I decided to spring clean my Dotfiles repo↗ , as it had been a while. Then I noticed that the last time I mentioned them on the blog was nearly ten years ago, so I wanted to give a quick update. The most significant change is that I have moved to using Zsh↗ and Oh My Zsh↗ since Zsh became the default Shell in macOS. Warning ...
During the day job, I have to get a little creative with controlling costs for Azure resources; there are some everyday tasks and scenarios where Azure Logic Apps can help you save money 💰. The first is quite a typical scenario: stopping and starting Azure Virtual Machines. There was a time when I would have just used an Azure Automation Account and the Microsoft-supplied workflow. Still, Automation Accounts are a little (well, a lot) too reliant on PowerShell for my macOS using / Linux administrating tastes. ...
As I am coming to the end of writing the second edition of Lean Ansible (more news on that coming soon), I thought now would be a great time to have a look at what exciting developments have been happening in the six months now that I have a little more free time. One of the things I have been keeping an eye on is the state of Large Language Models (LLM for short), especially since the introduction of open-source models such as Llama from Meta↗ and Mistral 7B↗ , which you can run locally. ...
2023 has been an extraordinary year for music, showcasing an eclectic mix of genres, styles, and artistic visions. This list of 17 albums represents the year’s rich musical landscape, each offering a unique perspective and sound. From the psychedelic choral pop of The Polyphonic Spree’s “Salvage Enterprise” to the introspective and nuanced melodies of Jenny Lewis in “Joy’All,” these albums traverse a spectrum of emotional and sonic experiences. The list includes revered artists like Peter Gabriel with his album “I/O” and new interpretations of classics like “The Endless Coloured Ways (The Songs Of Nick Drake)” by Various artists. It also features the experimental sounds of “Hologram” by Amplifier and the laid-back reggae vibes of Rhoda Dakar’s “Version Girl.” Each album stands as a testament to the artist’s creative vision, whether it be through revisiting and reimagining past genres or exploring new territories in sound and storytelling. ...
I had some time, so I thought I would take a look at Aider Chat↗ , Aidir Chat is described by its authors as; aider is a command-line chat tool that allows you to write and edit code with OpenAI’s GPT models. You can ask GPT to help you start a new project, or modify code in your existing git repo. Aider makes it easy to git commit, diff & undo changes proposed by GPT without copy/pasting. It also has features that help GPT-4 understand and modify larger codebases↗ . ...
Although it’s been some time since I’ve worked with containers on my local machine, I recently found myself intrigued to discover what’s new with Podman. Setting Up Podman To kick things off, we’ll need to get Podman installed. As my development environment is running on a Mac M2, I’m going to employ Homebrew for this purpose: Install Podman $ brew install podman podman-compose podman-desktop In addition to Podman itself, I’ve also chosen to install Podman Compose and Podman Desktop. The former serves as a fitting replacement for Docker Compose, allowing for the definition and orchestration of multi-container applications within the Podman environment. On the other hand, Podman Desktop is a handy GUI for Podman that substitutes Docker Desktop. ...
I am pleased to announce that my latest book, “Infrastructure as Code for Beginners,” is now available for purchase. Over the last six months, I have fully dedicated myself to this project, channeling my experience and knowledge into providing a resource that simplifies the complexities of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The importance of IaC cannot be overstated in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. IaC ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based services, thereby saving time while delivering robust results. However, understanding and effectively implementing IaC can be a challenge for many, and that’s where this book comes in. ...
Following on from upgrading my Macs to all M1-based ones, I get around to finally needing to use Ansible; typically, I would install Python using PyEnv and then run the following … It should just work?!?! pip install --user ansible pip install --user -r https://github.com/ansible-collections/azure/blob/dev/requirements-azure.txt ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection … and away we go, but this time I came across a few problems. The first was the following error when installing the requirements using the remote requirements-azure.txt file: ...