Tonight I am embarrassed to be an American. For much of my life I identified as a Republican. In the last few years I’ve found myself identifying less and less with that party. Not to say I’m a Democrat; both parties have serious problems. This year I voted for Hillary. Not because she was the lesser of two evils. She’s far from perfect, and I don’t agree with her on everything. But she’s an accomplished politician and a qualified presidential candidate. I like the strength with which she has dealt with Trump’s attacks. I voted for her because I’m With Her. ...

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. Chopping these down into a pair of two-and-a-half hour movies would drastically improve the pacing even if you didn’t address the characterization or the tone issues. You could leave around three hours of slow-motion action sequences, goblin chases, and Radagast the Brown on the cutting room floor! Sounds great, doesn’t it? ...

“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: @linode Manager keeps logging me out at seemingly random intervals, especially when trying to do DNS management. Is this a known problem? ...

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. Dropbox provides an easy one-liner: ...

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. So I set out to get ruby installed and ready to generate my blog again. ...

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. Feel free to throw me feedback! I don’t pretend to be an awesome blogger. =) ...