displayport / hdmi not recognized in ubuntu 14 when eighth inch audio jack is not plugged into sound system (lenovo t430s)

yeah you read that title right. can you believe it? I fought with my computer for an hour early this morning, installed a super fresh kernel, played with intel drivers, but nothing wanted to make ubuntu 14 recognize the displayport. It was working the night before!

finally gave up and went to put some music on. boom! screen turned on. what the hell? unplugged the eighth inch cable again. boom! screen turned off. also, the amplifier turned off and on each time I plugged or unplugged the cable. I'm still 99% baffled here but there's another clue - a buzz on the line that I can audibly hear thru the speakers when this particular sound system is connected, that also changes when I restart the computer.

Note that when I plugged headphones into the eighth inch jack, the screen did not turn on (altho there may have been some signs of life briefly).

So best guess (which is probably very wrong?) is that there's a loose connection somewhere in the laptop, and that the added power from my stereo thru the eighth inch connection (which should be flowing the other direction, but this is an input / output jack) is bridging the loose wire? hence the buzz?

UPDATE 6:30pm same night:
scratch the above theory - new shit has come to light!
when I moved my laptop to the living room and plugged the mini displayport into the projector, everything worked as always - without a sound system being plugged in. So then, being the good scientist that I am, I lugged one of my screens into the living room and plugged it into the displayport, and holy moly, it worked fine, no audio cord plugged in. So it's actually proximity to my crazy stereo system that's causing this issue. Unfortunately I don't know enough about sound systems and electronics to posit a complete theory, altho I bet this is enough for someone to be able to. My general idea now is that the magnetic field cast by the bass amplifier on the floor right next to the monitor is somehow involved.

As before, if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear em.
facepalms: 7.5 (would have been 10 but tempered by the sweet relief of seeing that screen turn on)

how to tell if an API works well before you write the integration

I connect with APIs for a living, or at least for part of a living. I do it all the time.
Often the ops team will ask me - how long to do an integration with ESP X, or Analytics firm Y? short of actually doing the integration, it used to be hard to give a good answer to this question. Now, tho, I have the perfect heuristic - it's never failed me.

Just take a look at the API docs. doesn't really matter what they say; if they're well formatted, easy to navigate, and well thought through, API integration will be a breeze. That simple.

Something like this makes an easy heuristic:

• no API docs - refuse to do the job
• API docs not available online but emailed to you in pdf form (or shared as gdoc): 40-50 hours
• API docs in one monolithic html page: 30-40 hours (obviously all of this depends on depth of integration too)
• docs have a formatted nav bar at left and some readable styling: 20-30 hours
• docs have the above in addition to "web 3.0" style formatting, and maybe some helpful examples: 10-20 hours
• docs have the above plus toggleable examples in different programming languages, maybe a link to wrapper libraries, are well written, and code blocks are formatted with special code block formatting: 1-10 hours.

you can use this, free of charge :)

best part of it is that I taught the ops team how to do this, and now they know exactly what estimate I'll give before they even ask me. Pretty soon they won't even need me at all, what with services like zapier.

for the record

the python CSV package is not as useful as it could be. no unicode support, can't handle all sorts of useful things like switching out the line delimiter (unless I'm missing something), and frequently just falls over for no reason.

I always try to use it, because modularity, and DRY, and yet I end up just writing up a quick csv parser myself for the job at hand like 60% of the time. Makes me think I should look for other CSV parsing packages, or just write my own.

more python SUDS advice

Everybody knows the a SOAP API is a horrid thing to work with, even a well designed one. But everybody also knows that SOAP is going to be around for a while.
Recently, while working with the ExactTarget SOAP API in Python, I figured out another helpful trick with SUDS, which is the main python SOAP wrapper.

Let me preface this by saying that suds is not a great library; particularly, it was written by and for people from another era of web development and does not stand up to today's needs. Why doesn't somebody write a better one? because everyone who does modern web dev hates SOAP in the first place.

But anyway, one annoying feature of suds is that when you create an object from its object factory, it always fills in all properties with an empty string, even those that are optional and have sane defaults. So essentially, it breaks all objects right out of the gate, forcing you to go through one by one and choose those sane defaults explicitly.

However, there's another way - for any properties that are giving you trouble in this fashion, just delete them after creating the object:
del object.AnnoyingProperty

Suds will then not send the property, allowing the API server to choose the sane default.

facepalms: 6

How to do get a good security audit for your startup

Recently at SimpleRelevance we decided it was time for a security audit on our website and especially our dashboard. We have quite a bit of client information that we would never want to share with the world.

Security audits are kind of like STD testing - even when you feel 100% fine, it's better safe than sorry.
Unfortunately, also like STD testing, if you cheap out, you won't get tested for everything.

So our problem was - how do we not get ripped off, while still ensuring a comprehensive audit - we're talking more than just simple pentests here. It's so hard to verify that you've gotten a good security audit, since the company can just come back and say "we didn't find any issues - your system is bulletproof!", and you can't prove that negative. In the end we did a lot of research and interviews and chose based on the data at hand. But since then I've thought of a fun way that might work even better.


1) through research, find N>1 companies that you'd consider paying for research.
2) bargain each one down (you were going to do this anyway, right? We ended up paying about 65% of the original ask for the company we chose).
3) tell each one: "I'll make you a deal. I'll pay you full price on the test, if you agree to the stipulation that I'm making this same deal with another security company, and whoever finds fewer or less important security holes doesn't earn any money, and whoever finds the most gets the full price [plus 10% if you need to sweeten it]".
4) Some of the companies are going to say no. Decide which company is most excited by the idea of the deal - they are clearly the winner, so congrats - you found the best one! Tell them none of the others would take the deal, so unfortunately you can't do it, but you'll still pay them the discounted rate you'd already agreed upon for a full audit, and you applaud their style.

ipython and the django shell: strange scoping errors

this is a minor issue that has annoying repercussions. on most versions of django, if you use ipython and start it with ./manage.py shell, you cannot define global variables and then use them in local functions. it gets ugly quick. more info here:
https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/62

patch is here:
https://github.com/django/django/pull/512/files

and it definitely fixes the issue.

python httplib2 7.x and ssl

this is not a completely new issue, and the internet helped me find the solution in about 5 minutes, but it was not very clear or obvious so I thought I'd write it down succinctly for posterity:

Python's httplib2 package did not validate ssl certificates in versions < 7.0, and started to from 7.0 and up. Unfortunately, it ships with its own set of trusted ssl certificates which comprise only a medium-sized subset of all of your favorite sites' certs (for instance, wikipedia fails when pinged at https://en.wikipedia.org!). The error looks like this:

  File "/home/deploy/.virtualenvs/sandbox.koaladeal.com/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/httplib2/__init__.py", line 1597, in request
    (response, content) = self._request(conn, authority, uri, request_uri, method, body, headers, redirections, cachekey)

  File "/home/deploy/.virtualenvs/sandbox.koaladeal.com/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/httplib2/__init__.py", line 1345, in _request
    (response, content) = self._conn_request(conn, request_uri, method, body, headers)

  File "/home/deploy/.virtualenvs/sandbox.koaladeal.com/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/httplib2/__init__.py", line 1281, in _conn_request
    conn.connect()

  File "/home/deploy/.virtualenvs/sandbox.koaladeal.com/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/httplib2/__init__.py", line 1036, in connect
    raise SSLHandshakeError(e)

SSLHandshakeError: [Errno 1] _ssl.c:504: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

 So the solution is to use ubuntu's system default cert file, which lives at /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt. I ended up overwriting the one that shipped with httplib2, which fixes the problem globally, but fails if we ever reinstall httplib2. Hence this blog post for posterity. If anyone knows of another way to globally install a new certificates file for httplib2 without changing the package itself, I'm all ears. I might just onboard the package to our project (but then I have to remember never to pip install it...).

by the way, this page was most helpful.

facepalms: 3