duckland.org news

Moving

Don Harper — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 15:30:39 GMT

Well, after 4 years (almost to the day), it is time for me to say good-bye to HP. The team I worked on is a great team who really know their stuff. However, I am a geek, and I want to be doing things with tech, and not talking about tech,, and for the most part, talking is all I have been doing. I have learned a lot and was given a chance to do some traveling which I do not think I would have been able to do.

So, where am I going? Well, until after I start and get on-boarded, I am not sure how much I can say. It is a financial company based in Houston, so I will not be moving the crew, just changing the direction I commute back to into the sun again.

Stay tuned here for more updates, and I will probably be using this as a place to document some of the new things I learn on the way.

Peace.

Updates to AUR packages

Don Harper — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 22:19:48 GMT

So, with the migration of the AUR to version 4, I looked at the 12 AUR packages I had created over the years which I have not looked at in a long, long time.

The list started out with:

chronicle - A simple blog compiler written in Perl
perl-leocharre-basename - Very basic filename string and path operations such as ext and paths
perl-leocharre-cli2 - Some quick help for writing cli scripts
perl-leocharre-debug - Debug subroutines
perl-leocharre-dir - Subroutines for general directory needs
perl-leocharre-strings - Combines string procedures I frequently use
perl-string-prettify - Subroutines to cleanup a filename and or garble for human eyes
perl-wordpress-api - Management of Wordpress API objects. Inherits WordPress::XMLRPC and all its methods
perl-wordpress-cli - Command line access to Wordpress
perl-wordpress-xmlrpc - API to Wordpress XML RPC calls
usbmount - Automatically mount and unmount USB mass storage devices
xlhttp - An Excel spreadsheet (.xls) and PowerPoint (.ppt) to HTML converter

In the end, I only kept xlhttp as I do not use the others anymore. Surprisingly enough, only one of the packages (chronicle) was out of date. I disowned all the others, so if you want, you can pick them up.

Vegas, again

Don Harper — Sat, 06 Jun 2015 15:06:48 GMT

Once more, off the Las Vegas for to work a trade show. This year, I was helping present training, so I was tucked away in a basement most of the trip, and did not get out to do much in the way of sight-seeing aside from walking around the hotel.

But, I did find time to snap a few pictures.

Quick Ansible Tip

Don Harper — Wed, 27 May 2015 12:24:16 GMT

This is a quick post to capture something seen. Ansibel is a configuration management tool that I have been learning recently. More details in a future post. This is just to capture this idea:

From: Smith, Chris (Big Data)

To: ansible

Ansible Galaxy is a centralised Github repository of public Ansible content, see: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ It uses a local routine that is installed when you install Ansible, called ‘ansible-galaxy’, to create a blank template for your Ansible content. What is not well known is you can run ‘ansible-galaxy’ in offline mode to create a blank template using the command:

# ansible-galaxy init --offline my-role

Enjoy,

Chris

More on this as I get some more back-ends stuff taken care of, like setting up a git repo and maybe auto-deploy from git push?

April recap

Don Harper — Mon, 04 May 2015 01:51:09 GMT

April has come and gone, and I did not manage to find time (or energy) to post anything.

I spent most of the month at work getting ready to and then delivering some training remotely in Nashville, TN, US. Now, I can say that I have stayed at the largest non-casino hotel in the world, The Gaylord Opryland. Now that that is over, I get to gear up to design a new training plan for internal product training. Such is the life of a Linux guy stuck working for a marketing group.

On the home front, we have hit a busy time with soccer, volleyball, dance, and swim time. I think we get a break sometime after the 4th of July.....

March Update

Don Harper — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 05:15:02 GMT

Does updating the theme of the site count as an update? No? Okay...time to type.

Life is busy right now, and extra things are gonna have to give. I have not had a chance to do much photography (both making and processing them), so I am putting the daily site on hold, again. For the sharp eye among you, you would have noticed this last week.

On the upside, I have lost about 20 pounds since the beginning of the year. While I am not where I want to be weight-wise, I have lost a pants size which puts me back were I was about 10 years ago. Life is good.

I am going to see about updating things here more often, if nothing else to have a record of things not in a cloud based service which may dramatically change its pricing model on me.

FreeBSD Challenge II, End Report

Don Harper — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 12:43:32 GMT

And, again, I hit something which is causing massive disk performance issues. That, and suspend/resume does not work on either laptop.

I would try to debug the issues, but that means learning a whole new set of tools, and I will not have time for a while. Next week, I am in week long meetings which will run late every day, and then I have to finish writing and present a training class the last week of the month. The hour or two I can spare will be far better spent for me by backup, re-installing ArchLinux than by starting to learn the tools. Yes, a bit of a cop-out, but I need the machines to do what I need to do. I will keep the servers FreeBSD, however, as it works great there.

I will revisit the issue of FreeBSD on the laptops when I either get new kit, or support for my models gets better.

FreeBSD Challenge II, Day 30 Update

Don Harper — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 21:38:32 GMT

As the month draws to a close, I am further into the switch. I have rebuilt my main laptop to PCBSD. I am still setting a few things up, but it seems to be going well.

Two things I need to fix:

Skype: While there is not a native client, there are lots of folks who report success with the Linux client. I will need to do some research.
Nikola: The software I use for my blogs. It throws a python error when I run it, so I cannot update things. Again, I think I just need to do some more research.

Now, the fun of the weekend is here, so I am off!

FreeBSD Challenge II, Day 14

Don Harper — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 05:51:48 GMT

Today is day 14 (pushing day 15 at this hour), and things are looking very good. Today, I got word from the PCBSD Project that a patch which I submitted to fix the issue with the WiFi NIC. Well, I got notice today that PCBSD Bug #7330 has been resolved, and I tested on the R810. It works!

Now, I just need to get a few things configured here first, like snapshots, backups, and porting my SDCARD reading scripts over to FreeBSD, and I should be good.

Then, fun things like configure & use IPv6. I have two FreeBSD VSP servers to test with...it will be fun!

Update on revisiting FreeBSD Challenge

Don Harper — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 04:35:04 GMT

It is the 10th day of the month, and I am 10 days in trying to use FreeBSD as my daily non-work driver. How is it going?

Well, for the most part, well. I can spend most of my personal work-flow on the FreeBSD laptop with no issues. There are a couple of things I have not moved over yet, and those relate to my photo work-flow. The main application, AfterShotPro is installed and working (see my previous desciption of installing in), however, I have not moved over the scripts I use in the flow. I believe they will just come over, but I have not had a chance to test them.

I was using Chromium, but any Flash site did not work. I need to revisit this at some point, but for now I went back to Firefox, and it is working create.

The only major thing right now I need to figure out is how FreeBSD deals with sound. I can hear things from the speakers just fine, but I need to figure out how to enable and use an USB headset. Not the biggest, but still. I also need to either install & configure Skype, or find a replacement video chat to use with the wife while traveling that works under FreeBSD. I like the second option better, but I have not really had the time to do the research.

And, the new site generating suite I am using works under FreeBSD. I wrote and posted this from the FreeBSD laptop.

More updates soon.