Recent content on General Ramblings
Intent now compiles itself Back in February I wrote about Intent. That post was more about what it couldn't do. Contracts were only runtime-checked. No generics on user-defined types. I said it was closer to "Rust with mandatory asserts" than to formal verification. I meant it. It was a proof of concept and I said so. Both of those limitations are gone now. The compiler proves contracts statically…
What if programming languages were designed for AI, not humans? A few weeks ago I saw a post on social media -- someone asking whether it was time to create a programming language designed for consumption by code assistants. Not for humans to write, but for AI to generate and humans to verify. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Every programming language I use was designed for humans to write.…
Back in 2021, I had an idea. What if there was a better way to share and discover Nomad job files and Nomad Packs? What if we could make it as easy to find a production-ready Nomad configuration as it is to find a Docker image? We needed a helm like repository for Nomad That idea became Ramble -- Github Repo . Today, after multiple restarts, countless refactorings, and a journey that taught me Go…
"Do you work with [insert latest tool here]?" If you're a Solution Engineer, you've heard this question countless times. That moment when a prospect mentions a tool you've never heard of can either be an opportunity or an uncomfortable scramble. The difference? Whether you've done your homework or not. Why This Matters As Solution Engineers, we need to understand more than just our own products.…
This is the final post in our five-part series exploring practical implementation of the SPACE-SEA framework . Having examined satisfaction, performance, activity, and communication, we now turn to efficiency - not just doing more with less, but ensuring Solution Engineers can focus their time and energy where it matters most. Understanding True Efficiency in Solution Engineering Efficiency in…
This is the fourth post in our five-part series exploring practical implementation of the SPACE-SEA framework . After examining satisfaction, performance, and activity, we turn to what often determines the success of complex technical sales: Communication and Collaboration. The Bridge Between Technical Excellence and Business Value Solution Engineers serve as translators, bridging the gap between…
This is the third post in our five-part series exploring practical implementation of the SPACE-SEA framework . After examining satisfaction and performance, we turn our attention to activity - specifically, how to ensure the day-to-day work of Solution Engineers creates meaningful value for customers. Understanding Activity Through the Customer Lens Every activity a Solution Engineer undertakes…
This is the second post in our five-part series exploring practical implementation of the SPACE-SEA framework . Having examined satisfaction and well-being as our foundation, we now turn to a challenging question: How do we meaningfully measure Solution Engineering performance? Beyond Win Rates Traditional metrics often reduce Solution Engineering performance to simple win rates or number of demos…
Following the introduction of the SPACE-SEA framework , many discussions with Solution Engineering leaders have centered on one key question: "How do we put this into practice?" To answer this, I'm writing a five-part series exploring each dimension of the framework in detail. We begin with what I consider the foundation of successful Solution Engineering teams: Satisfaction and Well-being.…
When I was leading Solution Engineering teams, I found myself grappling with a fundamental question: How can we most effectively measure success in the presales phase? It is not sufficient to consider only the number of wins and losses. We must also focus on ways of measuring success that will actually help our teams to thrive and grow. I am pleased to put forward a new approach that I believe has…
Something amazing happens when we expand how we measure SE success we discover the true magic they bring to our organizations . Every great SE brings multiple superpowers to the table: They architect solutions that delight customers They bridge the technical-business gap effortlessly They lay foundations for long-term customer growth They make complex technology feel accessible And yet,…
Let's talk about the unsung heroes of technical sales - Sales Engineers. They're expected to: Switch between multiple products seamlessly Be the smartest technical person in every room Translate complex tech into business value Handle high-stakes demos without breaking a sweat Navigate challenging customer questions on the fly But here's what many leaders miss: SE satisfaction isn't just a "nice…
Presales Engineers are known by many names, including, but not limited to, Solution Engineering, Solution Architects, Sales Engineering, and so on. In this article, I have opted to use Solution Engineering as a catch-all term for all the people who interact with your customers before they purchase your products. There is a long-standing discussion on how product management and Development Teams…
As I walked into the AWS Summit in Berlin, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. The atmosphere was electric, with attendees buzzing about the latest innovations in cloud computing and AI. As someone who follows the industry closely, I was eager to see what the summit was going to present. As I made my way through the different halls, The passion and enthusiasm of the…
As a manager at a startup, you know that stress and creativity are intertwined. While a moderate amount of stress can be motivating, unchecked stress can stifle innovation and hinder growth. As your team scales, it's crucial to strike a balance between these two forces. Understanding Stress in Startups Stress, much like a coin, has a dual nature. On one side, a moderate amount of stress can act as…
DNS in a multi-cloud world As companies transition to multi-cloud deployments, creating a common way to deploy solutions has become a requirement, this is also easily achieved by using Terraform to create your immutable infrastructure. The challenge you face is that the infrastructure in a cloud deployment is dynamic in nature and so you can't predict what the IP addresses of parts of your systems…
The getting started guides for using Terraform with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) https://cloud.google.com/community/tutorials/getting-started-on-gcp-with-terraform All suggest using code like this to provide credentials 1 // Configure the Google Cloud provider 2 provider 'google' { 3 credentials = ' ${ file ( 'CREDENTIALS_FILE.json' ) } ' 4 project = 'flask-app-211918' 5 region = 'us-west1' 6 }…
I have been trying to build a site with Meteor and have slowly started getting stuff working. One of the ways to populate your development data has been with database seeding. I wanted to link a user account with a document in one of my collections so I worked this out from the documentation. You add users to the users collection this returns the userId for the new user which you capture in a…
I was looking for a way to tidy up out photos on the NAS at home and have tried a number of things that just did not fit the bill. they were either just to difficult or completely wrong. i then stumbled upon this blog post http://falesafe.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/photo-management/ What a gem. if you can install ruby on a machine you have to sort your photos this is it. The post is from 2009 and so…
I am currently helping a customer migrate from Novell to Microsoft and they are using the Quest migrator product to move their data to new DFS servers. They currently have a large amount of data stored on a number of volumes. The sheer number of volumes and data have required that they deploy a large number of the copy engine servers. The copy engine does not utilize a central logging facility, it…
I have uploaded some images of the new UI so you can see what it looks like without installing it. Please let me know what you think. Images
A while ago Alex (so_solid_moo to the IRC channel) created a php binding for the Bongo API. He also created the start of the new UI that we are working towards. We started with the admin ui for now as we have created a user interface with the roundcube project that Alex also integrated with. I stared porting the current Dragonfly assets into the project and I tried to stick to the old design style…
This is an account of Thursday the 29th of September 2011 when my cynical view on Londoners only thinking of themselves and not wanting to get involved with other peoples troubles was blown completely out of the water thanks to some really amazing people who I don't have names for but would really love to thank from the depths of my heart for everything they did for me. The story begins as I am…
I recently had to move hosts and guests to a new vcenter server as the old server had become corrupt and full of issues. The current vcenter has a few custom attributes and notes that would not be transferred as part of the move. So I wanted to use powercli to read the attributes out and put them back. To export the attributes I used the script below. You will need to add as many Key Value pairs…
This blog is a follow on from a blog post I wrote ages ago and have eventually got round to finishing it off In this part of the process we will create the disks and setup the DRBD devices First we need to connect to the Virtual Machines from a terminal session as it makes life much easier and quicker when you connect remotely. You will need to make sure that your servers have static IP addresses.…
I was struggling with an install of ESXi on a cisco 6509 switch where the management and VM LAN connectivity worked just fine but for some reason the SAN NFS VLAN just did not want to communicate with the Nexenta on that VLAN. After some searching and trial and error I was able to utilise this post http://blogs.egroup-us.com/?p=2453 to get the port-channel and the ports configured correctly. I did…
I am busy working on a contract with a company that is implementing a 10G network for their ESX cluster. We have been using extreme X650 10G copper switches for the core. Migrating the current servers to the 10G environment was relatively easy and went with minimal issues. Over the last 2 weeks I have been trying to get a new server to connect to the cluster and have been frustrated. I have been…
This post should have been written quite a while ago as I wanted to start documenting my efforts to learn to program using Ruby. As most of you know I have been trying for a while to teach myself to program. I started my efforts with a course in c# at a company in London, the course was just great and the instructor was a fantastic guy. Unfortunately life meant I could not practice at all. I…
The Bongo-Project needs to be renamed Now before you fall of your chair or swallow your phone while reading this let me explain why. I have been wanting to create this post for sometime now and have been holding off as we are almost ready for our 1.0 release. The problem I have is that even if we released a new version of the software and it was our 1.0 release I am not sure anyone will be able to…
Creating a Two Node Mysql Cluster On Ubuntu With DRBD To create this cluster you will need 2 ubuntu node servers installed as follows. I am creating this cluster inside of vMware so I created 2 VM's with: 1GB RAM 1 10GB hdd for the root (/) partition. 1 20GB hdd for the database store. I downloaded the ubuntu 9.10 server iso and presented this to the VM's and started the install.
I have for some time now been wondering how many people actually use Bongo. The reason for this is that we have had images available for a while and I am still non the wiser as to how many people actually use them. I faithfully spend hours and hours building packages and getting them out the door but have no markers to see if they are being used. While reading the docs for the ESVA appliance (…
I have just upgraded to 11.2 from ubuntu 9.10 on my IBM / Lenovo T61 laptop. ( I will post a better blog about that later) What I wanted to mention here is that the current vMware workstation 6.5.3 does not want to run on my system. I have found this post http://k-----k.blogspot.com/2009/09/install-vmware-workstation-653-on.html Which has steps for compiling the modules yourself but by the look of…
I have great news about the images on the rPath system. I have been able to get Bongo 0.6.1 to build on the rPath system with a json patch from Alex. I have promoted it to the QA and RELEASE repo's so it should be available for you guys. Please test and let me know if you have any issues. You can find the images here
I have been trying to get the latest 0.6.1 release of Bongo onto the rPath images. This unfortunately has not been possible due to our reliance on a newer version of Python than what is available on the rPath system. This is a sad moment as I have been doing that for quite some time now and will not be able to continue. So for those that have images which contain Bongo on a rPath system please use…
I have been working on the images in the Suse Studio environment as I mentioned in my blog post here . I started the investigations to find that our RPM repository was in need of a bit of work. I wanted to create a new repository in my own name that would allow me to build these RPMs for the project. Thinking about the delivery of the RPM’s I thought it best to open a repository with a generic…
Over the weekend I was able to have my mobile contract changed and part of the deal is that I get an HTC Hero. This has made me quite happy as I have been forced to run windows mobile on my old phone for far to long and it is refreshing that I have an android phone. The first thing I noticed was that the box was really small, I wondered if they had actually just given me the charger by mistake.
You will be able to see from the poll archive that the following OS versions seem to be more popular Ubutnu 9.04 (53.0%, 19 Votes) Debian 5 (39.0%, 14 Votes) CENTOS 5 (28.0%, 10 Votes) openSuse 11.1 (22.0%, 8 Votes) Fedora 11 (19.0%, 7 Votes) I will now start to work on the packages for these OS's. From the outset I see that we have quite a few Debian based users and this is a problem for me as I…
Reflection Originally uploaded by lhaig This was taken in the Sandringham Estate. I found this puddle and tried to focus on the tree and got this strange result.
[ Forrest Picture Originally uploaded by lhaig Just trying different things out.
Walking Path Originally uploaded by lhaig Trying to create a meandering path composition
Reflection in water puddle Originally uploaded by lhaig Reflection of some trees in a puddle
Prehistoric Originally uploaded by lhaig It almost seems some prehistoric monster should be jumping up soon.
Wood for the trees Originally uploaded by lhaig was trying to get both the near and the far in focus but failed. Although this still looks ok I think.
Passing Time Originally uploaded by lhaig Wooden clock on the roof of the building at the Sandringham estate shops
Wooden Slats Originally uploaded by lhaig Trying to create a good composition to learn more
In flight Originally uploaded by lhaig This was a lucky shot while I was testing different filters on the 300mm lens
New Growth Originally uploaded by lhaig A new shoot of a fern I found in a patch of sunlight
Light Originally uploaded by lhaig I liked the way the sunlight shows all the lines in the leaves
I am about to embark on the epic journey which is Bongo packaging on the OpenSUSE Build Service. Now that I have succumbed to this task I wanted to establish a few things. In the Build service there are many many distributions available for build. Most of the distributions are very old. This leaves me with a choice as to were to focus my efforts, as most of you know I have been creating the Bongo…
For quite some time now we have been using the rPath rBuilder system to create images for the project. I have also used it for a few other projects. Things have been going quite well until someone at rPath decided that they needed to reinvent their web interface. Now I don't mind change and innovation as long as the changes are well thought through and well tested. I have experienced some major…