I work with several clients and often we are using different version of tools at different times. While I’m endeavouring to move my development processes to use docker containers I still do a lot of development locally on my Mac. I’m still running Mac OS (or is that OS X??), and so I use brew to install many of my tools. What I’ve struggled with in the past is installing certain versions of the many tools. e.g. terraform or ansible can often be stuck until someone has a chance to port breaking changes between versions. Recently while on-boarding someone into a team, I went out and tried to find a way to do the install. Everything I tried didn’t work. It seems it was never the intention and so the packaging doesn’t really support it. Read more

As many people know I usually use a GNU Linux desktop environment, and have for a few years. I have previously had to use Windows during stints at large Engineering orgs, but most of the time, I was able to setup a second computer with Linux on it for day-to-day tasks. I’ve also used macOS/OS X a few times in the last few years, and I’ve got pretty frustrated with it. Recently I had a lot of trouble with my daily work-horse (Dell E5530), where Dell actually took it away for a few weeks. I needed something quick and $employer was able to help me out. The best laptop available was 2015 MacBook Pro. Read more

About 6 months ago our car (2008 Nissan X-Trail) started to have it’s AirBag light flash. This could be a worry we thought. After some googling we found a way to reset or go into a new diagnoses mode. This involved carefully timed ignition key turning with the airbag light showing up on the dash. (as it turns out there are at least a couple of these combinations which interact with various systems in the car) Read more

I have been putting a lot of thought recently into how the Australian and NSW government are pouring money into road infrastructure in Sydney. I think they are about 20 years too late, and believe they should stop throwing that money away and change directions. We are living in a world where telecommuting is a reality. I am fortunate enough to work for a great company where I can do that. I am also (un)fortunate to be in a role that sometimes requires me to head into the office for meetings with customers, and for important meetings, thus at the moment I do live close enough to work to facilitate this. Read more

We do a lot of support of OpenSource CMS’s at work, and one of them happens to be WordPress. I recently thought it might be cool to have a bit more of a play with W3-Total-Cache as it is a plugin of choice to assist customer with scaling issues. Since my blog is massively popular (not!), I decided to use the S3/CloudFront option, presented here. Well it didn’t work. Very sad face. All the tests were passing OK, but nothing was changing in the source of my pages. Read more