A recent talk posited that open source is at the end of it’s beginning. I’m not so sure …| Emerald Reverie Blog
I’m standing for the Matrix Foundation! Here’s what I want to see, and you should vote for me if you agree.| Emerald Reverie Blog
My thoughts for what the year ahead should be for the Ansible community| Emerald Reverie Blog
The state of the Ansible community in 2023, as I see it| Emerald Reverie Blog
It’s nearly 9 months since Ansible started using Matrix alongside IRC. How’s that going?| Emerald Reverie Blog
A look back at Ansible Contributor Summit last week, and how it felt to run one of our major events on Matrix| Emerald Reverie Blog
Taking your first steps with any new tool can be uncertain. In this post I unpack the absolute basics, and also look at some specifics for migrating IRC users.| Emerald Reverie Blog
In which I attempt to get some data on distributed networks where people can idle forever, with a surprising amount of success…| Emerald Reverie Blog
In this post I’ll be covering the results from the recent Ansible Docs Survey, held at the end of last year. We’ll take a look at various facets of the userbase, and do some modelling to see what we can learn from it.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Blockers to contributing will reduce how people rate contributing, but which ones really matter?| Emerald Reverie Blog
People get tired, sure. But when?| Emerald Reverie Blog
Surveys! Huh! What are they good for? In this series of posts, we’ll take a look!| Emerald Reverie Blog
Stored on Joplin - go here| Emerald Reverie Blog
In Issue #6 of the Bullhorn I showed off a bubbleplot of contributors within the Ansible Community Collections. That raised quite a few questions, so I’ll answer them here!| Emerald Reverie Blog
In which we look at how we’re monitoring the “default” Ansible collection - and talk about why reviewing your code is not always enough…| Emerald Reverie Blog
In this post, I’m going to explore some of the community data for the last few years, and show why that suggests that drastic action is needed (and as we now know, that action is Collections). To some degree, this is just retrospective justification - we are already doing Collections. But I wanted to try and show what trajectory the community was on, if we did nothing. Honestly though, I also wanted to practice some of my forecasting techniques… :)| Emerald Reverie Blog
Time for another post in my showcase of the tooling I’m building for the Ansible community. This time: events! Specifically, Meetup.com events. Read on…| Emerald Reverie Blog
Communities produce huge amounts of work, when motivated to do so, and Ansible is no exception - and as Ansible’s community is huge, so is the volume of content! Let’s take a look at the Ansible modules contained in /lib/ansible/modules and try to see how we can view the community output.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Last month I was at the lovely EdinbR meetup to present my guide to self-hosting the amazing Shiny server. Some kind folks have been asking for the notes so that they can do it themselves, which seems fair, so here it is! The Why Let’s start with my slides before we get to the how-to. There are fantastic resources for hosting Shiny out there, so why would you roll your own?| Emerald Reverie Blog
In this post, I take a look at how people contribute to Ansible Modules, through the lens of how that might help us with Collections.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Welcome! This is the first part of a series of blogs I’m going to write, about the Ansible community and the work we’re doing to help improve it through appropriate use of data.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Some thoughts on Twitter, Mastodon, work, and the future….| Emerald Reverie Blog
Career-wise, I’ve worked in a variety of fields and in a variety of roles, mostly technical. I’ve been a sysadmin, software developer, FOSS community manager, and I’m currently a data scientist providing analytical support to other FOSS community managers. I enjoy public speaking immensely, and regularly speak on a variety of topics, including technology, open source, and process management to name a few. I’m generally available to speak at short notice within central Scotland - furth...| Emerald Reverie Blog
So! My first attempt at a full #TidyTuesday blog post! For those new to the idea, the R for Data Science learning community publish a new dataset every Tuesday, with the aim of helping people to practise their exploratory analysis skills. I’ve decided to join in :)| Emerald Reverie Blog
Wow, nearly a year since I blogged anything. That’s crazy - I must do better. However, for now at least, I’m back! Today I’m going to give my first impressions of Mailpile, which is a slightly different take on the problem of handling/storing/interacting with email.| Emerald Reverie Blog
(This is part 4 of my home automation blog series. See the automation category for the whole set) So, we have control of the HestiaPi Classic from OpenHAB, now it’s time to add some sensors and automate the control of the heating. OK, OK, it’s been a really long break from posting. What can I say, life kinda smacked me with a bunch of family issues. That’s all settled down now, and with winter coming on fast, it’s time to sort out the last mile of my open source heating system - respo...| Emerald Reverie Blog
(This is part 3 of my home automation blog series. See the automation category for the whole set) So far, we’ve got HestiaPi Classic speaking MQTT but nothing is really listening to it, or talking back. Time to fix that! Meet OpenHAB I’m not going to pull punches here, OpenHAB is a bit of a beast. It’s hugely flexible, but as with most systems, that flexibility comes at the cost of bit of a learning curve.| Emerald Reverie Blog
(This is part 2 of my home automation blog series. See the automation category for the whole set) So, in part 1 I laid out the aims of the first part of this project - read that if you’re confused. In this part, I’ll detail how to get HestiaPi Classic and MQTT to play nicely together… Installing MQTT MQTT is just a standard - not a programming language in it’s own right.| Emerald Reverie Blog
(This is part 1 of my home automation blog series. See the automation category for the whole set) Okay, okay, I said I’d blog more frequently and now it’s been over a year. Yikes, sorry, and other generic excuses. However, I do have a more exciting line of blog articles coming up! You see, I’ve been getting into home automation… I’ve been looking into open source approaches to home automation, and to some of the tooling that can be used to handle parts of the house infrastructure.| Emerald Reverie Blog
I love to cook. This is not a secret - it’s pretty much impossible not to hear me talk about food at some point during any time spent with me. It’s probably my main hobby (at least, I do it almost every day, which means gaming is the only competitor on a frequency basis). But, despite having a blog, a website and social media, I do not post recipes.| Emerald Reverie Blog
I’m overweight. There’s no getting away from this fact, I have the data to prove it. The problem here is not (mainly) one of excercise. I have a standing desk. I like walking. I have a small child. These (especially the last) make for a fairly active lifestyle - I have no shortage of opportunites to get my heart rate up. Nor do I eat (very) unhealthily - we cook every night, so there’s not an abundance of bad food in the house.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Well, that was rather a longer break than I anticipated. Life can get you life that. One minute you’re blogging away regularly, and then suddenly it’s been 2 years since you last wrote anything. Bummer. Still, “I aten’t dead”, as Granny Weatherwax used to say. As a child of Lancashire, I know exactly the sort of person Terry Pratchet was sending up with Esme - my own grandmother could be like that sometimes.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Collect loose papers, materials (2 minutes) Paper notes Mail Mind sweep (20 minutes) Guidelines What has my attention? Don’t censor - just collect It’s not a to-do list Quantity, not quality Free associate Move around or look around for visual cues Triggers Projects started, not completed Projects that need to be started “Look into” projects Communications to make/get calls, emails, voice mails, faxes, letters, memos Read/review books, periodicals, articles Financial cash, budget, bal...| Emerald Reverie Blog
Lukáš Zapletal has just pointed out to me that on Openshift, you can use environment variables to access the Postgresql username, password, and so on. The main blog post has just been updated to reflect the much easier setup instructions. Thanks Lukáš!| Emerald Reverie Blog
Over the last year or so, I’ve been working on my own personal take on Getting Things Done. When I started working from home a little over a year ago, I knew I needed to be productive in the absence of people looking over my shoulder. I also wanted to be better at dealing with the stuff I personally wanted to achieve. It’s taken a year of tweaking, but I’m going to share with you the system I’ve built, and as you’d expect from me, it’s all open.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Sounds like the start of a really bad joke, doesn’t it? Fortunately, this is not a post full of bad puns (well, any more than normal) but about the changes I’ve made to my home office this last week or two. I’ve been working from home for nearly a year now (wow, that went fast). When I was getting ready to shift from office working to home working I wrote a blog about the steps I was taking to set up a dedicated space for me to work in.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Unless you’re reading this on a braille reader, you’re probably wondering what happened to my blog. The theme has changed, the sidebar is different, the background image different, and so on. What gives? I’ve been blogging now for over a year. In truth, at the time, I wasn’t sure how often I’d be posting, or what sort of content I would be writing. Thus, I was happy to simply accept a low/no-barrier entry solution, in the shape of Blogger.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Day 7 Walk distance: 8.3 miles Walk time: ~4.5 hours GPX file KML view on Google Maps Goatfell from Sannox So we come to the final day, and we still hadn’t made a decision about the towering mass of Goatfell. The plan throughout the week had been to do Goatfell on the last day. There were two reasons for this; one, to do it when we were supposedly at out fittest, and two, to look back from the highest point of Arran on everything we had walked over the course of the week.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Day 6 - Lochranza to SannoxWalk distance: 9.8 milesWalk time: ~6.5 hoursGPX fileKML view on Google Maps The Arran AlpsSo, the penultimate day, taking in the north coast of Arran as well as a famous scientific landmark. Better yet, our target for the day was, in fact, the very cottage we were staying in! As such, we could leave the heavy weight in our room, and take just one light pack with food, water, and first aid kit.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Day 5 - Pirnmill to LochranzaWalk distance: 7.3 milesWalk time: ~4.5 hoursGPX fileKML view on Google Maps Clisham Lodge, PirnmillSo after an excellent rest day (involving the joy of buses!), and our delayed-but-not-forgotten meal at the Lagg Hotel, it was time to shoulder the bags again. Over half-way distance-wise, and with the longest day done, we were in good spirits. Doubly so, since this was the shortest day of the walk.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Day 4 - Blackwaterfoot to PirnmillWalk distance: 13 milesWalk time: ~8.5 hoursGPX fileKML view on Google Maps Setting off towards King's CaveA night's rest had done a hell of a lot to restore my spirits, but as we an excellent breakfast in Blackwaterfoot, and contemplated the OS map in front of us, it was hard not to be a little worried. We had approximately 11 miles to go (an underestimate, as it turned out), and about half of that was by road.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Day 3 - Lagg to BlackwaterfootWalk distance: 7.3 milesWalk time: ~6 hoursGPX fileKML view on Google Maps Farewell, Lagg!This day was going to be good. Some of the wilder terrain on Arran, not too hilly, just a long way from towns and villages. Nice to get even further away from things. In addition, the distance we estimated to be 8 miles, which after the epic march of the evening before was a welcome relief.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Day 1 - Whiting bay to LaggWalk distance: 13.6 milesWalk time: ~12 hoursGPX fileKML view on Google Maps Another glorious day, and another large breakfast - required though, as we set off on our longest day, both by distance and time. The issue was that we had two tidal sections to do - first, the boulder field at Dippen Head (which has an optional inland route if it's a problem) and the coast at Black Cave (which doesn't).| Emerald Reverie Blog
Day 1 - Brodick to Whiting bayWalk distance: 11.1 milesWalk time: ~8 hoursGPX fileKML view on Google Maps Rothwell Lodge(Apologies for the text spacing, it seems necessary to insert a lot of blank lines to make the photos line up properly in Blogger. If anyone's got tips for doing it better, let me know) The first day of our epic walk started with sunshine blazing in through the window - it was clear, blue, and going to be hot.| Emerald Reverie Blog
When I started this blog, I promised that this would be about tech, walking and baking. I've been quite good about blogging tech things, but there hasn't been much of the other two. Time to fix one of those. I spent last week on a walking holiday, around the coast of Arran, an island in the Firth of Clyde, off the coast of Ayrshire, southwest of Glasgow. It's postition is fortuitous - being on the western coast, it sits in the Gulf Stream, and yet is sheltered from the western Atlantic storms...| Emerald Reverie Blog
It's been a while since I last wrote a blog, but that doesn't mean I've been slacking off. In the next series of blog posts, we'll be looking at some of the new things in Foreman 1.2. But today, I want to make a small diversion... I recently got some new hardware in the house, courtesy of my employer, so I decided it was time to play with one of the other virtualization technologies out there.| Emerald Reverie Blog
I’ve been managing my virtual machines using Foreman for close to 2 years now, and that’s brought me a huge set of benefits in terms of how I test new code (or changes to existing code), and new packages. That’s just awesome :) But repeated rebuilds of a machine lead to one small niggling problem. One which bites you on every rebuild. One which doesn’t stop you working, but requires a few extra keypresses after every rebuild, and possibly at every login.| Emerald Reverie Blog
So as many of you know, I use Archlinux on a lot of my hardware - but you’ll have noticed that I always use Debian for my Foreman servers. What gives? The Problem with Versions Archlinux presents two major problems to Foreman. Firstly, the current version of Puppet in the AUR is 3.0.1. Admitedly, I made that problem for myself, since the AUR PKGBUILD of Puppet is owned by me… However, Arch is all about latest-and-greatest so it’s the right thing to do for Puppet.| Emerald Reverie Blog
So I've been managing the Debian packages for about 8 months now, and every so often I get asked if there's anything people can do to help. I have to answer "Not really" because the way we're building the Debian packages is somewhat arcane. At least, it was. This blog is to tell you all about how it's now much more open. Packaging in the openThe first piece of the puzzle starts with our foreman-rpms repo (github.| Emerald Reverie Blog
This blog post has been in my to-write pile for nearly 4 months now. I have two laptops at home, both of which are capable of running a few virtual machines. If you missed the news, I now work on Foreman full time, so obviously I want to use Foreman to manage my virtual machines. So it seems like the perfect opportunity to give you a blog post about getting Libvirt set up on a host of your choice (in this case, my laptop).| Emerald Reverie Blog
Sigh. Nothing stays still in the tech world, does it? :) The Archlinux Releng team have drastically altered the method for installing Archlinux since I wrote my previous article. In particular, they have dropped AIF and resorted to simple bash commands for installation. This actually makes our life for Foreman much easier, but I thought I should write a small blog post to tell you how to use it.| Emerald Reverie Blog
It's been a while, so I thought I'd write about what's been keeping me busy this last few weeks. In short, I'm about to start working from home, so that's required me to really think about how I work, and how I can improve my productivity. Location, Location, LocationAs with buying property, the location is critical. Until recently, my study has been on the ground floor of my house, and that room has only one tiny window in the corner.| Emerald Reverie Blog
So, a combination of a short holiday and a new laptop have conspired to keep me away from my text editor for a short while. The holiday was a walking trip, carrying our own gear, along the coast of Scotland. It was truly fabulous, but already covered at length on my wife's blog so I'll not repeat her here. As for the new laptop, well.... there's nothing like a new machine to make you re-evaluate your working environment.| Emerald Reverie Blog
Welcome back! In Part 1, we got our server set up to build Archlinux machines. Now we need to configure Foreman to make use of it! Let's get started... UI configuration Operating System setupFirstly we need the Operation System. If you already have some Archlinux clients, this might already be done, but head over to the Operating System page: and either edit the existing Archlinux OS, or create a new one if need be:| Emerald Reverie Blog
The Foreman developers have just merged a small patch which allows the UI to detect and correctly display Archlinux hosts. This means it's now possible to configure Foreman to do automated installs of Archlinux, just as you would for Debian or RedHat. This makes me happy, as people who know me might guess! The problemThe thing is, Archlinux isn't easy to net-install. It pains me to say it (because I'm a big fan of Arch), but their approach to automated installs just doesn't fit with how super...| Emerald Reverie Blog
If (like me) you find yourself re-installing your machines a lot (and let's face it, that's what Foreman is for), then a package cache can save you a huge amount of data traffic. There are many ways to achieve this, but I'll describe how I'm using apt-cacher-ng to help me save data. Apt-cacher-ng is particularly helpful since it can support almost any OS - the documentation has instructions for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, and even Archlinux.| Emerald Reverie Blog
So it seems that finally started to have enough things to say to start a blog. My interest are varied, and I don't have enough material for a blog on a single one of them, so you're going to see blogs on topics like: Linux / DevOpsCooking / BakingWalkingPoliticsGenerally awesome things You'll also get anything else that pops into my head. I'll try to tag things properly, but no promises :)| Emerald Reverie Blog
Thoughts on Ansible, Matrix, IRC, and the future of chat.| Emerald Reverie Blog