This weekend, I had occasion to build a new python-based utility and leaned in to my existing poetry tooling in order to do so. While starting the new project, I wanted to take advantage of some gitlab automation I'd previously used on other projects, so I figured I'd document it …

Background Generally speaking, I refresh most of my systems pretty regularly, spurred on by security concerns, general hygeine, a desire to make sure the automation doesn't age out, and certificate expiration. Although I don't need to refersh systems due to certificate expiration, it has historically been the easiest indicator of …

Background As part of an ongoing effort to keep Cartographica up to date with recent changes in libraries that we compile from source, notably GDAL and Proj, I'm in the midst of a refresh of those subtrees in the frameworks that I build from them. Over the past few years …

My previous post about proj floating point investigation discussed an issue that I'd tracked down to the OS level. However, it's clear that this relates to an underlying change to code compiled by Xcode (and/or the LLVM toolchain that it is built upon). Based on a post about Xcode …

As part of digging through my various problems with Xcode 14.3 (Feedback FB12154691, FB12154887, and some test case issues involving floating point math), I needed to install Xcode 14.2 to move my buildfarm backwards. Although this didn't enitrely fix the problem, it was an essential element of the …

TL;DR MacOS 13.3 or 13.3.1 incorporated a change that is affecting calculations in proj for applications running on those versions of the OS. The change appears to be relatviely subtle, only affecting a single test in a single projection and only on x86_64, not arm, but …

I've already written a bit about using renovate to keep dependencies current using Renovate On Prem in Renovating GitLab Repos. This has been working well. However, there are a couple of twists that I figured I'd document in the event that people run into them. For single-repositories with public dependencies …

Most of the system administration work that I do has been automated using Ansible, as I've mentioned in posts here, including Deploying with GitLab. Now that I've got Renovate in place (Renovating GitLab Repos), I am starting to look at how to expand beyond my existing automations in order to …

Seemingly appropriate for the week after Easter, I've gone through some old draft posts and decided to publish them. A couple that were mostly ready and I decided to push out: Slathering Xcode Variants Test without building and SPM And one that I did a bunch of additional work and …

Ed. Note: I started this article nearly a year ago, but got stuck on the Kubernetes piece. Now that I've resolved that, I'm publishing it. I've been a very happy user of SauceLabs for testing for many years. However, I don't make a lot of use of it, and recently …

Over the past week, I've been working on getting my various dependencies up to date in my GitLab instance repositories. The tool I'm using is Mend Renovate, an open-source solution by the folks at Mend (formerly WhiteSource). Let me state up front that I don't love the license here, it's …

I note with some amusement the fact that I wrote on this exact day last year about this same subject (in much more detail). The reason for the new message on this subject is that I'm still cleaning up some of the decisions I made when first using Bacula. The …

Another day, another set of testing issues. As mentioned in my previous post, Slathering Xcode Variants, I've been making some use of Xcode's capability to build a test package and separately run that test package on a different machine, possibly with a different version of macOS or even a different …

I've been doing quite a bit of experimentation with recent features in Xcode lately, especially as regards trying to efficiently run my GitLab-powered Mac Mini build farm. Recently, as I've been doing some work on CartoMobile, I've been updating the testing code there and stole some ideas from the Cartographica …

I've been an ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats) user for quite some time, using exclusively the open source version fo the stack. Generally it's works well and, with some exceptions, supports our mostly-Solaris based environment (using LX zones to host most of the beefier components, and using custom-built …

After nearly 20 years with a Technician class ham license, I've finally taken (and passed) the test to upgrade my license to General class. Next step is to try for my Extra class in an attempt to upgrade before my 20th anniversary as a ham next year.

I last bought a MacBook Pro from Apple in November of 2019, in the midst of a bout of travel that was about to come to an end. In point of fact, I haven't used my trusty MacBook Pro much in the last 19 months, since the COVID-19 pandemic started …

After 18 months of using Bacula and sending copies of my data to the cloud (in this case, cloud I operate in another location) using an S3-compatible storage mechanism, I noticed I had a lot of data sitting around on my current server for backups. When I set out to …

Back in September of last year, I wrote in Bacula: 6 months on that cloud backups required part.0 in order to be recognized for automatic part retrieval. While this was mostly accurate, the critical file is actually part.1. As such, when referencing my own blog post when trimming …

MRs (Merge Requests) in GitLab are similar to PRs (Pull Requests) in GitHub, although the process and language around them are slightly different. The name specifically refers the the request to merge into another branch from a branch (or repository) that isn't the same. Simple enough. Most of the time …