It’s that time of year again, here’s my top 10 albums of 2014…. The War On Drugs — Lost in the Dream↗ The Smashing Pumpkins — Monuments to an Elegy↗ Neil Finn — Dizzy Heights↗ Mogwai — Rave Tapes↗ Amplifier — Mystoria↗ Devin Townsend — Z2↗ The Pixies — Indie Cindy↗ Pink Floyd — The Endless River↗ St. Paul & The Broken Bones — Half the City↗ Mastodon — Once More ‘Round The Sun↗ I know number 2 has only just come out, but, they have been releasing tracks for the last month so I am putting it in. ...

As you may have noticed, the website looks different to how it was previously. I decided it was time for a refresh and I wanted to make the design a little more interesting. While Jekyll↗ & Github↗ pages use SASS↗ the Bootstrap theme I settled for uses LESS↗ . This meant that I needed to compile all of my CSS outside of Jekyll. Most of the articles I found say use either Gulp↗ or Grunt↗ , looking at the syntax of the two I preferred Grunt as it didn’t look like code. ...

Yesterday, I had day out of the office with Danny↗ at the 2014 London PuppetCamp↗ . It was the first time I had attended a PuppetLabs event, though I have streamed plenty of video from past camps and conferences. It was interesting to see how best practices had moved on (answer, lots) since I first had my Puppet epiphany over a year ago. For me, and in no order, the most interesting talks were …. ...

As mentioned in a previous post I tend to send most articles I am interested in reading to Pocket↗ so I can read them when I have time. Here is a selection of the most interesting “stuff” I have bookmarked over the last month or so …. How I Reverse Engineered Google DocsTo Play Back Any Document’s Keystrokes↗ A Flock of Tasty Sources on How to Start Learning High Scalability↗ AWS Best Practices — Enterprise Perspective↗ A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS↗ Distributed systems for fun and profit↗ Post Mortem: The One Where We Accidentally DDOSed Ourselves↗ Docker in Production — What We’ve Learned Launching Over 300 Million Containers↗ SimCity That I Used to Know↗

I have been listening to the following albums on the headphones over the course of the last few weeks and here is a playlist of the select tracks which are available on Spotify …

Now the dev team at work↗ have moved over to using Docker we decided to have some fun. An internal system we use is based on Drupal7↗ , the development version of the site has a NGINX / PHP 5.4 container↗ running in front of it. We have been hearing alot about HHVM↗ so why not try building a container and seeing if it our codebase works? ...

I am in the process of building a Vagrant↗ Box for work↗ . All was going great until I ended up having to spend the best part of two days trying to figure out why static files (css, javascript etc) were not being served after being updated on the host file system. Turns out that VirtualBox↗ has had a “bug” for around three years where if “sendfile↗ ” is enabled in the web server you are running it won’t serve a file after it has been changed on the file system mounted from the host machine. ...

When Docker 1.3↗ was released a few weeks ago I was interested in using the process injection docker exec functionality. Unfortunately, all of the repos which provide RPMs for Docker are out of date, the documentation suggests a manual installation↗ of the binary which is turns out to be straight forward: Installing Docker 1.3.x on CentOS 7 1/2 # Download the binary & set the permissions curl -L https://get.docker.com/builds/Linux/x86_64/docker-latest > /usr/bin/docker; chmod +x /usr/bin/docker # Download the systemd files curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docker/docker/master/contrib/init/systemd/docker.service > /usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.service curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docker/docker/master/contrib/init/systemd/docker.socket > /usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.socket # Enable & start the service systemctl enable docker systemctl start docker # Install Fig as well curl -L https://github.com/docker/fig/releases/download/1.0.0/fig-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/fig; chmod +x /usr/local/bin/fig now to check it works: ...