You magnificent girl, you brought me 14 years of love and happiness Photos

Stop trying to hire with titles like ‘DevOps Engineer’ or ‘Cloud Engineer’“DevOps is … not a job title” “It’s more of a cultural practice, like innovation, and it makes just as little sense hiring “innovation engineers” and expecting your organisation to be innovative, without also creating the culture to foster innovation.” (Joel Shea when responding to this posted on LinkedIn) In most cases it’s clear the organisation doesn’t truly know what they want or need and likely don’t understand the nuances of the aspects of engineering. The problem is - they’re going to end up with a ‘Camel Dressed As A Unicorn’ rather than someone with deep or natural engineering understanding in the areas they most need to help see, discuss, solve problems and deliver effective and lasting solutions.

As stated in my announcement post - after 7~ years, I resigned from Infoxchange several months ago. I planned on taking a holiday, relaxing, decompressing, dipping my toes in some off-the-shelf tech I haven’t spent a lot of time with and performing some personal growth through reading a number of books that have been sitting on my ’to read’ shelf. This is exactly what I’ve done. I’m now open to new opportunitiesI’d rather find a workplace that I can add great value too and be happy to work with than rush into a new role quickly, obviously if something great turns up right away - I’ll pursue it.

After 7~ years, I have resigned from Infoxchange. In 2012 I was hired to work with Infoxchange to “shake things up” (in the Systems Operations team) and stabilise the hosting environment. As Team Lead of Systems Operations I was tasked with melding the team and then for us to work to provide a stable, robust, modern and scalable platform for Infoxchange developed application hosting and product delivery and in a short time, with a small budget - we did just that. This 7~ year journey was exciting, rewarding and of course at times very stressful. I have learnt a lot and made so many very dear friends so resigning was far from easy, however it is time to move forward to new potential challenges.

In 2018 I set out to replace our XenSever 7.2 based virtualisation after Citrix essentially screwed over free / open source users. This project was to directly replace XenServer 7.2 with something supported and manageable for our traditional virtualisation needs. High Level Selection ConsiderationsI evaluated a number of options, with the primary candidates below. Key criteria (at a high level) I was evaluating: Ease of moving from our existing XenServer 7.2 based hypervisor clusters. Security (architecture, hardening, monitoring, logging). Cost (both licensing if any and self-support / management costs). VM Performance (Storage IOPs and throughput, Network latency and throughput, Processing latency, steal from over-provisioned workloads).

In late November of 2018 I was lucky enough to get my hands on the upcoming 2019 Sport spec Mustang GT v8 to be its first driver. I’m not usually an American Muscle enthusiast, but the new 2019 GT really is quite different from its slightly older counterparts, with a new specially developed 10 speed gearbox (yes, 10 gears - because more is better right?), tuned up suspension and so seemed like it would make for a pretty fun trip. I might do a review of the car at some point, needless to say it was a lot of fun, very quick, handled surprisingly well for a big America v8, it did however suffer from very poorly designed console controls.

I wanted an alias or function to use youtube-dl in the background. Looking around the web lots of people seemed to want this and most of them were banging their heads against a wall due to: A) bash quoting B) backgrounding dying when their terminal closed C) passing the argument (url in my case) to the function Here’s a simple function I whipped up that seems to ‘just works’™: function yt { nohup youtube-dl "$1" --no-progress 2>&1 > youtube-dl-"$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)".log & } And if you don’t want logs, simply send the output to /dev/null: function yt { nohup youtube-dl "$1" --no-progress 2>&1 > /dev/null & } Example:

This feature annoys me endlessly, I end up zoomed in and out of websites all over the internet. … But the fix is easy and there’s no addons required. Navigate to about:config (in Firefox’s URL bar) Change the value of the following two properties to 0: mousewheel.with_control.action mousewheel.with_meta.action If you use Firefox sync and want these settings to sync between your machines, also add the following properties: Create two new properties both of type boolean and set them to true: services.sync.prefs.sync.mousewheel.with_meta.action services.sync.prefs.sync.mousewheel.with_control.action Enjoy!

Last weekend I headed to New Zealand and marshalled at the Highlands Festival of Speed. The Highlands Festival of Speed is a weekend packed with some of the best modern classic racing you will see in New Zealand. Featuring the Pre 65 Racing, Mainland Muscle, Formula Libre, South Island Porsche, OSCA, Highlands Modern Classics/Nostalgic Classics and the Highlands Sprint Series. This is a weekend of true blue Kiwi racing starring some of New Zealand’s most well known racing legends. VideosI’ve supplied the car details at the bottom of this post. PhotosNote: These images are heavily compressed for the web, I have higher quality photos, just email or send me a DM on Twitter if you want them.

It was almost 3 years ago that my open source storage project went into production. In that time it’s been running 24/7 serving as highly available solid state storage for hundreds of VMs and several virtualisation clusters across our two main sites. I’m happy to report that the clusters have been operating very successfully since their conception. Since moving away from proprietary ‘black box’ vendor SANs, we haven’t had a single SAN issue, storage outage. We’ve also been so please with the success of the design that we’ve grown from a single cluster at each site to a total of 6 clusters (12 nodes).