Remembering Chester

A year ago today we had to say goodbye to our little dog Chester. I know, it's sad, and I'm sorry. Dogs don't get to live as long as we do and it's just not fair. He was a great little guy

Using GitHub mirrors with Bazel

If you use Bazel for builds, the https://releases.bazel.build and https://bcr.bazel.build certs expired today...and have not yet been renewed (see https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/28101). Any builds with Bazel will break because of this. I discovered this myself while working on something

Disabling Xbox Game Hubs

I've been an Xbox owner since 2010 starting with an Xbox 360 to my current Xbox Series X. One constant has been how you launch games: you select a game from the home screen with the controller, press the A button and the game starts. Simple! In June

Validating packer templates with GitHub Actions

I setup a GitHub Action for my packer-aws-windows-openssh project last month and it was working pretty well until a recent job failed with this: Run packer init ./aws-windows-ssh.pkr.hcl Failed getting the "github.com/hashicorp/amazon" plugin: 1 error occurred: * Plugin host rate limited the plugin getter.

Running PSScriptAnalyzer in GitHub Actions

I was working on a project recently that has some PowerShell scripts and I wanted to add some kind of linting for PRs, as you do. The go-to for PowerShell seems to be PSScriptAnalyzer and it's something I've already setup in VS Code. Great! The next

Installing a specific version of CMake in a docker image

Sometime last year I needed to get a specific version of CMake (3.6.2) installed in a CentOS 7 Docker image. The Docker image (via a Dockerfile) was being used in a Jenkins declarative pipeline. The version of the CMake yum package for CentOS 7 is 2.8.12.

Install Docker on Ubuntu with Ansible

I like to use Docker as much as possible for Jenkins builds since it simplifies the agent infrastructure – the agents just need to have git, java (jdk or jre) and Docker installed. I typically install Docker on Ubuntu via the instructions on the Docker website. The instructions recommend using the

Recommendations for MSBuild in a Jenkins pipeline

MSBuild has a lot of command line options that are relevant when building in a Jenkins pipeline. A useful command argument to set is /nodeReuse:false. This ensures that MSBuild.exe exits after being called. The default is true and is meant to reduce the startup time for subsequent builds.

Nginx reverse proxy settings for Jenkins CLI

If you run Jenkins in the cloud or locally, chances are good that you have it behind a reverse proxy, typicaly Nginx. Nginx is the goto for this sort of thing and the Jenkins docs have decent recommendation for setting it up. If you want to connect to Jenkins remotely

Denise Horrell: 1937-2017

Denise Horrell: 1937-2017

Creating a Custom FreeBSD 10 ISO with Automated Installation

Last month I was working on a FreeBSD 10.1 KVM image for SmartOS, SmartDataCenter and the Joyent Public Cloud. The first version of the image was released a few weeks ago and I'd like to share how I went about building the image. More specifically, I'

Switching over from Textpattern to Ghost

I recently switched Horrell.ca from Textpattern to Ghost. Chances are there are a bunch of broken links to files and such. I'm still tweaking and fixing things and reworking the site design, so expect more changes in the coming months :) For anyone else who wants to attempt

I could watch this all day

Joyent

Installing mod_cloudflare on a Joyent SmartMachine

CloudFlare is a great service and I’ve been using for my horrell.ca site for some time. It speeds everything up, acts as a firewall protecting your site from bots and jerks, and also provides IPv6 support. One side affect of using CloudFlare is the Apache logs for your

iOS

Adding Icons to Folder Names in iOS

The introduction of folders to iOS was a welcome addition to keeping your home screen tidy. Folders allows you to sensible group like applications and then give the folder a given name, like "Games" for all your game apps etc. In iOS 5, Emoji support was added which

Joyent

Installing node and npm on a Joyent SmartMachine

Here are some updated instructions for installing the latest stable version of node (v0.4.12), as well as npm, on a Joyent SmartMachine. These instructions install node in the ~/local directory avoiding the need for root privileges when installing things with npm, which is bad. First, create a ~src/

Mac

Disabling the Caps Lock Key on a Mac

I hate the caps lock key. Hate. I'm always, always pressing it by accident. I don't do it that often on my iMac, but boy howdy, I click it all the time on my MacBook Pro. At my old gig, when I did the nine to

Mac

com.akamai.client.plist errors

So you use a Mac and you notice that you see lots of errors like this in the Console.app application: 10-12-20 2:43:38 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[242] (com.akamai.client.plist[8486]) posix_spawn("/Applications/Akamai/loader.pl", ...): No such file

Joyent

Installing node.js on a Joyent SmartMachine

UPDATE These instructions have been replaced by the much better instructions here: Installing node and npm on a Joyent SmartMachine Here's a little tip for installing node.js (latest) on a Joyent SmartMachine (formerly called an Accelerator). First, you'll need to be root, so lets get

cnn.com: Remove Comments

cnn.com: Remove Comments is a Greasemonkey user script for the Firefox or Safari web browser. This script removes comments from the CNN website. To use this script you first need to make sure you have Greasemonkey installed and enabled for Firefox or GreaseKit installed and enabled for Safari. With

Installing Greasemonkey Scripts in Safari

Here's a recent discovery I'd like to share: you can actually run Greasemonkey scripts in Safari. The solution is simple: install GreaseKit. You can find some good instructions on installing GreaseKit here. Once installed, you can use any of my Greasemonkey scripts in Safari on a

youtube.com: Remove Comments

youtube.com: Remove Comments is a Greasemonkey user script for the Firefox or Safari web browser. This script removes comments from YouTube. To use this script you first need to make sure you have Greasemonkey installed and enabled for Firefox or GreaseKit installed and enabled for Safari. With that out

nationalpost.com: Remove Comments

nationalpost.com: Remove Comments is a Greasemonkey user script for the Firefox or Safari web browser. This script removes comments from the nationalpost.com website. To use this script you first need to make sure you have Greasemonkey installed and enabled for Firefox or GreaseKit installed and enabled for Safari.

theglobeandmail.com: Remove Comments

theglobeandmail.com: Remove Comments is a Greasemonkey user script for the Firefox or Safari web browser. This script removes comments from the theglobeandmail.com website. To use this script you first need to make sure you have Greasemonkey installed and enabled for Firefox or GreaseKit installed and enabled for Safari.