When I was working as an infrastructure architect, I regularly had interesting discussions with stakeholders related to change. To start off, change is something that is different from flexibility when it comes to designs. With change, I refer to changes in requirements or goals during a project. With this explanation, it is probably clear that change is an enemy of a perfect design, simply because project timelines usually don’t change, even while changes are imposed on a project....
Esp32 & brltty
Having recently obtained a small esp32 based gadget (Holocube, more on that in another post). I obviously wanted to see if I could at least get some of the details via the esptool.py. This unfortunately didn’t work. There was not /dev/ttyUSB* device that mapped to the gadget available. Scanning the dmesg output does confirm this: [59386.304049] usb 1-2: new full-speed USB device number 26 using xhci_hcd [59386.473422] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1a86, idProduct=7523, bcdDevice=a2....
Naming of Services
This is the eternal discussion, should services be functionally named, or given abstract, possible descriptive, names? Personally, I think that (micro)services should be given abstract names. From experience I do see that it has quite some advantages, which I will try to illustrate with simple examples. It frees one’s mind of unconscious biases. What I mean with this, is that if you call a service to its initial functionality, my mind tends to limit the functionality to something that is part of the domain the service is named after....
Carpenter or Cabinet Builder
One question that each developer should ask himself is: “Am I a carpenter or a cabinet builder?”. It might seem a silly question, but there is a difference. It isn’t the case that one is better than the other. This question isn’t about quality of work. When asking this, we also don’t worry about any compensation that one might get. So let me illustrate what I see as the difference....
Hugo Start
Welcome to this new attempt / incarnation of my blogging attempts. This time the site is setup using hugo, and over time, I will migrate the content from earlier attempts here, and mark them as something old.
Update infineon TPM 1.2 to TPM 2.0 from linux
Introduction If you, like me have a linux only environment running on your system, you will run into upgrade issues once in a while. I recently found that I wanted to use the tpm chip on my laptop, a HP Probook 440 G3, to decrypt my luks partition in an automated way. And knowing that things will benefit me, from using the latest standard, it found that I should upgrade my tpm chip from 1....
Handling Ubuntu Mono in Urxvt
When working with urxvt the ‘default’ way of working with the powerline font’s does not appear to be working. The work around is, installing a patched version of the font in your local home directory. This can be done using the following lines of code: cmd=$(pwd) tmp=$(mktemp -d) cd ${tmp} wget https://github.com/powerline/fonts/archive/master.zip unzip master.zip mv fonts-master/* ~/.local/share/fonts/ cd ${cmd} rm -r ${tmp} fc-cache -vf ~/.local/share/fonts And now, use the following line in your ~/....
lxhotkey when using ssdm for login
Recently I switched DE (desktop environment) from Plasma to lxqt. The change itself is quite simple, it basically means executing: sudo apt install lubuntu-desktop Once the installation is complete, only an desktop environment is giving that is really limited in the way it is setup. The most annoyn thing for me was the fact that my keyboard sound (volume) buttons did not work. So I started looking on the internet what might be the cause for this....
Orange PI Zero
Recently I got one of those tiny computers for some home projects. After some research in what’s available I decided to go for one of those Orange pi zero devices. The main reason to go for this one, is that is comes with build in wifi and a reasonable amount of memory for my intention, has a faster chip than the raspberry pi and a better price tag. The ordering was straight forward via ebay, as there are no resellers in Australia....
Adding java to an debian based distrubition using puppet
During some experiments I wanted to check if it is possible to install java, using puppet. This turned out to be quite simple. All that was needed where 2 simple scripts. The first shell script simply installs the puppet and a depended puppet module. #!/bin/sh sudo apt-get install puppet sudo puppet module install puppetlabs/apt sudo puppet apply java.puppet The second file (called java.puppet) should be placed in the same directory and will update apt, accept the java license and install java7, and make it the default java version....