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  • My team at IBM Skills Network

    Some of the out-of-town team members visited in October. We wrapped up the workday at a local escape room here in Ontario. It was good to have everyone in the same room, or perhaps trapped in three separate rooms filled with puzzling situations, each room more inescapable than the last. At IBM Skills Network, we…

  • Retiring Planet Db2 and Planet Big Data

    Planet Db2 and Planet Big Data are two blog aggregators that I created when I first started at IBM. They were similar to Planet Debian or Planet Intertwingly but about the Db2 relational database server and about big data technologies like Hadoop. If you are interested in taking over the blogrolls, please contact me. Blog…

  • Skynet Golems in Cyberspace

    There is no stealth in space. You can see a rocket burn anywhere between here and past Pluto, or any object of room temperature on infrared at the same distance. You cannot hide a spaceship. It is much the same thing in cyberspace. Anyone on the internet can attack anyone on the internet. Yet across…

  • Python Library of the Day: retrying

    I’ve learned through extensive experience that Bash is the wrong choice for anything longer than a few lines. I needed to write a command line app, so I put one together in Python — Python 3 of course, as Python 2 is going away by 2020. In the process I discovered a new to me…

  • Kudos to Firefox team on Quantum release

    The new Firefox Quantum release is incredibly fast. It feels faster than Chrome, faster than old Firefox, and faster than all the other browsers on my Macbook. Impressively, despite Firefox ditching the old extension model, all my extensions continue to work. I did have to manually reinstall the indispensable Tree Style Lab, but it works…

  • Cryptocurrency and irreversible transactions

    There’s a current news story about a wallet blunder freezing up $280,000,000 of Ether, a cryptocurrency. I try to avoid posting too much opinion on my blog, but I do have a view on this. Cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ether is based on the idea of unbreakable contracts and irreversible transactions. This is…

  • Integrate your Rails app with Open edX SSO and Oauth2

    OpenEdX is an open source platform for MOOCs. I put together the omniauth-cognitiveclass gem for integrating Rails apps with Open edX SSO using Oauth2

  • Brace expansion to match multiple files in Bash

    Bash has handy brace expansion powers that I’ve belatedly discovered. $ echo I love hippo{griffs,potamuses,dromes} I love hippogriffs hippopotamuses hippodromes For example, you can quickly diff a file with and without a suffix: $ echo diff .env{,.example} diff .env .env.example Or tail multiple log files: $ echo tail -f /var/log/{messages,secure} tail -f /var/log/messages /var/log/secure Bash…

  • Command line client for Sentry (Bash)

    Sentry is a great error aggregation service. We use it for every service we deploy at work. A command line client for Sentry lets you log Bash errors.

  • Update OpenLDAP SSL certificate on CentOS 6

    You may need to update your OpenLDAP SSL certificate, as well as the CA certificate and signing key on a regular basis.