Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
Now, I might be biased because I like John Scalzi’s stuff, but this book was really good. It starts slower than a normal Scalzi book, and takes a couple of chapters to really get going, but I am glad I was patient with it. Apart from that its a quick easy read. Its a typical…
Chet bought me this book and demanded I read it, and honestly that was a good call. The book reminds me a bit of Oryx and Crake, but perhaps that’s unfair given I read that one eight years ago and have probably forgotten some important details. The book is well paced and engaging. Despite being…
I bought this book on a whim, because I was trying to understand a compression scheme and had trouble finding good documentation on it. The book overall is written in a quite conversational style that I find a bit distracting from the content, and the introduction is a bit repetitive — yes I get it,…
Once again I venture into the lands of poorly documented keystoneauth1 calls. This time, I want to be able to validate if a stored keystone authentication token is valid. Here’s the best I could come up with, I’d be interested in others have something better. For this to work, we need a service account to…
A very readable history of the early US hacking scene, including the roots of Def Con and Blackhat security conferences. The book is filled with a cast of characters many of whose names and exploits I recognize — although I’ve only met one or two in person. The book is definitely US-centric in it’s coverage…
I enjoyed Andy Weir’s two previous books, so I guess it’s not a surprise that I enjoyed this one too. I feel like this one is closer to The Martian than to Artemis, so perhaps Weir is finding his sweet spot in terms of content choices. This book follows a school science teacher doing foolhardy…
I wanted to authenticate against OpenStack recently, and had a lot of trouble finding documentation about how to authenticate just by passing arguments (as opposed to by using clouds.yaml or environment variables). Now that I have a working incantation, I figure I should write it down so I can find it again. Its also disappointing…
One of the struggles I have with running self-hosted GitHub actions runners is that GitHub releases new versions of the runner quite often and I don’t notice. That’s fine as long as you ignore the scary warnings on action output, until they drop support for whatever random old runner you’re using. They did just that…
This paper examines the withdrawal behaviour of corporate contributors to OpenStack, which seems particularly relevant given most contributions in OpenStack are corporately supported, and corporate engagement is declining over time. Its also directly relevant to my own experiences contributing to the project, so seemed like a thing I should read. One interesting aspect of the…
My team at work now has a daily personal learning time called “egg time” — its a slightly silly story involving a manager who was good at taking some time to learn things each day, and an egg shaped chair. Today I decided that I should read this paper about container image loading in AWS…