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Over the past month I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, below are some of the interesting images I’ve generated.

Beginner Harmonica Practice Exercises Way back in around 2008 I wrote up a doc with a list of beginner harp exercises and practice riffs, at the time it was uploaded to a few forums and a shared Google doc - both have since disappeared.

Firefox Addons - 2022 Edition My list of must-have Firefox addons - 2022 edition Updated: 2022-11-07 Privacy and Security Firstly - you should have Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled.

Until recently I used Evernote for my notes, web clippings and document drafts, I was a subscriber going on 14 years and had over 3000 notes.

Weekend upgrades to my Ranchilio Silvia v4 espresso machine.

A template team charter for software and platform engineering teams.

Last weekend I had a chance encounter with a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta and the owner kindly let me jump in and take a few photos.

Near the end of every year I note down a summary of the best apps, hardware & podcasts I’ve enjoyed throughout the year (and often for some time before).

You magnificent girl, you brought me 14 years of love and happiness Photos

Stop trying to hire with titles like ‘DevOps Engineer’ or ‘Cloud Engineer’ “DevOps is … not a job title” “It’s more of a cultural practice, like innovation, and it makes just as little sense hiring “innovation engineers” and expecting your organisation to…

As stated in my announcement post - after 7~ years, I resigned from Infoxchange several months ago.

After 7~ years, I have resigned from Infoxchange.

In 2018 I set out to replace our XenSever 7.2 based virtualisation after Citrix essentially screwed over free / open source users.

In late November of 2018 I was lucky enough to get my hands on the upcoming 2019 Sport spec Mustang GT v8 to be its first driver.

I wanted an alias or function to use youtube-dl in the background.

This feature annoys me endlessly, I end up zoomed in and out of websites all over the internet. … But the fix is easy and there’s no addons required.

Last weekend I headed to New Zealand and marshalled at the Highlands Festival of Speed.

It was almost 3 years ago that my open source storage project went into production.

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link” Any improvement made anywhere besides the bottleneck is an illusion.

Here are my top album pics for 2017 (in no particular order) Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s just the top albums that really stood out to me and in all fairness, I’ve thought of several others since so there may be a follow up post (or…

My good friend Joel Shea received a most unlikely gift this Christmas - A vintage HP 4951 Protocol Analyser.

Using GlusterFS to provide volume storage to Kubernetes as a replacement for our existing file and static content hosting.

In vim, you can add a comment at the top of files to set the syntax, e.g.: # vim: syntax=ruby In SublimeText there are many ways to detect syntax, one interesting approach I’ve recently found useful is to match on the top line in the file.

Earlier this week we started the process to upgrade one of our hypervisor compute clusters when we encountered a rather painful bug with HP’s Broadcom NIC chipsets.

We’re in the process of shifting from using our custom ‘glue’ for orchestrating Docker deployments to Kubernetes, When we first deployed Docker to replace LXC and our legacy Puppet-heavy application configuration and deployment systems there really wasn’t…

Of all the tools for reading news and subscribing to software releases, I still find RSS the most useful.

MH-Z19 CO2 sensor reader, logger and visualiser Reads data from UART(serial)-connected MH-Z19 (or MH-Z14) sensor using python 3.

Castle Hill Winter Trip 2016 [Photos]

I wanted to try Android for a couple of weeks, I like staying on top of technology, gadgets and making sure I never become a blind ‘zealot’ for any platform or brand.

note: This is a follow up post from 2015-07-21-rcd-stonith A Linux Cluster Base STONITH provider for use with modern Pacemaker clusters This has since been accepted and merged into Fedora’s code base and as such will make it’s way to RHEL.

Scripts and source available here: sql_ascii_to_utf8 The Goal To be able to take a Postgres Database which is in SQL_ASCII encoding, and import it into a UTF8 encoded database.

Ever forgotten to add a critical service to monitoring?

The most common way to use rsync is probably as such: rsync -avr user@<source>:<source_dir> <dest_dir> Resulting in 30-35MB/s depending on file sizes This can be improved by using a more efficient, less secure encryption algorithm, disabling compression…

This is a quick tldr there are many other situations and options you could consider FIO man page IOP/s = Input or Output operations per second Throughput = How many MB/s can you read/write continuously Variables worth tuning based on your situation --iode…

Let’s pretend you have a project on Gitlab called ask-izzy and you want to mirror it up to Gitlab which is located at https://github.com/ask-izzy/ask-izzy Assuming you’re running Gitlab as the default user of git and that your repositories are stored in /…

Today we launched a mobile website for homeless people … and it was launched by one of Australia’s many recent Prime Ministers Today alone we served up over 87,000 requests As many of you know, I work with Infoxchange as the operations lead.

If a disk / VDI is orphaned or only partially deleted you’ll notice that under the SR it’s not assigned to any VM.

“Having a SCSI ID is a f*cking idiotic thing to do.” - Linus Torvalds …and after the amount of time I’ve wasted getting XenServer to play nicely with LIO iSCSI failover I tend to agree.

Slides Failover Demo

In an attempt to avoid using the Juniper Pulse (Now Pulse Secure) VPN client we tried OpenConnect but found that DNS did not work correctly when connected to the VPN.

Over the last two months I’ve been running selected IO intensive servers off the the SSD storage cluster, these hosts include (among others) our: Primary Puppetmaster Gitlab server Redmine app and database servers Nagios servers Several Docker database ho…

Set update channel to receive developer beta update sudo softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11seed-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz Set update channel to rece…

The following are benchmarks from our testings of our iSCSI SSD storage. 67,300 read IOP/s on a VM on iSCSI (Disk -> LVM -> MDADM -> DRBD -> iSCSI target -> Network -> XenServer iSCSI Client -> VM) Per VM and scales to 1,000,000 IOP/s total root@dev-samm:…

A modified version of John Sutton’s rcd_serial cable coupled with our Supermicro reset switch hijacker: This works with the rcd_serial fence agent plugin.

First some background… One of the many lessons I’ve learnt from my Linux HA / Storage clustering project is that the Debian HA ecosystem is essentially broken, We reached the point where packages were too old, too buggy or in Debian 8’s case - outright mi…

Due to several recent events beyond my control I’m a bit behind on the project - hence the lack of updates which I apologise for.

A brief demonstration of the failover and recovery process on the storage clusters I’ve been building.

A high level talk from Infracoders Melbourne on 12/04/2015.