adrift on a cosmic ocean

that if you pass a Ruby symbol through the Puppet external node classifier interface, through a parametrised class and into an ERB template, it will arrive (relatively) unscathed? OK not really, but the special undef Puppet symbol does. ENC says: myvariable: :undef Puppet interprets it as a standard undef (which is internally represented as Puppet::Parser::AST::Undef). When passed through to an…

It never fails to shock me that it is 2011 and yet there is so much bad software still out there, and still being created. It seems like the most basic elements of a good piece of software are the hardest to come by - like init scripts. I've been playing with ActiveMQ today as my team is getting MCollective training (yes, we are the first ones in the world to get trained up on the official course…

I'm giving another talk at Puppet Camp in Amsterdam, which incidentally will also be a totally awesome event. If you have not already signed up, and you are able to weasel your way into getting management approval then please try to get to it! I'll also be attending the Puppet Dev course in the preceding days, which I'm looking forward to immensely. The whole family is driving up (well, I'll be…

I am officially mother to a one year old. Its hard to believe that this time, a year ago, I went to the birth house in the morning,  stopped by the hospital around 12pm, ( had a two hour labour) and was home with a 2.5kilo baby by 4pm in the afternoon. a year on -  here are some  of the things I love about being a mother, in no particular order.... simple pleasures Kai has given me... How excited…

Today Ani* brought me back. *Ani difranco  (musician/ poet/ songwriter/ producer/ women's activist/ mother) Lately I have been wanting to write another blog post. I used to do a lot of personal journal and poetry writing, but it was for my eyes only and  not public - and so blogging is still a strange concept that I am  coming to terms with ( which is why 99% of the posts in this blog are from Oli…

My talk has been approved for the Puppet Camp 2011 in Amsterdam - Yippee! Aside from the nervousness of exposing myself as a complete sham in front of my peers, it will be a good opportunity to expose some of the challenges I've been working on for the last year and a bit, and hopefully generate some feedback which helps us solve more problems. So, just over a month to prepare ;) This will be the…

I've recently been satisfying my need for more programming time and reading up on some of the aspects which really complete a good application, like adequate organisation, good design and reusability of library functions, error handling and of course testing. I've been using Cucumber for a while now in conjunction with Puppet which represents the BDD aspect, but haven't really delved into TDD…

I'm sure I'm not alone in my personification of hardware, but in extension to that I like to know that my hardware is doing something. The thought of it sitting there idle just bugs me. So when I install a fresh new Jenkins server and it is sitting there waiting for jobs to be fired off, it saddens me just a little that it isn't utilised more. The flip-side situation is when the machine is…

I think I will call this week the last I use shell script as my primary go-to language. Yes, by trade I am a systems administrator but I do have a Bachelor of Computer Science degree and there is a dormant programmer inside me desperately trying to get out. I feel like shell script has become the familiar crutch that I go back to whenever faced with a problem, and that is becoming frustrating to…

For a long time I've shunned stereotypes such as the hacker sitting in a dark basement listening to repetitive music with headphones on while they code into the early hours of the morning. My early hours of the morning are usually spent rocking the baby back to sleep and then trying to get back to sleep myself, and I don't live in a basement. Nor do I particularly enjoy listening to techno, trance…