adrift on a cosmic ocean

I imagine that there are two groups of people who might read this post:

1. When you need to find a process by name, you run ps -ef or similar and pipe into grep processname.
2. When you need to find a process by name, you run ps -C processname

If you fall into the first category, you fail my interview tests. Perhaps you smugly fall into the second category, but surely you have seen this occur:

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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…

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…

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…

http://vimeo.com/23694270

Enjoy.

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…