When I first wrote about Heimdallr, I saw it as a project which was going to be written in Python using Django. I have been using both PHP and Python since their initial releases, but something made that pairing stand out.  First, outside of it using colons with indention to indicate code blocks, I have liked the ecosystem with stronger typing like C/C++, whereas PHP was weaker in its typing.

This is a bit of a continuation of this article, where I talk about Jenkins, Drupal and CI/CD.  In this case, I am not talking about Drupal, but about a Python/Django project I have been working on to track job applications rather than using a Google spreadsheet, which was getting a bit unweildy with hundreds of rows. This project is up on GitHub, here, and I will be referring to this project through part of this article.

I have been using jQuery DataTables for some years now, and have yet to find anything better. With its ability to produce tables with AJAX, built in sorting, filtering and more, I have used it to display datasets of over a million records. The problem comes when writing the backend code to create the DataTable and handle the AJAX requests. Recently, I started writing a Django application to track my job applications, since the spreadsheet was getting unwieldy with hundreds of rows. But unlike using PHP and Zend Framework, I have a ways to go.

When it comes to computer programmers and even computer aficionados, there are a number of things which are subject to debate, and at times, these can almost approach a religious holy war given the right individuals. Examples of some of these include "PC" vs. "Mac", "Windows" vs. "*NIX", "vi" vs. "emacs" and more. So it is of no surprise that even within testing, and specifically unit testing, there are some areas were competing  ideas can cause similar reactions.

Centralized logging and observability is not a new concept. Decades ago, at CompuServe, we had over 1000 machines running BSD/OS, and the idea of visiting each one to check machine health was laughable at best. Indeed, even just pulling the logs back for analysis was just as bad. So on each machine, syslog had lines like the following in the syslog.conf file:

One of the driving ideas in everything I do is the principle of "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY). While primarily a software development principle, I also apply it to tasks I perform.

One of the problems I had when I was copying content from my old WordPress site to the Drupal site was that while I could set the authoring date, I could not get that date applied uniformly throughout each article. Only the created date was being set, and the updated date on the article was showing when I did the copy/paste. But, a pointer and a bit of research, and I figured out how to fix this with a PHP script and drush scr. And I even fixed the dates on comments as well.

When I first got started with computers, there really was no choice for how you installed software. Indeed, you tended to do things like boot off a different cassette tape, pluggable cartridge or later, floppies. But then, there was a little bit of evolution, and you would boot the operating system off of one set of media, and insert a new floppy to run the program. There were no hard drives for these computers, those were reserved for the systems which colleges/universities and businesses had, and they cost in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars.

If you look back through my previous entries, you will see several mentions of Cobbler and Koan, which I have used for doing RHEL Kickstart installs. The past several weeks, I have been working towards migrating 70+ host definitions and associated distribution/repository information from an old Cobbler 2.8.3 install to a totally fresh install of Cobbler 3.3.6.

Lots of things yet to do, but welcome to my drupal site. I just finished copying/pasting my old posts from my old WordPress site to this site by hand. Thank goodness there were only 31 and not more, as it took me the entire morning to do this!!!