So I have a lot of old books and papers I want to scan for prosperity. I bought the Czur scanner some years ago thinking it would help. It did not. It never worked with Linux. It was supposed to be a simple webcam but the Linux driver hangs for this particular device The Czur has a lot of arcane features that didnt …

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I needed to make a rpm from various bits and pieces, some of them java, some of them native. I thought this was a job for Gradle, rather than Maven, because there was a lot of fiddling with files back and forth. nothing complicated, but still, maven isn't really good at that sort of thing. After some hacking, I got …

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The way I work with my blog is that I write down a number of unfinished notes. Eventually I get around to finish them, and when I do I usually finish a bunch of blog entries at the same time. This is why the emacs org-mode based o-blog blogging system works well for me. Since org-mode changes frequently it can lead to …

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The principles of Tao can be applied to almost anything, as evidenced by for instance Fritiof Capras "Tao Of Physics" and Benjamin Hoffs "The Tao of Pooh". Tao applies well to DevOps because who knows what DevOps is? It is an idiom as hard to define as quality, and indeed DevOps is closely tied to …

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There are many parts of the Free Software movement. Like mercury, you can split it in many tiny droplets, that can seamlessly reform to a larger whole. The noble goal of the GNU project is to protect the Free Software movement from unknown, orwellian entities, seeking to destroy it by various nefarious means. That is …

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Many developers complain about Maven, how it is slow, and how it complicates life instead of making it easier. These developers might not remember how life was in the ancient days before Maven. That said, Maven still has practical shortcomings, and one is the snapshot versioning scheme, when used in Continous Delivery …

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There is a tendency among engineers to disparage the tools of other engineers. So, developers don't like to develop tests with gui based tools for example. Sometimes a tool is indeed not worthy an engineers attention, for example a 'Golf-Ware' tool. These are tools that management learned about during a round of golf …

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Having worked in the field today called DevOps since around 2003, I've noticed that we more or less do the same thing regardless of what its currently called. When it works well anyway. This is how I see it; Continuous Delivery emphasizes the payoff in the end, the increased business value of having good value adding …

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I'm interested in the concepts of transhumanism and the singularity. Quite often I feel like the concepts take on a needless religious aspect; wait for the Singularity, then Nerd Rapture will follow. It is appealing in a way, but also kind of dumb, especially for a crowd that often prides themselves in being …

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In the Java enterprise world we have application servers that we deploy our applications into. An ear file is just a zip file with some metadata. its not a bad thing as such. The problematic situation occurs when we deploy our ears to our appservers. Teams start thinking that this is an unheard of problem, and invent …

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