I wanted an alias or function to use youtube-dl in the background. Looking around the web lots of people seemed to want this and most of them were banging their heads against a wall due to: A) bash quoting B) backgrounding dying when their terminal closed C) passing the argument (url in my case) to the function Here’s a simple function I whipped up that seems to ‘just works’™:

This feature annoys me endlessly, I end up zoomed in and out of websites all over the internet. … But the fix is easy and there’s no addons required. Navigate to about:config (in Firefox’s URL bar) Change the value of the following two properties to 0: mousewheel.with_control.action mousewheel.with_meta.action If you use Firefox sync and want these settings to sync between your machines, also add the following properties:

Last weekend I headed to New Zealand and marshalled at the Highlands Festival of Speed . The Highlands Festival of Speed is a weekend packed with some of the best modern classic racing you will see in New Zealand. Featuring the Pre 65 Racing, Mainland Muscle, Formula Libre, South Island Porsche, OSCA, Highlands Modern Classics/Nostalgic Classics and the Highlands Sprint Series.

It was almost 3 years ago that my open source storage project went into production. In that time it’s been running 24/7 serving as highly available solid state storage for hundreds of VMs and several virtualisation clusters across our two main sites. I’m happy to report that the clusters have been operating very successfully since their conception.

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link” Any improvement made anywhere besides the bottleneck is an illusion. Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless because it will always remain starved waiting for work from the bottleneck. Any improvement made before the bottleneck merely results in more ‘work’ piling up at the bottleneck.

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

My good friend Joel Shea received a most unlikely gift this Christmas - A vintage HP 4951 Protocol Analyser. According to the HP Computer Museum : Original Price: $3595 The 4951B was replaced by the 4951C and 4952A in 1986. Both new models handled Async, BSC, SDLC, HDLC, X.25 and SNA protocols.

Using GlusterFS to provide volume storage to Kubernetes as a replacement for our existing file and static content hosting. This talk was given at Infracoders on Tuesday 14th November 2017. NOTE: Below link to slides currently broken - will fix soon! (03/08/2019) Click below to view slides (PDF version): Direct download link

In vim, you can add a comment at the top of files to set the syntax, e.g.: # vim: syntax=ruby In SublimeText there are many ways to detect syntax, one interesting approach I’ve recently found useful is to match on the top line in the file. For example, with Puppet there is a file called Puppetfile, it has no extension but it’s really Ruby syntax, so it’s useful to add linting incase you miss something simple like a , and break deployments.

Earlier this week we started the process to upgrade one of our hypervisor compute clusters when we encountered a rather painful bug with HP’s Broadcom NIC chipsets. We were part way through a routine rolling pool upgrade of our hypervisor (XenServer) cluster when we observed unexpected and intermittent loss of connectivity between several VMs, then entire XenServer hosts.

We’re in the process of shifting from using our custom ‘glue’ for orchestrating Docker deployments to Kubernetes, When we first deployed Docker to replace LXC and our legacy Puppet-heavy application configuration and deployment systems there really wasn’t any existing tool to manage this, thus we rolled our own, mainly a few Ruby scripts combined with a Puppet / Hiera / Mcollective driven workflow.

Of all the tools for reading news and subscribing to software releases, I still find RSS the most useful. I use Feedly to manage my rss subscriptions and keep all my devices in sync, but instead of using the Feedly’s own client, I use an app called Reeder as the client / reader itself.