
excluding messages in action, review, and waiting from inbox and vice versa.
I'm also supporting a "muted" tag for now; I'm still learning how to use notmuch
with email threads, but I'm hoping the "muted" tag will prevent future messages
in a thread from arriving in my inbox.
After running `systemctl --user enable lieer-google.timer`, systemctl created a
symlink pointing from timers.target.wants -> ../lieer-google.timer. I'm not sure
if tracking symlinks in a git repository is such a useful idea.
This commit reminds me that I could and should be using Nix to better manage
symlink creation and destruction.
Until I have more opinions about my workflow with notmuch, I will redefine the
KBDs from Gmail that I'm comfortable with. While not many KBDs are defined here,
evil-collection defines dozens, many of which I find reasonable; those that I
disagree with, I've unbound in this commit.
Composing emails in notmuch feels similar to writing a commit message with
magit. I want to be able to type :x or :wq, but these commands don't DWIM. For
magit, I'd like that behavior to be the same as `C-c C-c`; not surprisingly, for
notmuch, I'd like the same.
I've bound :x to do this for notmuch. I'd like to define a macro that can easily
define buffer-local evil-ex commands for particular modes. This should lower the
cost of defining evil-ex commands and hopefully convince me to support some of
this desired behavior.
I'm borrowing from @tazjin's dotfiles, which are stored in Git on Borg. When you
call `nix-build ~/briefcase/mail`, result will output a systemd units, which you
should move to ~/.config/systemd/user/.
The path to `gmi`, which is Lieer's executable, exists in /nix/store, and you
can read it from the systemd unit file (i.e. lieer-google.service). Lieer
synchronizes notmuch with Gmail and Gmail with notmuch.
Here's a general sequence of commands that I ran to set everything up. Special
thank you to @tazjin for helping me with all of this. These steps are not
certified as a tutorial; I'm recalling them from memory. When I set this up
things didn't work as expected immediately and I had to troubleshoot.
```shell
> mkdir -p ~/mail/account.google
> cd ~/mail/account.google
> nix-env -iA nixpkgs.notmuch
> notmuch setup
> nix-build ~/briefcase/mail
> cp ./result/lieer-google.{service,timer} ~/.config/systemd/user
> rm ./result
> systemctl --user cat lieer-google
...copy the /nix/store path to gmi...
> notmuch new
> /nix/store/gmi init
...follow the OAuth login flow...
>
```
Unknowns?
- Do I need to call `systemctl --user start lieer-google` at startup? Or should
I move these units to user/default.target.wants?
- Can I send email from notmuch?
- How do I use notmuch to delete email? To respond to emails? To do anything?
Todo:
- Once this configuration stabilizes, I should package everything with Nix.
Write a function to merge meeting times. Added an in-place solution, which the
"Bonus" section suggested attempting to solve.
- Added some simple benchmarks to test the performance differences between the
in-place and not-in-place variants. To my surprise, the in-place solution was
consistently slower than the not-in-place solution.
After working with fish for a few weeks, I've decided that I prefer aliases to
abbreviations.
Why? When I reverse search through my command history, I search for the
what I typed and not what it expanded to. Some of my aliases wrap existing
tools encoding my preference for tool A if tool B isn't available. For example I
alias vim to neovim. When nvim isn't available on $PATH, typing vim will
expand to nvim, which will in turn fail.
I previously had an alias defined as `simple_vim`, which would start an instance
of Vim with a bare bones config. I had a to-do to Nixify it. That is
now (mostly) to-done.
When I try and install it with `nix-env -f ~/briefcase -iA tools.simple_vim`,
Nix fails and says that pkgs.stdenv is undefined. I will need to fix this one
day, but it is neither important nor urgent...
I had a spare fifteen minutes and decided that I should tidy up my
monorepo. The work of tidying up is not finished; this is a small step in the
right direction.
TL;DR
- Created a tools directory
- Created a scratch directory (see README.md for more information)
- Added README.md to third_party
- Renamed delete_dotfile_symlinks -> symlinkManager
- Packaged symlinkManager as an executable symlink-mgr using buildGo
I was a bit weaker than I expected to be in my most recent interview using
TypeScript. To improve, I think I'd like to attempt solving some of the
InterviewCake.com questions using TypeScript.
If you've read the previous commits, the inspiration for `run` arose because I
need to call `npx ts-code <file>`, which is easy enough to remember, but I'd
still rather just call `run <file>`.
I'd like to be able to just call `run file.py` and have a program DWIM. I'm
working on run as a step in this direction. Define a simple configuration that
maps file extensions to template strings where "$file" is replaced with the
argv[1].
It basically works but there are outstanding TODOs. See the README and source
code for more information.
Supporting a function that resolves a file name checking for the nearest
occurrence of the file from the CWD until it traverses beyond the user's home
directory, after which point it checks in backupPaths.
Today when I opened my laptop, I wasn't sure if it was powered off or on because
the display was blank. Thankfully the volume was muted and the LED indicator was
on, which informed me that the laptop was powered on. This saved me from
unnecessarily rebooting.
What happened was that last night I was working from home and using my external
monitor. Usually I enable my external display and disable my laptop display. But
when I left for work this morning, I unplugged the HDMI cable from my laptop
without disabling the external display or enabling the laptop display.
I noticed a XF86 button on my laptop entitled XF86Display. I figured that this
could be a nice place to bind a key to toggle my laptop display on or off. At
the last minute, I had the idea to just cycle through all possible display
configurations that I use; there are only three anyways. When dealing with more
than two states, I realized I should use a cycle to model the configuration
states. Now I'm thinking that I should be using cycles to model toggles as well
- instead of just using a top-level variable that I `setq` over. I haven't
refactored existing toggles to be cycles, but I am excited about this new
keybinding.
This commit additionally:
- Moves keybindings out of display.el and into keybindings.el
- Conditionally sets KBDs if using work laptop
When I ran `pass show some/password`, gpg, which uses pinentry would start its
ncurses password prompt. For many this wouldn't be a problem but my current
vterm version cannot send the <return> key to ncurses, so once that prompt
appears, I cannot get rid of it without C-c and killing the shell. For a day or
more I just opened suffered through this.
Today I dug more into the issue and when I ran `pinentry --version` it warned
that it couldn't connect to DBUS. After searching for more information on this,
people with similar issues recommended starting their window managers with
`dbus-launch`. I previously started Emacs with `dbus-launch`, but only because
some i3 documentation told me to do so and I just copied them. Then I switched
to EXWM and copied that pattern over. A friend of mine uses EXWM and starts his
without calling `dbus-launch` but `exec emacs`. I mirrored this thinking that I
no longer needed `dbus-launch`. What I didn't know, however, was that this
friend was using a Nix-built Emacs (like me) except that his wrapped a native
Emacs installation while mine doesn't. His natively wrapped Emacs installation
has the proper variables set to interact with dbus and other important Linuxy
things that I don't fully understand. Since I'm using a Nix-built Emacs, some of
my variables are unset or set to different values than programs expect. This is
why when I try and start `gnome-terminal` or `terminator`, they refuse to start
and warn about many unset or incorrectly variables and not being able to bind to
sockets, etc.
This change reverts back to using `dbus-launch` until I have a better
understanding of Linux, Nix, etc.
Grouping entries by country and sorting according to Done -> Todo.
I should consider sorting the country groups alphabetically by the country name
and then each entry alphabetically by its city name.
Right now, however, this isn't a priority.
In 2013, I lived in Grenoble with a host family. During that time, I visited
Lyons, as well as a few other locations that aren't tracked by this document at
the time of this writing.
I spent two weeks on the Spanish islands of Ibiza and Formentera over the
summer.
I went to Hamburg twice to visit Mimi's family - once in the summer; once for
Christmas.
In the Fall, I went to Bordeaux with Mimi where we stayed at a charming Airbnb.
I spent New Years Eve in Amsterdam with Matty, Ryan, and Conor.
I may be missing a few other places that I visited in 2019; it was an active
year.
Without these KBDs, C-k kills buffers. As an evil-mode user, I expect C-k to
move upwards. As such, adding the `ivy-switch-buffer-map` to my existing ivy
KBDs that handle a similar use-case.
Note: I'm unsure why the KBDs in evil-collection didn't cover this.
- Move state "gen server" to the top of main/0
- Initialize it as empty
- Ensure that persistTokens/2 is called whenever the state changes
- Support setState/2 (similar in spirit to getState/0)
Problem:
When SIGINT signals we're sent to the token server, it would shut down without
completing the shutdown procedure. The shutdown procedure would persist the
application state (i.e. access and refresh tokens).
This is problematic for the following sequence of events:
t0. Access and refresh tokens retrieved from kv.json and used as app state.
t1. Tokens are refreshed but not persisted. (I'm still unsure how this
happens). Remember that this means the previous access and refresh tokens
from t0 are now invalid.
t2. User sends a SIGINT.
t3. Token server shuts down.
t4. Token server is restarted, kv.json is used as the app state even though its
tokens are now invalid.
t5. Tokens are attempted to refresh, Monzo API rejects the tokens because
they're invalid.
Now we need to provide the token server with valid access and refresh tokens
otherwise we will repeat the loop described above. This means going through the
client authorization flow again or copying and pasting the tokens logged from
the token server into kv.json. Either scenario is more manual than I'd prefer.
Solution:
Use a buffered channel to receive the os.Signal. I got this idea after reading
these docs: https://golang.org/pkg/os/signal/#Notify and I debugged this issue
shortly thereafter.
I also rearranged the order of operations in main/0 to ensure that
handleInterrupts/0, which registers the event listeners, occurs before
scheduleTokenRefresh/2 is called. This allows the token server to gracefully
shutdown even if it's in the middle of the scheduleTokenRefresh/2 call.
Consume the newly relocated auth package.
Additionally:
- Debugged error where JSON was properly decoding but not populating the
refreshTokenResponse struct, so my application was signaling false positive
messages about token refresh events.
- Logging more often and more data to help my troubleshooting
- Refreshing tokens as soon as the app starts just to be safe
- Clean up the code in general
Relocated the logic for authorizing clients into a separate package that the
tokens server now depends on. Moving this helped me separate concerns. I removed
a few top-level variables and tried to write more pure versions of the
authorization functions to avoid leaking Monzo-specific details.
I'm writing sensitive data here, so I'd like to ignore it instead of encrypting
it and publishing it. Perhaps later on, I can extend the key-value store to
handle encryption and decryption but that feels like overkill for now.
Attempting to read the persisted tokens from the key-value store when the server
begins. The server currently fails when those values are empty.
TODO
- Consider adding logic for knowing if the cached tokens are expired and prompt
the user to reauthorize the client using a web browser.
- Created a gopkgs directory and registered it with default.nix's readTree
- Moved monzo_ynab/utils -> gopkgs
- Consumed utils.go in main.go
- Renamed monzo_ynab -> job
In order to persist my access and refresh tokens, I needed a store. I think
using a database like SQLite may have been fine for this but was heavier weight
than what I wanted.
I decided to write a simple key-value store when the state is encoded and JSON
in a file called kv.json.
TODO:
- Support field nesting
- Support better error handling
- Support parameterizing the store path (i.e. ./kv.json)
I created a server to manage my access and refresh tokens. This server exposes a
larger API than it needs to at the moment, but that should change. The goal is
to expose a GET at /token to retrieve a valid access token. The server should
take care of refreshing tokens before they expire and getting entirely new
tokens, should they become so stale that I need to re-authorize my application.
A lot of my development of this project has been clumsy. I'm new to Go; I didn't
understand OAuth2.0; I'm learning concurrent programming (outside of the context
of comfortable Elixir/Erlang).
My habits for writing programs in compiled languages feels amateurish. I find
myself dropping log.Println's all over the source code when I should be using
proper debugging tools like Delve and properly logging with things like
httputil.Dump{Request,Response}.
The application right now is in a transitional state. There is still plenty of
code in main.go that belongs in tokens.go. For instance, the client
authorization code belongs in the tokens server.
Another question I haven't answered is where is the monzo client that I can use
to make function calls like `monzo.Transactions` or `monzo.Accounts`?
The benefit of having a tokens server is that it allows me to maintain state of
the tokens while I'm developing. This way, I can stop and start main.go without
disturbing the state of the access tokens. Of course this isn't the primary
benefit, which is to abstract over the OAuth details and expose an API
that gives me an access token whenever I request one.
The first benefit that I listed could and perhaps should be solved by
introducing some simple persistence. I'd like to write the access tokens to disk
when I shutdown the tokens server and read them from disk when I start the
tokens server. This will come. I could have done this before introducing the
tokens server, and it would have saved me a few hours I think.
Where has my time gone? Mostly I've been re-authorizing my client
unnecessarily. This process is expensive because it opens a web browser, asks me
to enter my email address, sends me an email, I then click the link in that
email. Overall this takes maybe 1-3 minutes in total. Before my tokens server
existed, however, I was doing this about 10-20 times per hour. It's a little
disappointing that I didn't rectify this earlier. I'd like to remain vigilant
and avoid making similar workflow mistakes as I move ahead.
