We are living through a strange professional silence. Many of us use AI every day while feeling a quiet guilt about it. We worry that by offloading the labor of coding, we are offloading our value as engineers. We reach for the tool because it works. Then we wonder what it means that we needed it. The discomfort is not about the technology. It is the sense that we are moving faster than we can think. ...
Growing into SparkleFormation In my continued usage with SparkleFormation I’m really growing to appreciate the convenience of having ruby available when composing templates. Things that would be challenging in a simplistic serialization format or lead to unmanageable duplication become easily solvable thanks to the powerful combination of an actual programming language, which json and yml are not, and the simplicity of the SparkleFormation DSL. At it’s simplest you can mirror the structure of any cloudformation json (and finally have comments inline!) but you quickly discover more advanced use cases. ...
A very brief whirlwind tour of sparkles or: How I learned to stop writing terrible serialization formats directly and love the dsl An imaginary story of the beginner exploring some infrastructure tooling. Getting started Set env variables. Maybe create an init.sh while practicing. export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your key" export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your sekret" export AWS_REGION="us-east-1" # because YOLO export NESTED_BUCKET="s3://mah_bukkit" load that stuff into my current shell source ./init.sh Create a config .sfn file aready exists, thanks @luckymike. no need to create one. ...
Recently I had a need to create a bootable sd card containing OpenBSD. Since my day to day machine is a MacBook Air with no cdrom drive this initially seemed difficult. It turned out to be much easier than I expected thanks to VirtualBox raw disk access. Raw hard disk access can be dangerous, mainly because there’s a risk you use the wrong device and blow away things you actually need, so be careful and make sure you know you’re using the right physical device. ...
I genuinely dislike email, yet it’s a necessary part of working and communicating these days. I suppose there is occasional value found in the community of certain mailing lists, but generally the way email is used today is simply more of a distraction or interruption. A while back Steve Losh described how to setup Mutt the way he likes. It was an interesting read because he was detailed, technical and clearly prefers very customizable tools. I agree with him, and although I’ve long since abandonded Mutt I was motivated to describe my version of powerful, customizable, terminal based email management. ...
I spend a decent amount of time in org-mode, using Emacs + iTerm2 on a Macbook Air. I fixed a recent annoyance I encountered when using Emacs org-mode to track time for a project. Org-mode has a handy time tracking feature and as the manual points out both C-S-<up/down> S-M-<up/down> can be used to call various functions for adjusting recorded time. In particular I wanted to use org-timestamp-down to add some time for a CLOCK item I had forgotten to start before a Skype call. ...
Sometimes it’s the simplest things that remind me why I love the classic unix tools. Here’s a quick way to fill in cookbook_versions for a chef environment using awk. Of course, this is a ridiculously simple usage of awk. There’s plenty more that can be done with just a single line of awk.
It seems in the chef community lately there’s a growing trend for cookbooks to be kept in separate repos, or even separate branches in a single repo. I wanted to share the script I used to split out the community-cookbooks repo for Heavywater I knew the general git commands I needed to use, but it did take a few local trial runs to get it exactly as I wanted. To create the actual repos on github I made use of the excellent hub script. ...
There’s a thought provoking article by David Mitchell at The Guardian site right now. It’s relatively short and worth reading, and I say that even as someone who isn’t all that interested in the NHS project that frames the article’s opening paragraphs. Mitchell makes two points that I found myself both agreeing with as a developer and sysadmin, and leading me to further thought. First, from David Mitchell in I want to talk to you about the NHS… ...
One topic frequently tossed around at the recent Opscode summit was a re-org of the cookbooks repository. No more monolothic cookbooks repo on github, instead replaced by single cookbook repos, making it much easier to pull and contribute to a single cookbook. @jtimberman will be leading this effort. On a slightly unrelated note, it looks like @dysinger posted a handy little cleanup script: