Hugo Composite Theming

Just recently, Hugo, the web site generator i use for this site, got a new feature: Composite theming. This means that you can build themes on other themes, or even do weird things like multi theme sites. I decided to try theme compositing just to change the fonts of my site.

Been singing

The last ten or eleven days, i’ve been on a music camp with my kids. Well, mostly it’s been the kids doing the music and me looking out during the night. But i was in the “adult ensemble”, where we practiced these two songs, Alta Trinità beata and I skovens dybe stille ro. The first of these is an old Italian religious song, the other a Danish folk song. Since i’m not much of a singer and because i don’t read sheet music very well, i try to teach myself my stuff by transcribing the notes into a notation software (called MuseScore).

Help, It's Summer!

The good news is that summer holiday in Finland is four weeks, or as i have so many extra hours worked in, five. Five weeks paid holiday. Whoa.

Running Presenter Decks

Last week, i was involved with Reaktor Breakpoint, a tech, design, business and future conference with about 600 attendees and twenty-odd speakers.

Unlike with last Breakpoint in 2015, i wasn’t involved in the planning bits, i just worked with the execution. On the surface, my job sounds trivial. I was to make sure all presenters’ slides were delivered to the right stages, in time, before each presenter’s show, and looking awesome.

I like to emphasize the last word of the previous paragraph, because that is your job and the job of nearly everyone working backstage or in production: making the presenter look, sound, and feel awesome.

While delivering slides may sound like the job of a glorified runner, it was actually quite a bit of logistics than i’d originally expected.

Dabbling With Docker

For me, Docker’s been this black box that people say is the best thing ever and is so easy to get into and just package everything with Docker and things’ll just work. Yeah. Right. I don’t trust that at all.

So i’ve decided to learn something new. I’ve decided to demystify Docker.

Manfluenza

I’ve been sick in a way that can only truly be appreciated by experiencing it. I’ve had manfluenza, which is the male version of any disease and is by definition worse just by the virtue of you being male. We’re not as good at handling pain. And yes, i’m joking. A bit.

I was about to write a long technical post about my illness, but i’ll just lay down the short and sweet.

Cable Feng Shui

Your network will always grow, and due to the laws of entropy, left to itself, it’ll grow messier. Here are some things to consider while it’s still small and manageable:

Link Aggregates and Virtual LANs

A Link Aggregate (or Network Aggregate) is what you get when you push a single network link over several cables at once. In HP switches parlance, this is known as a trunk and in the Cisco dialect as an EtherChannel Bundle. On HP servers, it’s NIC Teaming and in other places it’s called Link/NIC bundling or bonding. In this post i’ll just call them Aggregates, and Aggregates are your friend.

HP Switch Certificate

Setting up a SSL certificate on a HP (HPE/Aruba) 2530 switch is not hard or complicated but it is frustrating when you try to figure out exactly how it’s done. There’s some terminology that isn’t immediately obvious and the switch tends to be a bit picky about how things are done. So with that said, let’s dive in. I’ll assume here that you have a functioning PKI on your site, or that you’re able to get a certificate request signed somehow.