Blogs

Packt is running a cool promotion right now where you can get a different free ebook each day until a March 5. Check it out!

My book, Learning SaltStack, is available for purchase! It’s available in paperback, as well as for kindle from Amazon. You can also buy it directly from Packt. Hope you enjoy it!

My coworker CR wrote up a great guide to mitigating the new GHOST vulnerability with SaltStack. Check it out here: Mitigating GHOST with Salt If you haven’t already checked out SaltStack, I highly recommend it! You’ll never have to manually patch all of your machines again!

I was catching up on my RSS feeds and I found [this review of the last Hobbit movie by Ars Technica][1]. Sums up my feelings perfectly: There’s one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset—the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children’s novel into three feature-length prequel films. Artistically bankrupt. Perfect way to put it. What these movies desperately need are boundaries, reasons to condense scenes or cut them out entirely instead of reasons to pile on more....

“This one weird trick that will make all Legos appeal to girls more” So good. And so true.

Recently I’ve been having issues with Linode Manager repeatedly logging me out every few requests. I figured this was related to ipv4/ipv6 switching, because sometimes the logout would also trigger a new IP whitelist request, which would sometimes be ipv4, and sometimes be ipv6. After a little googling, I found this twitter conversation: Turns out I’m not the only one experiencing this issue. So I decided to set up dnsmasq as one of the replies mentioned, and force Linode to a single ipv4 address....

This weekend I moved my blog over to Pelican from Octopress. I’ve been very happy with this decision. But I decided I wanted to go a step further, and set up autopublish. I knew it could be easily done with a git hook, but I wanted to be able to easily blog from my iOS devices as well, so I decided to go with Dropbox instead. Getting Dropbox First, I needed to install Dropbox on my machine....

It’s been a long time. …again. I thought that I had a pretty low-friction setup with my new blog on Octopress. However, that was not the case. This morning I decided I needed to get my blog back up. There have been a few times in the last couple of years that I wished I had it available. However, I didn’t have any of the dependencies set up on my new laptop....

Well, at long last I got around to re-installing Ruby on my machine, updated Octopress, and got my blogs settled. I’m back! So what’s been going on in the interim? Let’s hit the top two: I graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Utah with a BS in Computer Science. I switched jobs – I now work for Salt Stack, Inc, making awesome open source software. A lot has changed, and I hope to have much more to blog about now that I’m more involved in the open source community....

Update, Nov 2014: Since I wrote this blog post, I have ditched Jekyll and Octopress (mostly because of the pain of setting up Ruby, not because of those pieces of software themselves). This blog is still static, but is now generated using Pelican, a Python project. The Problem Last week I received an e-mail from the RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center. It related to my personal blog: It appears that your website cmyers....