May 25, 2017 · 5 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsPersonalWork
I’ve not written much about coming back to Red Hat to head up the Open Innovation Labs in EMEA, but somehow it seemed fitting to author a blog post to mark a momentous last week. Last week we held the official opening events for Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs space in London and on Tuesday of this week our first customer working in the space, Motability Operations, held their Demo Day to show off what they had built in their four-week residency to their business sponsors.
Feb 4, 2017 · 2 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsPersonalReviewsBook Reviews
I’ve just finished reading one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in recent years, The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks.
I’ve always loved the Lake District since friends of mine who lived in Carlisle took me walking up a fell there. I guess I was one of those walkers, and later fell runners, who connected deeply with those amazing mountains without understanding much about those that live and work those landscapes.
Jan 19, 2017 · 3 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsPersonalReviewsBook ReviewsGTDDeep Work
It’s funny to be writing a review of this book about deep work while sitting in an uber watching the driver check and fiddle with his phone every few minutes! Road safety issues aside, this highlights a very real problem we all face today we are constantly distracted in our digital always connected world. This new world is making all of us into social media addicts and our days are governed by incoming digital interruptions.
Dec 29, 2016 · 14 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsPersonalReviewsBicyclesSlate
TL;DR; This is an awesome go-anywhere-do-anything bike that is pure FUN - if you are in a rush skip the review and check out this gallery of highlights from the past year.
I’ve had my Cannondale Slate Force CX1 for almost exactly a year and done over 2000 km on it on and off-road, tumbled off it, had an accident and done a few gravel bike events, so it’s been given a thorough workout - about time I write a review.
The short version is that I love, love, love this bike! It’s the most expensive bike I’ve ever bought, and I’ve had the most fun I’ve every had on a bicycle. It is a go anywhere do anything bike, and if you are only going to have one bike then this is it!
Dec 19, 2016 · 2 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsTechnologyMac
TL;DR Use AppPolice for the Mac to control how much CPU the BlueJeans for Mac app can use (100% or 1 core seems to work) so that your computer is usable while using video and your battery won’t be zeroed by a one hour call.
I’m a big fan of using video for calls instead of just voice - participants are often far more engaged when you can all see each other, and you can give thumbs ups, raise your hand and give other visual cues as part of the conversation that avoids the usual voice conference call.
At Red Hat we encourage remote work, and one of the ways we make it work is to have a lot of video calls using BlueJeans, which works great for me on my Mac except for one horrible problem that tends to completely kill my experience - if I enable my camera (kind of important for a video call) when I’m using the BlueJeans desktop app (seems to happen with Chrome and browsers as well) the BlueJeans app seems to try to hog ALL of my CPU that it can use and when it has all the cores of my processor spinning away at maximum I will lose HALF of my Mac’s battery life after a one hour call!
Jul 13, 2016 · 1 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsAPIsTechnology
One of the things I’ve been meaning to try for a while is to experiment with combining Open API Spec (formerly known as Swagger Spec) and static websites. So I’ve hacked together a quick experiment that allows you to embed OpenAPI Spec inside a Hugo site.
You can see an example of this in action here.
Jun 23, 2016 · 2 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsPersonalOpinion
Today I voted in the UK’s EU Referendum to remain in the EU, and it really irked me because there are many things that are broken in the EU.
Jun 8, 2016 · 4 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsDeveloperTechnology
TL;DR; The Apple TV 4 can run Plex or Kodi (XBMC) directly and play all my Movies, TV Shows and Music from my QNAP NAS. It’s quite a sweet setup.
I’ve finally had a bit of time to work on a project I’ve had on my back burner for quite some time, building a home entertainment system to play all of my movies and TV series that I’ve got on my NAS.
Nov 16, 2015 · 2 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsDeveloperTechnology
I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a while to move this site to be a statically generated site to escape the constant admin and update cycles of wordpress and over the weekend I finally managed to get around to it.
In the end it was remarkably painless, probably because I didn’t have that many blog posts!
I chose to use the excellent and blisteringly fast Hugo for the site itself and Netlify to actually host it.
Jul 27, 2015 · 6 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsPlatformTechnology
I’m a big fan of Kubernetes and the ideas it brings to enable running Docker containers at scale. However if you’ve used Kubernetes you’ll know that right now the tooling around it is pretty basic from a developer and application lifecycle perspective. OpenShift V3 builds on the concepts of Docker and Kubernetes to add some much needed higher level tooling and a Web UI that is really nice.
Here are just a few of the features that OpenShift Origin provides out of the box on top of a Kubernetes cluster:
May 31, 2015 · 1 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsDeveloperTechnology
Sometimes when you run a script with Ansible it requires an interactive prompt like y/n or something similar.
I recently ran into this problem and after a bit of head bashing I found the following solution in a little Linux utility called ‘yes’ which repeatedly outputs a line with a specified STRING(s), or ‘y’. In this case I just needed ‘y’ so I went with the default.
Here is my Ansible Task file with the ‘yes’ command in use:
May 27, 2015 · 1 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsPersonalWorkAPIs
I recently left Red Hat to join Apigee and one of the funniest things I get asked when I say this is if I’m going to make computer games!
May 26, 2015 · 1 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsTechnology
I have a new MacBook Pro 13″ Retina (early 2015) that is pretty amazing, however when I plugged it into my large external display at the office fonts became really blurry and ugly, so bad that I could barely look at the display!
After a lot of messing around I’ve found a cheaper solution than buying an awesome Apple display!
Basically it’s a combination of this article on the problem Fonts Look Blurry in OS X Yosemite?
Oct 9, 2014 · 1 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsTechnology
As we use Zimbra at work I decided to install Zimbra Desktop for offline email, however I ran into a bit of a snag because after downloading it and following the installation instructions I had the following error message when I ran Zimbra Desktop for the first time:
Couldn't load XPCOM.
After a bit of googling around I found this article Installing Zimbra Desktop on 64bit Linux which has the following fix to install the 32-bit libraries that are (naturally) missing in my 64-bit Fedora install:
Sep 10, 2014 · 4 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsDeveloperTechnology
I’ve been a hardcore Apple/Mac/OS X fanboy ever since the first Intel Macs came out and since I made the switch from Windows I’ve never really look back. However I’ve always had this niggling feeling in the back of my head that my desktop OS wasn’t as open as I would like it to be. OS X and Macs have just been so popular with developers and Mac laptops really have the best hardware — for me the killer feature has always been the trackpad, even though others are now imitating the aluminium form factor nobody has come close with their trackpads yet. This fantastic machine definitely won me from one closed ecosystem (Microsoft) to another (Apple’s) but it’s still a closed ecosystem and since I got my first MacBook Pro in 2006 I’ve noticed that this ecosystem has gotten more closed — Mac App Store being a great example.
However I sometimes write code, mess around with new technology and most importantly I wanted to be fully in control of my desktop and my data and move to an ecosystem that was by default open. Linux seems the perfect choice but I’ve really struggled to have a compelling event to move me over to the ever improving Linux Desktop, until this year…!
Sep 27, 2013 · 6 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsArchitectPlatformTechnologyOpinion
What if you could wrap up your application in a lightweight container and then move it to any Linux server and have it perform in a predictable way with no changes? bare metal? virtualized? in a multi tenant environment? securely?
What if you could choose your language and runtime environment (Ruby, Python, JEE, JavaScript, etc) and have it provisioned with your application code? with full life-cycle management? with auto scaling? supported by the vendor behind the technology? on any PaaS?
TL;DR version — Docker is an awesome way to containerise any application running on Linux, but it has some shortfalls. Red Hat’s collaboration with dotCloud the company behind Docker will fix these and allow Docker run on almost any distribution of Linux (including RHEL and it’s derivatives). They will also integrate the technology that underpins the OpenShift PaaS (cartridges) so that the lifecycle of an application runtime can be managed. Meaning your application will eventually be able to run anywhere on your infrastructure or on the cloud with no changes — cool eh?
Sep 3, 2013 · 2 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsOpinionTechnology
When I saw the news about Microsoft Acquiring Nokia Devices and Services this morning my initial reaction was one of confusion, why would one loser acquire another loser? It seems that others had the same thought as well.
However as I digest this more I’m starting to think that this was part of a larger piece of chess where Nokia has realised for some time that the writing was on the wall for their devices as Android and iOS were busy carving up their formidable market share.
Aug 29, 2013 · 1 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsTechnologyCTO
I’ve just noticed that over on openshift.com they have an intriguing calculator that claims to Calculate the Business Benefits of PaaS and to generate a dollar value for moving to PaaS, quoting directly from the page:
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a powerful cloud solution that can help solve real problems today. With PaaS you can enable your developers to work faster and allow your operations team to provide real business value by reducing time-to-market for key IT services.
Aug 28, 2013 · 6 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsTechnologyCTODeveloper
Update I’ve recently moved to a static website based on Hugo and hosted on Netlify
As I’m a bit of a geek at heart and because I’m a major fan of open source I really wanted to host this website on an open source PaaS using as much open source software so I decided to use my favourite blogging software WordPress and host it on OpenShift Online. While I was putting this blog together I realised just how far things have come when it comes to setting up your own website, but before I dive into the evolution of hosting that has gotten us to PaaS let me show you exactly why I think PaaS is so magic by taking you through the three simple steps it took to set up a WordPress blog on the domain www.
Aug 27, 2013 · 1 minute read · Comments
Blog PostsTechnology
So today I open up my RSS reader (I migrated to Newsblur after Google killed Reader) and I’m browsing my usual feeds — including Dilbert when I see this:
Grrr! Even after checking the website and going to the official feed it’s still broken and the worst is that Scott Adams has decided to do this on purpose in some sort of perverse and misguided attempt to drive traffic to their website.
