I am a few months into working with the official Terraform provider for OCI and my opinion is that Oracle still has a lot of work ahead of them. I honestly don’t understand how some things are as bad as they are. That might sound a bit scathing but let’s remember that Oracle has no […]

If you thought the title of this article was just a bunch of mental word vomit, well, it kind of is. But the words all have meaning and I wanted to quickly talk about a key issue that I have continued to come across in my journey with Terraform… namely, getting things to apply consistently […]

I have been working on a project that requires me to interact with upwards of 10 separate repositories at once, typically referencing a handful of them and while actively making changes and commits across three of them. A lot of my time is eaten up with switching between windows in an attempt to find the […]

Have you ever come across something in your IT career that makes you think to yourself “How did I come this far having missed this for so many years?” I had one of those moments this morning when it dawned on me that I didn’t instinctively know how to create or update environment variables in […]

I recently overhauled a script that I wrote to take advantage of the parallel processing functionality that is included in Microsoft Powershell 7. The results have been excellent with script runtimes being reduced from over an hour down to roughly 5 minutes. Learning the ins-and-outs of using parallel processing was a bit of a chore […]

I periodically review Azure PaaS resource edge security. As a part of that process I examine and cleanup AzureSQL firewall rules. Once you have more than a handful of subscriptions and AzureSQL databases, doing this manually starts becoming unfeasible. To that end, Azure Powershell is your friend… As is typical, you need to install the […]

Continuing on my journey up the Azure Automation mountain, I recently completed a simple AZ PowerShell script that takes several input parameters and scales UP or scales DOWN a given AzureSQL database instance depending on what time of day it is. Before I go any further, if you are just getting started in Azure Automation, […]

I have been using Powershell to manage pieces of Azure on and off for about a year and half now. I had heard tell of Azure Automation but never really had a good reason to justify spending the time climbing that particular mountain (hill really…). Then the request came through… let’s scale AzureSQL databases up […]

A lot of my bash scripting experience has been, in one sense, relatively simple. I have several scripts that span several hundred lines and do fairly complex things across multiple systems. From that perspective they aren’t necessarily simple. However it wasn’t until recently that I had to really starting thinking about managing when scripts run […]

I have been learning a ton of PHP lately in an effort to build a significant amount of custom functionality into a Drupal website. As I am not a developer by trade it has been a steep climb upward. Lately I have been refactoring a lot of my code using functions. Being a noob however, […]

Need to administer some drupal stuff from the command-line? DRUSH is the answer. But first you need to get it installed. I am putting the commands to run here to do just that for my own future reference. Hope this is of benefit to everyone else! Elevate yourself: sudo -s Check if Pear is installed: […]

This tutorial is going to be a bit to the point so there is an assumption that you have a level of comfort with Linux and with basic file manipulation, ownership, etc. I recently launched a new site, www.mtkfirmware.com, that is focused on collecting firmware for Mediatek based devices. The majority of the site is […]

I have put it off for a long time… You know… actually really deep-diving and really learning a programming language. After reading, and then reading some more, and then talking to some developers where I work (we are a Microsoft Shop from pretty much top to bottom), and then reading a few more things… I […]

Recently we had to wrestle with the Heartbleed bug. Heartbleed, was/is a major flaw in certain versions of OpenSSL, which is itself an “open source” project/application/codebase… This has had all of the armchair developers (myself included in that mix) either defending the concept of open-development or attacking it on grounds that it is less secure. […]