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ZEROSSL API
ZeroSSL API – The missing examples. 02Apr21. The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which hasmade
PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE I mentioned in my RC2014 post that I’d got myself a new oscilloscope, so this is the blog post to complement my review on Amazon.co.uk.. Background. The ancient single trace Telequipment S51E that I saved from a skip a 6th form college as they upgraded to shiny new dual trace scopes has served me well over the years, but at 1MHz it doesn’t have the bandwidth for retro computing projects. RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to MARCH 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Apple Fitness. It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got aZEROSSL API
ZeroSSL API – The missing examples. 02Apr21. The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which hasmade
PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE I mentioned in my RC2014 post that I’d got myself a new oscilloscope, so this is the blog post to complement my review on Amazon.co.uk.. Background. The ancient single trace Telequipment S51E that I saved from a skip a 6th form college as they upgraded to shiny new dual trace scopes has served me well over the years, but at 1MHz it doesn’t have the bandwidth for retro computing projects. RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MARCH 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Apple Fitness. It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got aZEROSSL API
ZeroSSL API – The missing examples. 02Apr21. The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which hasmade
MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR Dart is the main programming language we use at The @ Company, and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about.. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Coll i son about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for theVMware acquisition.
GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
USB SHAVER CHARGER
The solution. My shaver charger is 12v at 400mA. I got a MC34063A based DC-DC converter module from eBay for £1.68. It’s claimed to be 78% efficient and can output up to 1.5A (though it’s recommended that it’s only pushed to 800mA). Crunching the numbers: 12v * 400mA = 4.8W. 4.8W output/ 78% efficiency = 6.15W input. 6.15W/5V = 1.23A.RETRO COMPUTING
I already wrote about my plans to get a TMS9995 running on RC2014, so this is the post about how I put together an RC2014 version of Stuart Conner’s TMS 9995 Breadboard or PCB System.. Planning. Taking a look at the TMS9995 pinout and the RC2014 module template it became clear that there was no easy way to place the CPU that would align well to the address bus, so I chose a position RESCUING GEN 8 MICROSERVER FROM ROGUE ILO Rescuing Gen 8 Microserver from rogue iLO. 30Jul19. Saturday was very rainy, so I thought I’d finally get around to upgrading my home lab from ESXi 5.5 to 6.5. I started with my #2 Gen 8 Microserver as I don’t have any live VMs on it, and thus began many wasted hours of reboot after reboot failing to get anything to work. CONNECTING DOCKER CONTAINERS BETWEEN VMS WITH VXLAN Then plug the VXLAN adaptor into the bridge and bring both of them up: 1. 2. 3. sudo brctl addif docker0 vxlan10. sudo ifconfig vxlan10 up. sudo ifconfig docker0 up. The process then needs to be repeated on a second machine, taking care to change MAC and IP addresses to avoidconflicts.
HOWTO – FACTORY RESET ILO 4 ON HP MICROSERVER GEN8 Firstly press F8 at the appropriate part of the boot sequence: The config tool opens on the option to set defaults: So just hit enter and then F10 to confirm: That’s it – the trial license will now work again. If like me you set a more memorable password than the one on the factory tag then that will have to be reconfigured.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API toZEROSSL API
ZeroSSL API – The missing examples. 02Apr21. The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which hasmade
SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TVCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API toZEROSSL API
ZeroSSL API – The missing examples. 02Apr21. The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which hasmade
SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE What follows are some observations about pathological culture part of the Westrum model (from being inside one long enough to know):. Power oriented – the bosses are in their high positions because they know best – everybody else is failing, because they’re not correctly doing what they’re being told.; Low cooperation – because what’s the point – doesn’t help with following orders. GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR Dart is the main programming language we use at The @ Company, and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about.. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Coll i son about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for theVMware acquisition.
ABOUT | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG I write cloud and DevOps stuff for InfoQ. I speak at events and sometimes get interviewed on podcasts. I have a profile on LinkedIn. For readers who don’t know me already I’m Gen X bloke living in the UK. When I’m not working or blogging I like to spend my time clay pigeon shooting, riding my motorbike and skiing.USING 1.1.1.1
TL;DR. One of the best features of Cloudflare’s new 1.1.1.1 DNS service is the privacy provided by DNS over TLS, but some setup is required to make use of it.I put Unbound onto the OpenWRT routers I use as DNS servers for my home network so that I could use it.. Background. Yesterday Cloudflare launched its public DNS service 1.1.1.1. It’s set up to be amazingly fast, but has some great DS18B20 TEMPERATURE SENSOR WITH RASPBERRY PI DS18B20 Temperature Sensor with Raspberry Pi. 28Jan13. After bringing my Nanode based temperature sensor back to life I thought about some other projects that I might do. One was simply to add an external sensor to the Nanode project, and another was to turn my slow cooker into a sous vide water bath (along the lines of ‘ Sous Vader ‘). WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. RESCUING GEN 8 MICROSERVER FROM ROGUE ILO Rescuing Gen 8 Microserver from rogue iLO. 30Jul19. Saturday was very rainy, so I thought I’d finally get around to upgrading my home lab from ESXi 5.5 to 6.5. I started with my #2 Gen 8 Microserver as I don’t have any live VMs on it, and thus began many wasted hours of reboot after reboot failing to get anything to work. AUTOSSH IN SCREEN FROM SYSTEMD I like to have permanent SSH connections from (a VM on) my home network to the various virtual private servers (VPSs) that I have scattered around the globe as these give me SOCKS proxies that I can use to make my web traffic appear from the US or the Netherlands or wherever (as mentioned in my previous post about offshoring traffic).. I’ve been using Ubuntu VMs since Jaunty Jackalope andCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API toZEROSSL API
ZeroSSL API – The missing examples. 02Apr21. The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which hasmade
SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TVCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API toZEROSSL API
ZeroSSL API – The missing examples. 02Apr21. The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which hasmade
SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE What follows are some observations about pathological culture part of the Westrum model (from being inside one long enough to know):. Power oriented – the bosses are in their high positions because they know best – everybody else is failing, because they’re not correctly doing what they’re being told.; Low cooperation – because what’s the point – doesn’t help with following orders. GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR Dart is the main programming language we use at The @ Company, and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about.. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Coll i son about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for theVMware acquisition.
ABOUT | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG I write cloud and DevOps stuff for InfoQ. I speak at events and sometimes get interviewed on podcasts. I have a profile on LinkedIn. For readers who don’t know me already I’m Gen X bloke living in the UK. When I’m not working or blogging I like to spend my time clay pigeon shooting, riding my motorbike and skiing.USING 1.1.1.1
TL;DR. One of the best features of Cloudflare’s new 1.1.1.1 DNS service is the privacy provided by DNS over TLS, but some setup is required to make use of it.I put Unbound onto the OpenWRT routers I use as DNS servers for my home network so that I could use it.. Background. Yesterday Cloudflare launched its public DNS service 1.1.1.1. It’s set up to be amazingly fast, but has some great DS18B20 TEMPERATURE SENSOR WITH RASPBERRY PI DS18B20 Temperature Sensor with Raspberry Pi. 28Jan13. After bringing my Nanode based temperature sensor back to life I thought about some other projects that I might do. One was simply to add an external sensor to the Nanode project, and another was to turn my slow cooker into a sous vide water bath (along the lines of ‘ Sous Vader ‘). WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. RESCUING GEN 8 MICROSERVER FROM ROGUE ILO Rescuing Gen 8 Microserver from rogue iLO. 30Jul19. Saturday was very rainy, so I thought I’d finally get around to upgrading my home lab from ESXi 5.5 to 6.5. I started with my #2 Gen 8 Microserver as I don’t have any live VMs on it, and thus began many wasted hours of reboot after reboot failing to get anything to work. AUTOSSH IN SCREEN FROM SYSTEMD I like to have permanent SSH connections from (a VM on) my home network to the various virtual private servers (VPSs) that I have scattered around the globe as these give me SOCKS proxies that I can use to make my web traffic appear from the US or the Netherlands or wherever (as mentioned in my previous post about offshoring traffic).. I’ve been using Ubuntu VMs since Jaunty Jackalope andCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR Dart is the main programming language we use at The @ Company, and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about.. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Coll i son about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for theVMware acquisition.
GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TVCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR Dart is the main programming language we use at The @ Company, and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about.. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Coll i son about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for theVMware acquisition.
GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMER HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY GitHub Actions and their product management philosophy. 15May21. Kerpan’s law of product management: Good products are defined by what they aren’t. Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive Networks. Swan’s corollary: Bad products are the integral of every stupid littlefeature request.
PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE What follows are some observations about pathological culture part of the Westrum model (from being inside one long enough to know):. Power oriented – the bosses are in their high positions because they know best – everybody else is failing, because they’re not correctly doing what they’re being told.; Low cooperation – because what’s the point – doesn’t help with following orders. MARCH 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Apple Fitness. It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got a APRIL 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Leadership. I’ve written about leadership on this blog before, as I think it’s an important topic. Listening to ‘Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership’ was one of those aha moments – I’ve been doing this stuff and trying to get better for over 30 years, and that’s what I’ve been missing.I’m going to give the sample lessons on AdmiredRETRO COMPUTING
I already wrote about my plans to get a TMS9995 running on RC2014, so this is the post about how I put together an RC2014 version of Stuart Conner’s TMS 9995 Breadboard or PCB System.. Planning. Taking a look at the TMS9995 pinout and the RC2014 module template it became clear that there was no easy way to place the CPU that would align well to the address bus, so I chose a position RESCUING GEN 8 MICROSERVER FROM ROGUE ILO Rescuing Gen 8 Microserver from rogue iLO. 30Jul19. Saturday was very rainy, so I thought I’d finally get around to upgrading my home lab from ESXi 5.5 to 6.5. I started with my #2 Gen 8 Microserver as I don’t have any live VMs on it, and thus began many wasted hours of reboot after reboot failing to get anything to work. WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. REPLACING ACTIVE DIRECTORY DNS WITH BIND ON OPENWRT TL;DR. I need local DNS for various home lab things, but the Windows VMs I’ve been using can be slow and unreliable after a power outage (which happens too frequently).Moving to BIND turned out to be much easier than I feared, and I chose OpenWRT devices to run it on as I wanted reliable turnkey hardware.. Background. My home network is a mixture of ‘production’ – stuff I need for FIXING FLOW ON AQUALISA MIDAS PLUS SHOWER MIXER Turn off the water supply ( IMPORTANT – the water on/off on the left hand side of the bar simply acts on the cartridge, so if you take it out without isolating the supply first the cartridge will fly out and then water will gush from the mixer bar). Undo the grub screw on the bottom right hand side of the mixer bar with a 3mm hex bit. PullCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERUSB SHAVER CHARGER
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RETRO COMPUTING
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERUSB SHAVER CHARGER
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RETRO COMPUTING
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MARCH 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Apple Fitness. It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got a PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM The journey to understanding starts with the first step. If developers don’t look at the performance of their app (s) then they’re not going to be able to run small experiments to improve them. We have tools like profilers and tracers, we have practices like A/B testing, canary deployments and chaos engineering. SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR Dart is the main programming language we use at The @ Company, and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about.. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Coll i son about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for theVMware acquisition.
USB SHAVER CHARGER
The solution. My shaver charger is 12v at 400mA. I got a MC34063A based DC-DC converter module from eBay for £1.68. It’s claimed to be 78% efficient and can output up to 1.5A (though it’s recommended that it’s only pushed to 800mA). Crunching the numbers: 12v * 400mA = 4.8W. 4.8W output/ 78% efficiency = 6.15W input. 6.15W/5V = 1.23A.USING 1.1.1.1
TL;DR. One of the best features of Cloudflare’s new 1.1.1.1 DNS service is the privacy provided by DNS over TLS, but some setup is required to make use of it.I put Unbound onto the OpenWRT routers I use as DNS servers for my home network so that I could use it.. Background. Yesterday Cloudflare launched its public DNS service 1.1.1.1. It’s set up to be amazingly fast, but has some great CONNECTING DOCKER CONTAINERS BETWEEN VMS WITH VXLAN Then plug the VXLAN adaptor into the bridge and bring both of them up: 1. 2. 3. sudo brctl addif docker0 vxlan10. sudo ifconfig vxlan10 up. sudo ifconfig docker0 up. The process then needs to be repeated on a second machine, taking care to change MAC and IP addresses to avoidconflicts.
HOWTO – FACTORY RESET ILO 4 ON HP MICROSERVER GEN8 Firstly press F8 at the appropriate part of the boot sequence: The config tool opens on the option to set defaults: So just hit enter and then F10 to confirm: That’s it – the trial license will now work again. If like me you set a more memorable password than the one on the factory tag then that will have to be reconfigured.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERRETRO COMPUTING
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERRETRO COMPUTING
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE What follows are some observations about pathological culture part of the Westrum model (from being inside one long enough to know):. Power oriented – the bosses are in their high positions because they know best – everybody else is failing, because they’re not correctly doing what they’re being told.; Low cooperation – because what’s the point – doesn’t help with following orders. ABOUT | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG I write cloud and DevOps stuff for InfoQ. I speak at events and sometimes get interviewed on podcasts. I have a profile on LinkedIn. For readers who don’t know me already I’m Gen X bloke living in the UK. When I’m not working or blogging I like to spend my time clay pigeon shooting, riding my motorbike and skiing. MARCH 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Apple Fitness. It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got a MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power.USB SHAVER CHARGER
The solution. My shaver charger is 12v at 400mA. I got a MC34063A based DC-DC converter module from eBay for £1.68. It’s claimed to be 78% efficient and can output up to 1.5A (though it’s recommended that it’s only pushed to 800mA). Crunching the numbers: 12v * 400mA = 4.8W. 4.8W output/ 78% efficiency = 6.15W input. 6.15W/5V = 1.23A. DOCKER | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG At the recent DockerCon event in Austin Docker Inc announced two significant open source projects, Moby and LinuxKit. Moby essentially marks the split of Docker the open source project from Docker Inc the company, with the docker/docker GitHub repo moved to moby/moby. DATA ON PREMISES, CONTROL IN THE CLOUD Data on premises, control in the cloud – will that work? 02May19. All three of the major cloud service providers have (or have announced) ‘have your cake and eat it’ versions of their services where data resides on premises whilst stuff is managed from a control plane in the cloud. AWS has Outposts ( launched at re:Invent 2018 butstill
SAFETY FIRST
Safety first. 27Jul17. Google’s Project Aristotle spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what made some teams perform better than others, and in the end they identified psychological safety as the primary factor . It’s why one of the guiding principles toCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERRETRO COMPUTING
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERRETRO COMPUTING
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE What follows are some observations about pathological culture part of the Westrum model (from being inside one long enough to know):. Power oriented – the bosses are in their high positions because they know best – everybody else is failing, because they’re not correctly doing what they’re being told.; Low cooperation – because what’s the point – doesn’t help with following orders. ABOUT | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG I write cloud and DevOps stuff for InfoQ. I speak at events and sometimes get interviewed on podcasts. I have a profile on LinkedIn. For readers who don’t know me already I’m Gen X bloke living in the UK. When I’m not working or blogging I like to spend my time clay pigeon shooting, riding my motorbike and skiing. MARCH 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Apple Fitness. It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got a MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power.USB SHAVER CHARGER
The solution. My shaver charger is 12v at 400mA. I got a MC34063A based DC-DC converter module from eBay for £1.68. It’s claimed to be 78% efficient and can output up to 1.5A (though it’s recommended that it’s only pushed to 800mA). Crunching the numbers: 12v * 400mA = 4.8W. 4.8W output/ 78% efficiency = 6.15W input. 6.15W/5V = 1.23A. DOCKER | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG At the recent DockerCon event in Austin Docker Inc announced two significant open source projects, Moby and LinuxKit. Moby essentially marks the split of Docker the open source project from Docker Inc the company, with the docker/docker GitHub repo moved to moby/moby. DATA ON PREMISES, CONTROL IN THE CLOUD Data on premises, control in the cloud – will that work? 02May19. All three of the major cloud service providers have (or have announced) ‘have your cake and eat it’ versions of their services where data resides on premises whilst stuff is managed from a control plane in the cloud. AWS has Outposts ( launched at re:Invent 2018 butstill
SAFETY FIRST
Safety first. 27Jul17. Google’s Project Aristotle spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what made some teams perform better than others, and in the end they identified psychological safety as the primary factor . It’s why one of the guiding principles toCHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERRETRO COMPUTING
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot.CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG
The price. When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employee engagement. That extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in human misery. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. MANAGING GITHUB LABELS Managing GitHub Labels. 16Apr21. I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent way too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightened out. After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to PERFORMANCE AND DETERMINISM GETTING MORE FROM A BRITISH GAS UP2 TIMERRETRO COMPUTING
HANTEK DSO5102P DIGITAL OSCILLOSCOPE The PicoScope 2000 series appeared to come highly recommended, and the lower bandwidth models come in at under £100, but unfortunately the 100MHz version starts at £479 for two channels. So I picked the standalone DSO5102P as it had the right features (2 channels and 100MHz) at a very attractive price of £227.99. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
RASPBERRY PI SATELLITE TV WHY MY X230 MIGHT BE MY LAST LENOVO LAPTOP Why my X230 might be my last Lenovo laptop. 15Aug14. I got my Lenovo X230 when I started with CohesiveFT almost 18 months ago. I’ve generally been very happy with it, but the cracks are starting to show – literally: Frame above wrist pad coming away, and also a hairline crack at the top of the ExpressCard slot. MAY 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Podcast. We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.. We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE What follows are some observations about pathological culture part of the Westrum model (from being inside one long enough to know):. Power oriented – the bosses are in their high positions because they know best – everybody else is failing, because they’re not correctly doing what they’re being told.; Low cooperation – because what’s the point – doesn’t help with following orders. MARCH 2021 | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG Apple Fitness. It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got a ABOUT | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG I write cloud and DevOps stuff for InfoQ. I speak at events and sometimes get interviewed on podcasts. I have a profile on LinkedIn. For readers who don’t know me already I’m Gen X bloke living in the UK. When I’m not working or blogging I like to spend my time clay pigeon shooting, riding my motorbike and skiing. MAKING AN IMAGE FILE FROM AN SD CARD ON WINDOWS Making the image. First start a Windows command line as Administrator (hit the start button, type cmd then right click on the cmd.exe that appears and select Run as Administrator). Next change directory to wherever you unzipped the DD tool. To copy the SD card to an image file (in this case c:\temp\myimage.img) use the following commandline:
SACRIFICE | CHRIS SWAN'S WEBLOG TL;DR. Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power. MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR Dart is the main programming language we use at The @ Company, and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about.. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Coll i son about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for theVMware acquisition.
USB SHAVER CHARGER
The solution. My shaver charger is 12v at 400mA. I got a MC34063A based DC-DC converter module from eBay for £1.68. It’s claimed to be 78% efficient and can output up to 1.5A (though it’s recommended that it’s only pushed to 800mA). Crunching the numbers: 12v * 400mA = 4.8W. 4.8W output/ 78% efficiency = 6.15W input. 6.15W/5V = 1.23A. DATA ON PREMISES, CONTROL IN THE CLOUD Data on premises, control in the cloud – will that work? 02May19. All three of the major cloud service providers have (or have announced) ‘have your cake and eat it’ versions of their services where data resides on premises whilst stuff is managed from a control plane in the cloud. AWS has Outposts ( launched at re:Invent 2018 butstill
SAFETY FIRST
Safety first. 27Jul17. Google’s Project Aristotle spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what made some teams perform better than others, and in the end they identified psychological safety as the primary factor . It’s why one of the guiding principles toChris Swan's Weblog
* About
* Commenting
* Speaking
* Podcasts
-------------------------MAY 2021
31May21
PUPDATE
Cold and dry April gave way to wet and windy May, but at least the bluebells were out and beautiful for scamping around:PODCAST
We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantasticepisodes coming up.
We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. It feels like there’s a community starting to build around what we’re doing, which is great :) WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES I wrote a little while ago about adding by Gigabyte Brix to my lounge media setup, so it was a bit of a head scratcher when I fired it up to watch an Always Be Comedy Tuesday Night Club with Rachel Parris & Marcus Brigstocke, and the screen wasblank.
I then tried other inputs to my AV receiver, and nothing was working; and then I remembered the very close, very loud lightning strike earlier in the day – oops :( The death toll was pretty severe: * Digital Video Recorder (and Blu-ray player) – HDMI fried –trashed
* Gigabyte Brix mini PC – HDMI fried – now having to use mini DPport
* Raspberry Pi B v1.1 – HDMI fried – seems to still boot, so may live on headless in another project * AV Receiver – HDMI fried – still seems to work from other inputtypes
Luckily the TV survived intact, along with my Fire stick. Initially I rigged up the AV receiver to take an optical input from the TV, which meant I could still get surround sound, but only ‘analogue’ Dolby Prologic II rather than proper Dolby Digital or DTS. After a few days I was able to get a replacement (slightly newer) AV receiver on eBay, which is now in place.BBQ
I had another go at smoking, this time with some pork shoulder along with a larger piece of brisket. It turned out really well: That pork didn’t need any pulling, it just fell apart. The cover for my Kamado Joe finally arrived, after being out of stockfor many months.
BEATING BEAT SABER
No noteworthy progress on my Full Combo quest, but I have been able to play mutli-player a few times, which has been fun. It’s a little annoying though that music packs only work when everybody’s bought them – feels like a missed opportunity for ‘try before you buy’ (even if it was time limited). Filed under: monthly_update | Leave a Comment Tags: BBQ , Beat Saber, HDMI
, lightning
, podcast
, vr
SACRIFICE
26May21
TL;DR
Pathological organisations select executives for a willingness to sacrifice themselves and their family relationships (for large sums of money), which keeps those capable of achieving better outcomes away from the levers of power.BACKGROUND
I wrote yesterday about pathological culture, but
this post has been brewing for a lot longer.. It’s also the answer to the question posed by Benji Mauer: > What do you feel the root cause of this pathological culture is? Is > it the system that rewards it? Surely it’s not “pathological”> individuals.
> @heybenji
IT STARTS AT THE TOP Being a CEO is a tough job. You can’t pick and choose, you can’t hide in a speciality, the buck stops here. But oh those bucks – so many of them. In the good times you’re getting paid for performance. In the bad times you’re getting danger money for risking your career on an uncertain proposition. But there just aren’t enough hours in the day, and the troops expect visible leadership from the front – no slacking. In a word –sacrifice.
Friends and family can wait, for now, there will be time later, and that time will be better, because of all of that money. Perhaps I can make it up to the kids by having a family foundation, focussed on causes we all care about, and then they at least don’t have to worry about the cut and thrust of corporate life, and the sacrifice it entails. AND THE ‘TOP TEAM’ If the CEO needs to sacrifice, then those around them need to too. That’s table stakes for playing this game; and the rewards are pretty decent here too. Sacrifice is also a test of loyalty. People taking these roles will have their own rationalisation – it’s just while we turn things around – it’s just while I get on top of things – I love my job and working evenings and weekends doesn’t feel like ‘work’ to me. But this can easily run into normalisation of deviance, where the
sacrifice stops being a short term compromise, and becomes moresystemic.
> I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.> Darth Vader
BUT IT POISONS EVERYTHING People up and down the organisation start being pushed to show their own sacrifice. It’s not about the outcome right now, it’s about showing that you’re ready to pitch in when the going gets tough. Why get your best person in Tokyo to present to the customer there when you can fly there yourself. It’s only a 36 hour round trip. And then the customer will know you really care, even though they know deep down that a General Manager isn’t going to be much use when there’s a ransomware attack, or whatever other horror lies aroundthe corner.
NOPE
Sacrifice acts as a selection filter, and lots of smart, capable people look at the sacrifice being demanded and say: > No – I’m not willing to do that>
> I took this job so I could support my family, not spend all my time> away from them
>
> I work to live, not live to work WE CAN’T CONSTANTLY BE AT WAR War demands sacrifice, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice. War also provides a context for the great leaders of our history books to step forward and make their mark. But war is tiring, and depleting. If we’re constantly on a war footing, then we’re constantly on the verge of burnout. We can see this from the ‘forever wars’ of the past decades – the war on drugs, the war on terror. As a society we prefer wars that are won quickly, decisively, and with minimal blood and sacrifice (e.g. Gulf War 1) versus wars that drag on mercilessly, eventually throwing the bodies of those who weren’t even born at the outset into the meat grinder (e.g. Afghanistan). It’s neither desirable nor healthy for civilian organisations to cosplay ‘war’ simply because we’re bereft of strong leadership examples beyond the military. There may be times of crisis that demand short term sacrifice, but it shouldn’t be ‘normal’. Micro sacrifice when supporting the team and the greater goals demands it, rather than macro persistentsacrifice.
TIMES HAVE MOVED ON
Hierarchy, command and control are the easy to spot artefacts from successful military organisations across millennia. So it’s no surprise that these structures were copied into corporations as the world industrialised. Particularly as the military (quite literally) provided a training ground for future leaders and managers. But we no longer have phalanxes clashing on the open battlefield, or trenches lined up against each other, or manoeuvre around fixed positions. Communications technology changed the way we fight, just as communications technology has changed the way we do business. Gene Kim observed (on the topic of sacrifice): > I find this persuasive — this attribute, and many others, is what > it took to “win the internal tournament” for decades (or a> century).
>
> Which I’m sure is different than the attributes required to “win > the tournament” in this century.> @realgenekim
>
The military have adapted to the circumstances they find themselves in – that’s what Team of Teamsis all about.
_From ‘Key takeaways from Team of Teams by General StanleyMcChrystal
‘
by Beau Gordon_
Companies have adapted too, and the ones that have adapted are the ones with generative cultures. There are just a ton of People’s Liberation Armies of The Great Republic of Blah still out there, and their corporate equivalents.THE PRICE
When an organisation selects commanders for their willingness to sacrifice, it excludes leaders who might be capable of fully realising the latent human potential that could be released with better employeeengagement . That
extracts a price in corporate productivity, and also a price in humanmisery.
BURNOUT
If sacrifice is endured for too long it can lead to burnout, which is the word we use to describe the range of illness (physical and mental) that comes about from people working beyond their limits. This brings us back to the Whitehall study referenced by Dr Ron Westrum when describing the outcomes of pathological culture.GRIT
There’s a winners vs losers argument here that people who can endure sacrifice are the natural leaders, the ones with ‘grit’. That it’s somehow a positive characteristic. But why is it that only pathological cultures need such ‘grit’, when even bureaucratic cultures use their rules as a defence against ‘grit’, and generative cultures thrive without a constant call for it?CONCLUSION
Too many organisations are pathological, and they’re pathological because they select for sacrifice. Selection for sacrifice may in fact be the hallmark of pathological culture. Sacrifice is useful and necessary in a crisis, but such a crisis should be short lived, and not ‘situation normal (all fouled up)’. By selecting for sacrifice those organisations are excluding people with the skills and capabilities needed to drive better outcomes; and since the world is now full of ‘Red Queen‘ races, if
you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. Filed under: culture| 1 Comment
Tags: command , culture, leadership
, military
, pathological
, sacrifice
, war
PATHOLOGICAL CULTURE25May21
I’ve been really enjoying Gene Kim’s recent interviews with RonWestrum (Part 1
& Part 2
).
There were two things that really struck me in part 1: * PATHOLOGICAL CULTURES MAKE PEOPLE ILL – we know this from theWhitehall study
;
but that’s fine for the bosses, because it’s not them who are getting ill, it’s their behaviour that’s making their minions ill. Ron (00:45:59): … _“Every day when my father drove to work he would get sick on the way to work.” That’s what living in a pathological environment is like. Because basically, the pathological organization is oriented toward pleasing the people at the top. It is what they want, what they need, and so forth, that drives theorganization._
Ron (00:46:46): … _But in the Whitehall Study what they discovered is, the chance of having a heart attack went down every level you went up. People on top had the least heart attacks, people on the bottom had the most heart attacks. Now, consider that basically everybody in Britain, in principle at least, has the same health system. So what was the difference between the top and the bottom? And the answer waspower._
* ‘ORGANISATIONAL JUSTICE‘: Ron (01:31:56): _Well, first of all, the good leaders are honest. So if somebody does something, they get a reward for it. In organizations where the leader isn’t honest, somebody else who didn’t do it will get a reward for it, all right? That destroys your sense of organizational justice, when the wrong person gets recognized for something, and shows that the people on top don’t know what’sgoing on._
Part 2 gets deeper into the idea of ‘technical maestros’ as leaders, with some excellent case studies of organisations who had such leadership and conquered, but also organisations who had such leadership, and chose a different direction, then failed badly. ------------------------- What follows are some observations about pathological culture part ofthe Westrum model
(from being inside one long enough to know): * POWER ORIENTED – the bosses are in their high positions because they know best – everybody else is failing, because they’re not correctly doing what they’re being told. * LOW COOPERATION – because what’s the point – doesn’t help with following orders. * MESSENGERS “SHOT” – because the message they carry is subversive and wrong; an unwelcome distraction that might turn people away from doing what they’re told. * RESPONSIBILITIES SHIRKED – because the high command is responsible for everything. * BRIDGING DISCOURAGED – again, a distraction from followingorders.
* FAILURE LEADS TO SCAPEGOATING – the only reason for failure was not following orders correctly, therefore you’ve failed as a‘resource’.
* NOVELTY CRUSHED – because it’s just another distraction from getting on with the dear leader’s perfect plan. NB I’m being very particular in avoiding the word ‘leader’ here for people who aren’t actually leaders. We very often use ‘leader’ for people in positions of authority who are commanders rather than leaders:From
Jon Smart’s DOES 2020 presentation ------------------------- The people at the top of pathological cultures aren’t just reaping the rewards of their power, they’re also certain that they know the one true way to success, and the only thing thwarting them is the useless minions failing to follow orders correctly. The underlings are the ones causing the problems, and they should be made to suffer for it – hence the health (and mental health) issues for everybody downthe pyramid.
------------------------- Furthermore, command and control is just a really lazy approach to doing things, whether it’s running a company or running a country. And lazy begets more laziness, which is why such bosses are always chasing after ‘one neat trick’ rather than doing the hard work of empowerment. Unfortunately there are two entire industries of consultants and analysts pandering to the shortcut market, which is why we see so much cargo culting of things done in successful places (e.g. Spotify model etc., covered well by Andrew Blain in his recent ‘The Usual Suspects (Operating Model anti-patterns)‘).
Filed under: culture| Leave a
Comment
Tags: command , culture, health
, leadership
, pathological
MY DART JOURNEY SO FAR16May21
Dart is
the main programming language we use at The @ Company , and so it’s becoming something that I’m frequently talking to people about. I first heard about Dart chatting with Derek Colli
son
about Go after the FITE club meeting that Alexis Richardson brought him along to when he was over doing due diligence on RabbitMQ for the VMware acquisition. It wasn’t that long after he’d left Google, and before Docker, Cloud Foundry etc. (so before Go really took off). And then it vanished from view. Go got all the traction in the infrastructure software space. This is why I sometimes joke about Dart being ‘the ginger cousin’. And then Flutter came along and started pushing Dart up the language rankings.
And then Flutter 2 dropped,
adding web and desktop to the Android and iOS targets. And Canonical are jumping in with the new Ubuntu installer, and suddenly this is the train that it seems everybody is jumping onboard. I was chatting to Justin Cormack about Dart over the past couple of weeks, and his observation is that it’s quite Erlanglike.
The choice between ahead of time (AOT) native compilation and just in time (JIT) provides for some interesting trade offs between startup time and long term runtime performance. Async/await and callback handling is very JavaScript. But there’s strong types, like Typescript. There’s no static linking like Golang, but the system library dependency layer is VERY thin (~2MB). And there’s an actor model built in, and isolates.
The pub.dev package manager is one of the least bad I’ve seen (though it’s still possible to end up in that Gem thing of different chunks of code insisting on different versions of deps). ‘Interesting Features of the Dart Programming Language‘
by Renato Athaydes provides more detail, and I also like this ‘Introduction to Dart VM ‘ by Vyacheslav Egorov (more on my Dart pinboard tag).
My most recent adventure with Dart has been ‘Running Dart on ArmServers
‘,
but you can get started in the browser with ‘DartPad’ tutorials.
Filed under: technology| Leave a
Comment
Tags: ARM , Go
, golang
, actor model
, Dart
, Erlang
, DartPad
, pub.dev
GITHUB ACTIONS AND THEIR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY15May21
Kerpan’s law of product management: > Good products are defined by what they aren’t. > Patrick Kerpan, CEO, Cohesive NetworksSwan’s corollary:
> Bad products are the integral of every stupid little feature> request.
BACKGROUND
A colleague was recently bemoaning GitHub not having a feature for a markup he was using. Competing products like GitLab had the functionality. The GitHub forums had long threads of other people asking for the feature. What was wrong with them, denying something that was obviously in demand? > You can do that with an Action.> Me
> That seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut.> Them
> Works tho, and saves them from supporting nut crackers, small > hammers, medium hammers etc.> Me
AVOIDING THE EXPLODING TEST MATRIX OF DOOM Back at Cohesive when I was working on the VNS3 networking virtual appliance it was commonplace for customers to ask us for extra features based on popular tools. They knew that the virtual appliance was just a Linux base with a bunch of open source tools wrapped together with our proprietary glue to provide an API and user interface. So what harm would there be in adding just one more tool tothe mix?
In isolation every request for Varnish for caching, or HAproxy for load balancing, or Ngnix for reverse proxying, or whatever seemed entirely reasonable. But in aggregate those feature requests took us to the exploding test matrix of doom. Worse still, everyone wanting HAproxy might want a different version, and a different way of configuring it, and a different way of logging. The exploding test matrix of doom was exploding in every direction. And that’s why we held firm against all of it – if we succumbed to one little feature request then it opened the floodgates to them all, and that would inevitably lead to an unmanageable mess. THE UNIVERSAL SOLUTION We fixed the problem at Cohesive by providing a Docker subsystem for plugins. You want Varnish, have a Varnish container. You want HAproxy, have an HAproxy container. You want different config, that’s justfine.
The key is that the subsystem introduced something like the cloud ‘shared responsibility model’. We were responsible for the subsystem working, the individual users were responsible for what they put into it. For sure, we seeded the endeavour with a bunch of samples and examples that were often used with little or no modification; but crucially we’d drawn a line around what we were responsible for(testing for).
ACTIONS IS GITHUB’S UNIVERSAL SOLUTION The answer to almost every question about extending GitHub functionality has become ‘you could do that with an Action’, at which point the discussion moves to the distance between ‘could’ (a hypothetical possibility) and ‘can’ (something that is achievable right away, maybe with a bit of light web searching). This gets GitHub out of the business of responding to every stupid little feature request, and bloating the product with lots of knobs and dials that most users never need or want. CLOSED TO OPEN TO ECOSYSTEM The whole reason why people need to make feature requests in the first place is that a lot of software (including GitHub) is closed off to end user modification. Things change when software becomes open, because anybody can take it and change it to suit their needs. But the real magic happens in ecosystems, where people are sharing their solutions with each other for continuous spirals of improvementand reuse.
We certainly saw benefits from the Docker ecosystem to VNS3 users, and the same is very visibly happening with Actions – value is being provided to GitHub customers by other GitHub customers, without GitHub themselves having to get involved. And of course Docker is a big part of the Actions landscape, so GitHub users can reap benefits from both ecosystems at once. Win, win, win.CONCLUSION
Actions is more than just a smart move for GitHub to do more stuff with Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipelines – it’s a product management super move that gets GitHub out of the business of responding to stupid little feature requests. Better still, it’s an ecosystem play where GitHub (and Docker) users create value for other GitHub users without GitHub needing to invest their own time andtreasure.
NOTE
Another Kerpan at Cohesive aphorism was “California can”. When we said “we can do that”, we meant that the functionality was there, in the product, ready to go, now. When visiting Silicon Valley when we heard people say “we can do that”, we understood that to mean ‘I have a great product team and some outstanding engineers, and we think we can build that in the next six months’. Filed under: Docker ,strategy ,
technology
| Leave a Comment Tags: Actions , Docker, ecosystem
, github
, product maangementAPRIL 2021
30Apr21
PUPDATE
As the weather has improved it’s been great to get out and aboutmore with Max.
We also had some fun with his mother Nellie coming to visit.CODING
The new job means I’m back to writing code a lot more. One of my first adventures was into using the ZeroSSL API to automate TLS certificate creation where the prototype I hacked together in Bash needed a completerewrite with Python
.
I also put together a tool for automating label sync across GitHub repos (more about that on anearlier post
).
As I spend more time reviewing code I’m planning on writing a bit about that – it seems many of the lessons I saw being learned the hard way with Java 20+ years ago are playing out again for Dart andFlutter.
RUST
I’ve been interested in Rust for a little while, and Take your firststeps with Rust
on
Microsoft Learn is an awesome resource, particularly the memorymanagement module
(which I’d commend to anybody developing on a VM language like Java or Dart, as it’s good to be reminded what the garbage collector is doing for you, and the costs that might be involved with that).OPEN SOURCE
Another excellent resource on Microsoft Learn is the Build community-driven software projects on GitHub learning path, which wraps around some great GitHub based material.PODCAST
After some months in the works the Tech Debt Burndown Podcast that I’ve been collaborating with Nick Selby on is now live. Get it on your favourite podcast app.*
BBQ
I had a go at smoking some brisket, which I think turned out pretty well for a first attempt:LEADERSHIP
I’ve written about leadership on this blog before, as I think it’san important topic.
Listening to ‘Randall Stutman: The Essence of Leadership’ was one of those aha moments – I’ve been doing this stuff and trying to get better for over 30 years, and that’s what I’ve been missing. I’m going to give the sample lessons on Admired Leadership a try and see if I’m up for the $1000 package. Along similar lines I’m enjoying Gene Kim’s interview with Admiral John Richardson – Leadership Development and Balancing Creativity.
RASPBERRY PI STUFF
Since I’ve been back into Python I went back to my sous-vide code and updated that to Python 3.BEATING BEAT SABER
VR workouts were back for April, and I was delighted to find that a new free set of levels had dropped with OST 4.
They’re not easy either, so it will take me a while to clock up those Full Combos at Expert. Meanwhile I finally got the Full Combo at Hard on Ghost in the Camellia pack, and I’ve also been able to crack a few more at Expert on the Green Day pack (just Father of All to go). Filed under: monthly_update, podcast
, technology
| 1 Comment
Tags: BBQ , Beat Saber, brisket
, coding
, dachshund
, open source
, podcast
, puppy
, Raspberry Pi
, Rust
, smoking
, vr
MANAGING GITHUB LABELS16Apr21
I was on a sprint planning call last week where it felt like we spent WAY too much time getting the labels in our various repos straightenedout.
After a little Googling I found various scripts that use the GitHub API to manage labels. But nothing that seemed easy enough. So… I pulled together my own repo of scripts – atsign-company/labels , which we have now opensourced.
When a label is added to that repo it fires a GitHub Action that pushes the new label to all the repos listed in a config file (in our case atsign-foundation.yaml for our open source repos). Thanks to Olivier Jacques for pointing me to the ability to start an Action from a labels event,
and to the DXC DevOps Dojo teamfor having a
nice labeling script as part of the Welcome module.Filed under: howto
| 2 Comments
Tags: action , github, labels
, open source
, python
, script
TECH DEBT BURNDOWN PODCAST14Apr21
After a few months in the making Nick Selby and I today launched the Tech Debt Burndown Podcast , where we talk to each other and guests about Tech Debt and how to deal with it. Please subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify
, iHeartRadio
, Spreaker
or
wherever you get your podcasts. Filed under: podcast| Leave a
Comment
Tags: debt , podcast, tech
, tech-debt
ZEROSSL API – THE MISSING EXAMPLES02Apr21
The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbotwrapper zerossl-bot
to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API . Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which has made it quite a journey to figure out how things work. After LOTS of trial and error I have a script that generates and downloads a certificate, which I’ll walk through block by block below. The whole thing is at this gist.
I’m using bash, so we begin with a shebang:#!/bin/bash
I’ll probably end up writing the final script in Python, or maybe even put together a Go or Dart app, to provide error checking andretry logic.
I’m using the Digital Ocean APIfor DNS (other
DNS providers with APIs are available), as it’s fast and well documented. Both APIs need keys, which should be stored in a secrets manager rather than a script: # API keys for ZeroSSL and Digital Ocean # These particular keys are fake random hex ZEROSSL_KEY='0f027ac0f3b24ddb3c4412f11fa1e746' DO_KEY='a3e6ee004fd7c352af61f0465765030b5d162acc94c24fdbb42f7a8c81e897a3' The script sets a base (sub)domain, and takes a single parameter of the certificate name to be created: # Set root domain and take CN from params DOMAIN=subdomain.example.com CERT_NAME="$1"."$DOMAIN" We need a certificate signing request (CSR). The ZeroSSL docs point to a web form that generates CSRs, but anybody using an API will want to have a more automated way of doing that bit, such as: # Create CSR and Private Key openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -out "$CERT_NAME".csr \ -keyout "$CERT_NAME".key \ -subj "/C=GB/ST=London/L=London/O=Example/OU=Testing/CN=$CERT_NAME" \&>/dev/null
With the CSR prepared it’s time for the first call against the ZeroSSL API to draft a certificate. The hard part here was figuring out how to pass a CSR into the API, but thankfully recent versions of curl have an option to URL encode data directly, and I’m using the @ operator to pull in the CSR from the file generated in the last step: # Draft certificate at ZeroSSL curl -s -X POST https://api.zerossl.com/certificates?access_key="$ZEROSSL_KEY" \ --data-urlencode certificate_csr@"$CERT_NAME".csr \ -d certificate_domains="$CERT_NAME" \ -d certificate_validity_days=90 \ -o "$CERT_NAME".resp The response then needs to be parsed to extract the certificate ID and parameters for validation, in this case for the DNS CNAME method. Since it seems necessary to modify DNS to make use of the HTTP(S) methods this look like the simplest way. I tried using jq to parse the JSON, but it’s an extra dependency, and seemed to sometimes mangle CNAME parameters. The combination of sed and awk isn’t great, but does appear to work for this limited use case: # Extract CNAME parameters from ZeroSSL response ID=$(< "$CERT_NAME".resp python3 -c "import sys, json; print(json.load(sys.stdin))") CNAME_HOST=$(< "$CERT_NAME".resp sed -e 's//''/g' \ | awk -v RS=',"' -F: '/^cname_validation_p1/ {print $2}' \ | sed -e 's/"//g' | sed -s s/".$DOMAIN"//g) CNAME_ALIAS=$(< "$CERT_NAME".resp sed -e 's//''/g' \ | awk -v RS=',"' -F: '/^cname_validation_p2/ {print $2}' \ | sed -s 's/"//g') The CNAME can then be added to DNS for validation: # Add DNS CNAME at Digital Ocean for verification curl -s -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $DO_KEY" \ -d '{"type":"CNAME","name":"'"$CNAME_HOST"'","data":"'"$CNAME_ALIAS"'.","priority":null,"port":null,"ttl":1800,"weight":null,"flags":null,"tag":null}' \ https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/domains/"$DOMAIN"/records \ -o "$CERT_NAME".name Wait a moment for it to be ready: # Wait for DNS record to propagatesleep 30
Then call for validation: # Validate certificate at ZeroSSL curl -s -X POST https://api.zerossl.com/certificates/"$ID"/challenges?access_key="$ZEROSSL_KEY" \ -d validation_method=CNAME_CSR_HASH \ -o "$CERT_NAME".vald Wait again for the certificate to be issued: # Wait for cert to be issuedsleep 30
Then get the certificate. Using jq here to prettify the JSON:# Get the cert
curl -s https://api.zerossl.com/certificates/"$ID"/download/return?access_key="$ZEROSSL_KEY" \ | jq -r '."certificate.crt"' > "$CERT_NAME".crt Finally tidy up DNS by removing the validation CNAME: DNSID=$(< "$CERT_NAME".name python3 -c "import sys, json; print(json.load(sys.stdin))")echo "$DNSID"
# Delete the verification CNAME curl -s -X DELETE -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $DO_KEY" \ https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/domains/"$DOMAIN"/records/"$DNSID"UPDATE 15 APR 2021
I ended up doing a Python version, with some
better error checking and retry logic. Filed under: howto ,software
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Tags: API , automation, bash
, certificate
, curl
, Digital Ocean
, jq
, json
, python
, script
, SSL
, ZeroSSL
MARCH 2021
31Mar21
PUPDATE
Max is 7 months old now, and continues to be a source of endless entertainment and cuteness. Having half his people back at school has disrupted our Lockdown III routines, but he has a reason to get extra excited when folk comehome.
VACCINATION
I got my first shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The logistics for the vaccination centre at my local ‘community building’ Clair Hall were outstanding – I was in and out of there in about five minutes, finishing with a return appointment for 11 weeks time.NEW JOB
I joined The @ Company as an Engineer, and our CEO wrote about my intro meeting and culture in virtual organisations.
For my techie friends who are wondering what it’s all about start with this post about the @protocol that we’re building the @platform to run. My focus is going to be getting to progressive delivery for the platform, and improving the Developer Experience for people using it. The platform is built with Dart , and we’re riding the wave of Flutter becoming very popular for development across Apple, Android, Web and Desktop.APPLE FITNESS
It was mid March 2020 when I decided that I’d better keep fit during what looked like being a long time stuck at home, so this month saw the 365 day streak on my move ring. If there were streaks for the other rings then I’d be doing a little better on stand, and I’d have broken by exercise streak last August as I got a little distracted by having to deal with Dougal’s lastday .
MOTHER’S DAY FEASTING WEEKEND Mother’s day provided all the excuse I needed to have a weekend ofamazing food.
COOKAWAY
As a somewhat regular investor in startups via Seedrs I occasionally get offers to try new products or services from companies trying to attract investment. One of those was Cookaway , which is a non subscription meal box service. For Friday evening we got the Tandoori chicken with lemon rice and coriander mint chutney,
which was delicious and full of really fresh flavours that we’re not used to getting from our usual local Indian restaurant. My wife also really enjoyed the Zoom cook along session with chefNidhi Verma .
FISH PLATTER
Our local fish monger does a very nice sharing platter: But we’ve taken to order separate items to have better control over getting what we REALLY like; so this time I ordered a dressed crab, smoked mackerel and smoked salmon pates, hot smoked salmon, beetroot gravadlax and some king prawns. Along with a Forman & Field royalfillet of salmon
that was plenty for two breakfasts and one dinner.BBQ
Ever since getting a Hawksmoor at Home box over the summer I’ve been using their ‘How to Cook the Perfect Steak‘
guide with côte de boeuf from my local butcher. But it’s always been a challenge to maintain a ‘steakhouse sear’ temperature. I’ve been able to get the grill to 300C, but as soon as I open it to put the steak in, then again for turning, the temp has been dropping. I wondered why the gauge went up to 450C, and how it was even possible to get it there. Until this time… the steak was quite fatty, and I left it a little longer than usual for the first turn, so by then the fat was rendering down onto the coals, and I was getting FIRE.LAMB
Along with the steak I got a 3kg leg of lamb from the local butcher, which I slow roasted overnight with the fan oven dial set to 75C, and that got me an internal temp of 65C. It’s some of the juiciest, tastiest lamb I’ve ever had, and along with Sunday roast provided for multiple sandwiches, salads, shepherd’s pies and curries – about 16 meals in total.WATCH REPAIR
I found my old Casio watches when looking for something else and decided to get them running again (along with the Seiko I wore before getting an Apple Watch). My W-50U
World Time watch was in a particularly sad state, with no strap and missing the screws for the back. A quick look at eBay suggests that it’s a sought after model these days. Batteries were easy to find on eBay, and I was able to get everything else I needed from WatchBattery (UK) Ltd (except a new seal for the W-50U). The whole process was helped by the watch repair kit I’d randomly bought when it was on sale last year. Ah… I can now press a few buttons and see the time zone line move from one city to another and recall the days when I used that feature.ACTOR MODEL
After hearing about the actor modelfrom Simon Crosby
talking about Akka
as part of his work at Swim.ai , and then exploring Daprwhen Mark Chmarny
was at Microsoft I decided to take a deeper look. Oh boy is that Wikipedia article a tour de force of important computer science stuff for distributed systems (process calculus etc.). I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO Along with my usual diet of the Sam Harris Podcast and the Farnam Street Knowledge Project , I’ve been catching up on a few interesting looking episodes of Behind the Tech with KevinScott , and also a
few standalone episodes that came to my attention: * Daniel Schmachtenberger on Better Sensemaking(The Jim
Rutt Show)
* Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini on Breaking Down Bureaucracy andBuilding Up Workers
(Harvard Business Review IdeaCast) * Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence (Lex Fridman Podcast) * David Kilcullen on The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West (Intelligence Squared) The latter two came about from a conversation with Ben Ford (@commandodev ) following some discussion on Wardley Maps and Team Topologies . He recommended Jeff and David’s books, but I generally find that author podcasts can be much more efficient at getting to the key points.RASPBERRY PI STUFF
I’ve written in the past about booting from SSD, and we’re now starting to see boards like the Piunorathat allow
Compute Module 4 to work with NVMe SSDs. The performance improvement is measurable but not astonishing (10% rather than 10x) – so I won’t be rushing to buy new kit. NO BEATING BEAT SABER My March Apple Fitness challenge was to walk or run 199.5km, so my VR exercise time got spent on extra walks :/ Max was happy :) Filed under: monthly_update, Raspberry Pi
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