I really have enjoyed working with a $5/month hosting company for seriously small projects with few performance requirements. The service that I am using at this time is site5. They offer a great plan that works for me and the many simple projects I have been using as prototypes. For this specific discussion I am going to talk about what I needed to do get the lastest django (v1.4) working on site5.

So today I was working with the datastax virtual environment (namely getting the OVA to work inside of VMWare). There was only one issue that I ran into, that was the external networking was not working out of the box. In this post I will discuss what I looked into and how I fixed the problem in the end. To start, I am not a very savy linux guru, so the purpose of this post is to both share and record my experience so that I can go over it again in the future if needed.

I love Docker and I really enjoy developing on a stable nix-like environment. But with the current limitation of the docker daemon requiring the linux kernel to work, I am left trying to create the best experience that I can while developing on a mac. Why not just use boot2docker So docker does provide a solution for most people which is called boot2docker. This solution provides the native docker client for mac, virtualbox and a minimum linux os for virtualbox that you can use as the docker daemon.

I am a huge fan of continuous delivery, of release code as soon at it is written and passes the automated test gates. I am also a fan of having a deployment system that can be more closely managed by me (the engineer). Using docker at work we have been able to create a system that allows us to define a running container and using gates, continuously deploy this simple container to many different environments (stage, prod, etc).

At AWS re:Invent (November 2014) a new technology was introduced. This was the AWS EC2 Container Service. A service provided by AWS to run docker containers on top of EC2 instances. We have been using docker for a while now within our organization, and I have to say that I am a huge fan of Docker. This is a great step in the right direction and I believe can help to decrease deploys to AWS while increasing stability and extensibility of a given architecture.

Tonight I decided I really wanted to switch to freebsd from Ubuntu. The move was not because ubuntu had issues, but rather because I felt that I would enjoy the experience of freebsd more than that of linux. It was going to be a new world, with a different way of making things work. So the items I list below will show the steps that I went through to get freebsd working smoothly on vmware.

This will be one of those posts, that I hope grows often as I love to use vim, and especially love to write down what I learn in case I forget it in the future. Useful Shortcuts Disable Search Highlighting set nohlsearch " Turn it off set hlsearch! " Toggle on or off :nohlsearch " Turn it off as command :nohl " Shorthand :noh " Even Shorter Useful Plugins TODO ;-)

So I am no stranger to dependency injection (DI), having used it for many years (starting with RhinoMocks on .net). For my new company they are using a CDI implementation (Weld) which is one framework that I have yet to use, so today I go over my experience with using this framework. Introduction So what is weld you might be asking. Well Java in their “infinite” wisdom, created a standard for the language to be set around dependency injection, or more specifically around “Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE Platform”.

There is a process that I have always wanted to be more familiar with, and this process is awk. Someone might ask why I am spending my time on this tool. I would answer with… “that is a great question”.

This week I had the chance to attend QCon SF and let me tell you it was a great experience. One of the benefits that came out of this conference was a free ebook from ORielly books. The book that I decided to pickup was the newly released Real World Ocaml. One of the first things that you need to setup when working with ocaml is, of course, the environment. This book talks about using utop and opam (the ocaml package manager).