fzf: The Fuzzy Finder

Here's a quick blog post covering a neat Linux package called fzf. It's easy to install, either from GitHub or via your package manager. For Debian- or Ubuntu-based distributions, it's apt-get install fzf. The way that fzf works is that it provides you an interactive search capability on your command line. Suppose for example that…

Microsoft Teams on Linux

When setting up my laptop, I decided to see just how much of my everyday workload I could replicate in Linux. Turns out that over the past few years, the answer has become "a lot." That's because Electron has taken the world by storm. The downside is that applications tend to be huge, but the…

First Experiences with the Framework Laptop

I've had the Framework Laptop for a couple of days, so I wanted to put together a few thoughts on it. I'll start with some build images, move into experiences running Linux on the laptop, and wrap up with some general thoughts. Unboxing and the Build Process The box arrived on Thursday: One laptop box…

The Framework Laptop

About a month ago, I pre-ordered the Framework Laptop, specifically the DIY edition. This laptop isn't exactly what I want in a laptop, but it does have a lot going for it, so I figured I would write up a summary of why I went with this one, especially as it's expected to arrive tomorrow.…

What’s On My Work PC?

I just had to rebuild my work machine, so I figured I'd get a cheap blog post out of it discuss the tools that I use regularly. I've broken these down by category. As a quick note, this is on my main work machine, so there are some things which I use on other PCs…

GitPitch: Revamping My Slide Decks

Over the past few months, I've started transitioning my slide decks to GitPitch.  I've used reveal.js for years and enjoyed being able to put together presentations in HTML format.  I can run these slides in any browser (or even phones) and don't have to worry about Power Point messing up when I go to presentation…

TIL: Docker

Last night, I went to a local .NET User Group meetup and got my first taste of Docker. In my case, I ended up running on Elementary OS rather than Windows, but the experience was a good one, going through the tutorials. In the end, I installed Solr and was able to load a document for…

TIL: Kafka Queueing Strategy

I had the privilege to sit down with a couple Hortonworks solution engineers and discuss a potential Hadoop solution in our environment.  During that time, I learned an interesting strategy for handling data in Kafka. Our environment uses MSMQ for queueing.  What we do is add items to a queue, and then consumers pop items…

TIL: Bots

Last night, Jamie Dixon (whose book you should buy) talked about his experience at Build this year.  His main takeaway is that Microsoft is pushing their Bot Framework pretty hard.  Jamie showed how to create a stock lookup bot and deploy it to Slack using F# code and an Azure account. About a month ago,…

TIL: Auditing, Monitoring, Alerting

I'm giving a presentation on monitoring this Monday.  As part of that, I want to firm up some thoughts on the differences between auditing, monitoring, and alerting.  All three of these are vital for an organization, but they serve entirely different functions and have different requirements.  I'll hit a bunch of bullet points for each.…