- Finding inspiration
Posted by Oliver on the 13th of July, 2011 in category Thoughts
I fully own up to and take responsibility for my unending perfectionist
streak (although of course I am far from perfect) - I am never happy
with the work I have done, am always looking for new challenges, and
constantly think that I'm not doing enough (in various different areas
of my life). This generally applies to work and associated pursuits but
also to just about any other area I care to…
- Hacking on Maemo5 eCoach
Posted by Oliver on the 17th of June, 2011 in category Tech
Since I took possession of my Nokia N900
(a marvellous piece of smartphone technology, despite being mercilessly
killed off by my employer) I've been using
eCoach to track my sports activities
outdoors. Mainly running and more recently cycling, it's a pretty
decent analogue of SportsTracker which
is, vaguely speaking, the S60 version and forerunner in many ways (not
that eCoach is a port - it's…
- How we use Vagrant as a throwaway testing environment
Posted by Oliver on the 31st of May, 2011 in category Tech
As I mentioned in my presentation at
PuppetCamp, one of the goals of our
Puppet code testing was to run Puppet
Faces-style compile tests on all of
our modules. Since this requires a somewhat realistic deployment
environment, a clean system, and our modules to be installed as packages
(since that's how we are distributing our own modules) it makes sense
to run this stage in a throwaway virtual…
- Video of talk from Puppet Camp 2011 Amsterdam
Posted by Oliver on the 20th of May, 2011 in category Tech
http://vimeo.com/23694270 Enjoy.
- How we use cucumber-puppet
Posted by Oliver on the 16th of May, 2011 in category Tech
I got a question recently by email in followup to my presentation at
Puppet Camp in
Amsterdam
about how we use
cucumber-puppet. I touched
on the subject only briefly in my talk but what I did say is that it
revolutionised my approach to Puppet in general. Don't get too high an
opinion of the tool from that statement! Behaviour-driven development in
general was a new thing to me and did change my…
- reblog: Modeling Class Composition With Parameterized Classes
Posted by Oliver on the 11th of May, 2011 in category Tech
http://www.puppetlabs.com/blog/modeling-class-composition-with-parameterized-classes/ I'd like to point out a fine blog post by Dan Bode on parametrised
class theory and application. No surprises, I've done a lot of work
with Dan and our new Puppet implementations reflect this, but I find it
to be a very logical way of working.
- CI and Vagrant SSH sessions
Posted by Oliver on the 8th of May, 2011 in category Tech
If you saw my talk in Amsterdam or read my slides (or even work with me,
) you would know that one of my stages of Puppet module
testing is compile tests using Puppet Faces (at least, a pre-release
version of it since we started using it a while ago). I'm just putting
the finishing touches on the system so that it uses dynamically
provisioned VMs using Vagrant and one of the
slightly fiddly bits…
- strace leaving your processes in "stopped" state?
Posted by Oliver on the 5th of May, 2011 in category Tech
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=590172 I can't tell you how many times this has bitten me, and left me
completely confused. Now I know it is just another bug... sigh.
- PuppetCamp 2011 Amsterdam Talk
Posted by Oliver on the 29th of April, 2011 in category Tech
If you made it to my talk, I hope you enjoyed it. If not, then maybe
next time! Either way, I've uploaded my slides which are available
here. If I forgot your name, your face, or just totally forgot who you are I
apologise, and similarly if I didn't introduce myself when I was
standing right next to you - I'm a terribly shy person at heart so I
probably didn't have the guts to interrupt your…
- Puppet Dev Training / Camp @ Amsterdam
Posted by Oliver on the 25th of April, 2011 in category Tech
I'm currently at the Puppet Developer course at Beurs van Berlage in
Amsterdam. We drove up on Friday from Berlin (which should have taken 6
hours, but due to traffic jams and sanity stops it took almost 11
hours). We've now spent the weekend exploring Amsterdam, which is an
amazing looking city. The canals are breathtaking, and despite the
frenzied bicycles and scooters constantly whizzing past…