...or why do I subject myself to the muck flowing from MicroSoft...

I have two machines which are my original two CentOS 7 installs, which date back several years. At that time, I was running an old (now ancient) version of cobbler which had a history of blowing up when I tried updating to newer versions (more on that in a different, future post), and there was no support for RHEL/CentOS 7 installs using it. And I don't mean that it was just missing the "signatures" and what defines an OS version to cobbler... the network boot just went ***BOOM*** as it was bringing up the installer.

If you have not figured it out, I am a strong proponent and user of cobbler and kickstart installs. It is rare these days that I build a machine in what one might call a "hands-on" mode, whether using a Live DVD/USB flash drive, network install, or any other media.

Granddaddy built houses for decades, and while I don't think I heard the adage from him, I learned all about using the right tool for the job growing up, between what I learned from Mom, and from what I learned through personal experience. For example, it is quite obvious that you don't use screwdrivers for driving nails into boards, but then you are faced with all the different hammers, all slightly different, for driving a nail... and we have not even considered the size of the nail.

The past couple of weeks have been filled with lots of little "I need to do X, but to do X, I first need to do Y, and to do that I need to do Z" type tasks. One of those items was learning about and then writing a new Releaser plugin for tito. More on it specifically in a post to be written shortly, but now that I have my client SSL certificate updated in my browser (yet another upcoming post), I can write this post to talk about an issue I had while working with tito and Jenkins.

What is it with spammers, crackers and the like? Before doing my previous post, I took a quick look at some comments left on a couple of posts which I had noticed a few days ago, but which were lower on my priority list. As noted in my privacy policy, when you leave a comment, your IP address is tracked. Indeed, this is true if you even access the website, or any website or most any service for that matter.

I have been looking at tuleap for a personal Agile tool, to help me track tasks as I work on personal coding projects. For example, I might be working on a new version of a disk partitioning script to use with my kickstart installs, and come up with ideas I don't want to forget. So, to keep track of it, I have been creating tasks in Eclipse Mylyn using the stand-alone task list. But that list can be less than optimal, and it does not integrate with things like Jenkins, etc.

In my previous post, I unloaded on Chrome's crappy handling of expired SSL certificates. I had to work around the fact that when trying to connect using HTTP with its FQDN (e.g. http://host.subdomain.ka8zrt.com), the browser would itself switch to HTTPS, and then refuse to let me connect due to the SSL certificate having expired. And so, I instead had to connect using the IP address.

As a developer, it is not often that a developer or developer team makes me go WTF, and has me envisioning conducting a test of both electromagnetic repulsion and the Pauling Exclusion Principle using their head and an available desk or wall, but today, the Google Chrome team has done it twice. Congratulations to them for setting several new records (minimum interval between occurrences, and the more than once in a day).

You might be wondering what to expect here. Here is a "short" list of topics: