Here are my top ten and bit albums of 2015 (yes I know one is a remake, one was first released in 2014 and one is an EP). Steven Wilson Hand. Cannot. Erase.↗ Vennart The Demon Joke↗ Charlie Barnes More Stately Mansions↗ Leon Bridges Coming Home↗ Sweet Billy Pilgrim Motorcade Amnesiacs↗ Nordic Giants A Séance of Dark Delusions↗ Gary Clark Jr. The Story of Sonny Boy Slim↗ Julia Holter Have You in My Wilderness↗ Dave Gahan & Soulsavers Angels & Ghosts↗ New Order Music Complete↗ Public Service Broadcasting The Race for Space↗ Faith No More Sol Invictus↗ Coheed and Cambria The Color Before the Sun↗ Monster Magnet Cobras and Fire↗ Crippled Black Phoenix New Dark Age↗ Cleft Bosh↗ There are also lists for 2014 and 2013....

Jenkins has always been a bit of an elephant in the room to me. Not being a developer I have always just shrugged it off a tool used for running unit tests, however, as I moving more into orchestration and automation I am finding the need for a tool which can run both tasks and unit tests, so this weekend I decided to finally take the plunge and have a play around with it....

As mentioned in a post a few months ago I have been working on a book about the various ways you can approach monitoring your Docker containers, I am proud to announce that it was published today by Packt Publishing↗ . You can order your copy from the Packt website↗ or Amazon↗ . A free sample of the book can be found here↗ .

I have been reading about Flocker↗ for quite a while and it’s been something I have been meaning to look at since the introduction of plugins back in the Docker 1.7 release↗ . But I have been busy looking at other parts of Docker. Since I had a few hours this weekend I thought it was about time and had a play. ClusterHQ describes Flocker as; Flocker is an open-source container data volume manager for your Dockerized application....

This week I had to do a few installations of Puppet Enterprise on an EC2 instance. Although this seemed like a simple enough task, I did hit upon one annoying issue. I was doing a Monolithic installation as it was just for testing, I had done this several times on Digital Ocean↗ and locally using a Vagrant box↗ with no issue at all. Reading through the documenation I had to open the following...

Since the last post about the blog I have been playing with the blog a bit more, I have finally got a decent PageSpeed Insights Score↗ ; It’s annoying that the Disqus javascript is keeping me from getting 100/100 but considering before I started to tweak things I was getting a score of 85/100 so I can’t complain too much. I have also adding the following functionality to my Gruntfile↗ grunt test — Runs a PageSpeed Insight test from the command line and highlights if either the mobile or desktop test drops below 95/100 grunt grab — Grabs the external Javascript needed to run the site so I can serve it locally....

One of the reasons I haven’t been posting much on here for the last fews months is that I have been busy spending my weekends and evenings writing a book called “Monitoring Docker” which is being published by Packt Publishing↗ at the end of the year. It’s now available for pre-order from the Packt website↗ and also Amazon !!! Exciting times :D

Every six months or so I like to do clean installs of all of my Macs. I try and time this for late September which is normally when Apple releases its latest updates. This year its OS X 10.11 El Capitan; First thing to do is build a USB install disk so that , to do this I use DiskMaker X↗ . Once the drive has been created I boot from it, erase “Macintosh HD” and then do the installation....