Encrypt Your DB Backups

I’m mostly putting this here for my reference. I do this in multiple projects and always seem to forget where my instructions are.

Generate Keys

From your user’s home directory:

openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 1000000 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout .ssh/backup_key.pem -out .ssh/backup_key.pem.pub

Fill out the questions appropriately. Or not. I don’t think it matters really.

That will create the public and private keys.

backup_key.pem - private key backup_key.pem.pub - public key

Why It Needs Help - My Letter

This is an open letter to the Covered California website designer, administrators, bureaucrats and contractors.

Website Design and Usability

I have several things listed below. Things I find to be of poor design or just plain broken.

You Don’t Got Mail!

• “Secure Mailbox (2)” even though nothing was in my mail box.

• It randomly logged me out.

GO’ON CLICK ME IF YA CAN

• I am low on time for open enrollment and it gave me a “Pay Now” button in order to do it faster, but the button was broken. It would pop up and then if I tried to pay it would throw a JavaScript error in my console and close out. Now I can’t pay. It’s weird when people don’t want my money.

Land of the Free

Welcome to America. You are now free to think exactly how we tell you.

In 2016 I realized a few things about people in the United States. I realized that women are not going to vote for a woman because she is a women unless she meets several social minimums. This is in contrast to minorities voting for someone because they are a minority. I realized that the conservative right is indeed as hypocritical in their voting practices and narratives. I found that the class warfare narrative of the left is easily mirrored by the

The Waves of Technology Professional

I like to consider 2001 the tail edge of the Internet bubble. It was a brutal time to be in a computer science field. There weren’t many jobs. The jobs that were being squatted on were jealously guarded. I needed the one thing that nobody would provide. Experience. So instead I grinded projects and studied unceasingly.

In 2001 I had to take a job as an “integration specialist”. That is basically a programmer job with a crappy title, so they didn’t have to pay me much. I was making $12.50/hr, and it was business casual dress code. Meaning I worked for barely enough to pay my bills, but I had to wear a tie to work. This Internet revolution was starting to look like a failed promise. I should have realized then.

Binding Multiple Terminals

I am running on multiple servers all the time. And with DTAC doing testing of big data I obviously need to play with many servers at once. I used to do a lot of work on linux and loved the broadcast ability of the terminals. So when I moved onto mac I expected more.

I tried a few other terminal apps. Particularly iTerm2 that has some nice broadcasting. But I didn’t like having to deal with the tabs and keystrokes. I kinda liked having multiple windows and the ease of launching with csshX

What is Up With Those Millennials?

Ah, yes. The click bait. A marketing construct of the GenX’ers: pornographic gossip without the payoff.

But, since you are here…

My Motivation: Agism

I have become infuriated seeing one segment of United States citizenry be the target of a multiple-party attack. This pressure has been escalating over the last couple of years, and I wanted to make a number of assertions and lay out some warnings. The warning comes at the end if you can make it that far. I know how your attention span is now days.

Writing in Markdown

If you haven’t used Markdown to write in a rich(er) text format, then you are missing out. I pretty much write all my technical documentation in Markdown. It’s pretty awesome and I don’t know why it took me so long to find it. I didn’t start using it until around 2013.

What is Markdown

Markdown was created by John Gruber.

According to Wikipedia.

John Gruber created the Markdown language in 2004 in collaboration with Aaron Swartz on the syntax, with the goal of enabling people “to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, and optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)”

TL;DR

OpenStack is a massive complicated ecosystem. It is only going to survive by the vendors that support it and probably not what you need.

Backstory

Let me begin by saying that given the proper talent pool, financial resources, and time; OpenStack probably isn’t bad for some people. For most institutions it is just wrong.

I will probably write another article that outlines all the questions that I should have asked before starting this. My assumptions were not all quite valid, but I did have a sneaking suspicion given a couple very relevant experiences.

Building a Dana Sixty

Part of this process was setting up the new axles. I wanted to go 1-ton all the way around. I think everyone knows that finding a good condition d60 for a reasonable price is not possible.

So I bought one from a local guy that had been sitting on a truck in a paintball field. It looked like it was pulled from Davey Jones Locker Room.