We've heard it all before: AWS is expensive, and you need to watch out for the hidden sharp edges of their pricing model. Today I provide a small lesson in that concept. History ClueTrust has run through a number of backup methodologies over the year, originally using Retrospect (when they …

In 2018, I wrote about the move to convert Gaige's Pages to a static generation model. I followed this up in mid-December of that year describing the drop in processing and response time. After 18 months of running the site (and Cartographica's Blog as well) on Pelican, I wanted to …

I put this up in hopes that somebody runs across it more quickly than I did... This weekend, as a "break", I decided to do some work updating an ancient (2003-vintage) piece of code that I wrote when I was doing extensive blogging. I'm not certain it'll ever leave my …

The background Many years ago, all of my systems were pets. I tried to make them easier to manage by standardizing on a single operating system (MacOS X Server at the time) and used management tools that were part of that suite. As time moved forward, Apple decided to concentrate …

I wasn't originally going to write this up on the blog, but considering that we've just finished our transition from our old backup software (BRU, no link) to Bacula community edition and considering that it's World Backup Day, it seemed like it would make sense. As many of you are …

This weekend, Rob and I had been testing the use of hardware keys to secure ssh sessions, especially for back-end console access and certain administrative functions. Since the hardware keys are a special case, and cannot be added to the ssh-agent, we were slinging around a fair number of command …

I've been doing a bunch of maintenance on my two blogs (company and personal) and one purpose has been to track down malformed and mis-mapped URLs on the site. Since both have been through changes in the underlying blog engine a couple of times, there are multiple sets of URLs …

Why client certificates? RS wrote about Preventing drive-bys with client certs and although we'd discussed this method for some time, I hadn't deployed it yet. However, some recent log-spelunking had led me to determine that I liked the idea of a second layer of protection on some of my sites …

Today I read of the passing of Larry Tesler, a computer scientist with a long and storied career, spanning Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, and others. He's considered the father of the modeless interaction model (think Cut/Copy/Paste on the Mac). I met Larry in the late 1980s, when …

According to an article on PCWorld, Activision-Blizard has pulled all of their titles from nVidia's GeForce Now. In my days as CTO of Haste (a service that improves network connections for gamers), I had occasion to spend a fair amount of time playing Overwatch as part of our test regime …

There's been a lot of discussion about the 2019 Mac Pro and various assertions that it's over-designed, overpriced, or underpowered. Since I decided to replace my venerable 2013 Mac Pro[1] with a 2019 Mac Pro, I figured I'd write up my experience with the device as a developer. The …

When you're looking to quickly create an appropriate .gitignore file for a new repository, you can save yourself some time, and possibly aggravation, by using gitignore.io. Available as either a website with a very simple interface (and completion), or as a simple API-based service documentation for the API and …

OK, now that I have your attention with the catchy title, let me get right into the reason behind this post. Rob has been doing a lot of work lately on a set of roles to provision raspberry pi systems. I'm grateful for the work in this area, because frankly …

One of the very first posts on this blog (16 years ago in the beginning of 2003) was entitled All of your favorite sites at a glance which discussed a new pair of apps (NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite) that I'd just started using. Considering the fallout for RSS from the …

At ClueTrust, we use a lot of automation to run our systems. It's mostly how just a couple of us can manage hundreds of virtual servers and keep them up-to-date and operational. A few years back, I moved from using Puppet to Ansible, mostly at the suggestion of RS, who …

Over the past few weeks, RS and I have noticed an increasing number of unexplained failures logging in over SSH with both manual and automated means. On most of the servers it was just an inconvenience, but as it started to become more frequent, it became a significant issue for …

For many years, I was a happy Perforce user. Despite clearly not fitting their precise model, I had a three-user license which allowed me and my bots to appropriately work on my code base. I have a number of pretty complex projects, which often have overlapping code and I took …

When I set out to move Gaige's Pages to a static web generator, chronicled in Gaige's Pages moves to static generation, I stated one of the reasons that I favored Pelican was because it is written in python, which is a language that I'm intimately familiar with. Not surprisingly, that …

A number of years ago, I set out to automate a set of manual tests that we've been using for years to validate functionality and UI in Cartographica. I've been through a lot of technologies over the years, some expensive commercial tools, some open source technologies. I won't go through …

For a number of years, Cartographica has had a lot of tests-on the order of 1500+, but a few of them are quite a bit bigger than they should have been, owing mostly to their data-driven nature. This post describes the method used to provide dynamic test creation for Cartographica …