This Page is Designed to Last
This Page is Designed to Last — a manifesto from Jeff Huang for preserving content on the web, where he advocates to keep content on the web available and pledges to keep his site available for the next 10 years.
Having my content in this weblog online since 2002, I can very much relate to this initiative and additionally would like to point to the efforts of archive.org (aka. The Internet Archive).
The wayback machine of archive.org allows to see old versions of websites, even when the website itself is no longer available.
For me personally this became critically useful when the database of my weblog vanished with no current backup and I then used the archived versions from archive.org to restore the missing content.
Thus I would like to encourage everyone to support the efforts of archive.org with a donation.
The Comet Is Coming
The Comet Is Coming is a 21st century style Jazz band.
Discovered at the Jazznojazz festival :-)
More productive Git
More productive Git — a short article from James Turnbull with 'Tips for acquiring Git super powers'.
TL;DR:
git reset <filename>
git cherry-pick <commitid>
git commit --amend
git stash
git log --stat
git bisect
Engineering Management
Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder — a well written article from Charity Majors about the non-trivial entanglement between engineering and management, explaining how doing everything at the same time does lead to unhappy/un-fulfilled people. Also worth reading in this context is the prequel article The Engineer/Manager Pendulum.
Blogroll cleanup
As some links on my blogroll start to turn into 404 errors it's time to do some cleanup and also to bring in some fresh blood :-)
Removed:
Added:
New Year - New Vim Trick
Happy 2019! I have learnt a new Vim trick:
When searching for some pattern with / (eg. /mystring), often the next step is to perform a replacement command.
Now instead of re-typing the whole string, you can directly enter the substitution command with an emtpy search-pattern (:%s//newstring/), Vim then automatically re-uses the previous search pattern.
(via)
The Swiss Army Knife of Hashmaps
The Swiss Army Knife of Hashmaps — a very nice article from Ravi Shankar explaining how Google's SwissTable concept was implemented for Rust.
Run QRadar CE on Mac OS X with Vagrant
The Vagrant file provided by IBM for running QRadar Community Edition on Mac OS X currently does not work properly. It fails with the following error:
Failure: repodata/repomd.xml from centos-gluster38: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try. http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/storage/x86_64/gluster-3.8/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404
The problem is that gluster3.8 was moved out of this CentOS repository and now the download fails. But the gluster3.8 RPMs are also provided with the QRadar CE installation ISO file.
Based on the workaround described here, I've extended the IBM provided Vagrantfile so that the RPMs are taken from the ISO file instead of the CentOS repository. With the modified Vagrantfile the automatic provisioning script no longer fails.
The instructions for running QRadar CE with Vagrant now look like this:
- Download the zipfile with the original Vagrantfile and the accompanying helper files from the IBM website: https://developer.ibm.com/qradar/ce/
- Create a folder and extract the zipfile:
mkdir community_edition unzip QRadarCE_Vagrantfile.20171003084145.zip -d community_edition/
- Download the modified Vagrantfile and overwrite the original one:
curl -o community_edition/Vagrantfile https://blog.x-way.org/stuff/Vagrantfile
- Make sure you have the requried Vagrant plugins installed:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-disksize vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload
- Make sure you have the QRadar CE ISO file (downloaded from the IBM website) in the same folder as the Vagrantfile:
cp QRadarCE.iso community_edition/
- Create the auto_install file to automatically install QRadar:
touch community_edition/auto_install
- Accept the EULA by adding the corresponding setup parameter in the Vagrantfile:
Edit the Vagrantfile and add the --accept-eula argument to /media/cdrom/setup --no-screen to automatically accept the EULA - Change into the folder and start the QRadar installation (takes about 1 hour):
cd community_edition vagrant up