I got interested today in trying to come up with a solid way of determining when updates were last applied to a RHEL-derived Linux instance. Previously we’d been inferring it from the kernel version, but it turns out there is a convenient “yum history” or “dnf history” command which will show you all the previous…
Amazon Linux 2023, DNS, and systemd-resolved — a story of no caching
I’ve learned a few things on an adventure this week, and I figure I should probably write them down. First off, AWS throttles the number of DNS queries you can perform on a VPC. Apparently you’re limited to 1,024 packets for Elastic Network Interface (ENI). I am a little unclear on if the limit is…
Leaders Eat Last
This is the first Simon Sinek book I’ve read. His stuff has been on my mental to do list for a long time, but never seemed to get to the top until now. This is about a book about how employee happiness and trust in their management directly results in better outcomes for employers, and…
Children Of Ruin
This book did not go where I expected it to. Sure, it has a species uplift plot which is similar to Children of Time, but that’s not all that’s happening here. If the previous book was about refugees and redemption, this book is about alternative ways of structuring societies (I don’t want to ruin the…
Solving the bottom turtle (the SPIFFE / SPIRE ebook)
I’m reading about SPIFFE / SPIRE at the moment in the form of the official project ebook. I’m going to list it here because if I read 194 pages I am going to write it up, regardless of if the book has been formally published or not. This book is probably the best introduction to…
Lights Out
This book continues the story of General Electric in the period after that covered by The Man Who Broke Capitalism, thus presenting an opportunity to validate if Jack Welch really was the bad guy while also learning more about where Welchism took General Electric in the longer term. This book is very readable, with nice…
The Stranger in the Woods
At 20, Chris Knight set off into the woods to avoid society. He didn’t come out apart from to commit petty theft for supplies for 27 years, when he was finally caught after about 1,000 burglaries. Catherine and I are a bit divided on this story — I think Chris clearly had something wrong in…
Drive
This is a book about motivation, specifically about how our assumptions that biological urges and extrinsic motivation are sufficient to model all human behaviours. It turns out that’s not true — intrinsic motivation plays an important part, and in fact badly applied extrinsic motivators can harm the much more powerful intrinsic motivating factors. (It will…
Plays Well With Others
This book lied to me. It purports to start out with a description of a hostage situation in New York city. However, the twist is it turns out that its a simulation instead of the real deal. The deception is complete! However, this is a pretty unusually effective way to “hook” people at the beginning…
Argo CD in practice
I guess it’s no surprise that work uses Argo CD, so it seemed like time to understand it a bit better. Unfortunately this book has what I have come to expect from Packt publishing — it could do with a more solid editorial pass to be honest. The English in the book is awkward, and…