bestov.io

As part of the datacenter-wide visibility upgrade I’m working on for a customer, I’m setting up monitoring one of their legacy network applications. This application has no logging support whatsoever, and upgrade path available: the original developers have published a new version 10+ years ago, and have no interest for supporting it apart from (sometimes) replying to support tickets. Thus, to set up at least some basic metrics, the solution I came up with is to monitor the COM+ components that work together to make it up...

It’s been a few years now since I switched to Wayland. I use Sway, a compositor based on wlroots, and apart from the sporadic broken Wayland application (easy fix: force XWayland) and Java application (easy fix: set _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1), it’s mostly been great times. I have also been a long time user of UK International Keyboard, and that is the layout I know by heart and use on all physical keyboards. This layout builds upon the standard UK keyboard to enable you to type ṽårìóǘş kïņḑş õf åçĉëñţş äņḑ şẙḿbôĺş not found on the keyboard itself...

Docker is a container engine for the Linux operating system. It leverages two Linux kernel functionalities, chroot jails (or, nowadays, the pivot_root system call, but the details don’t really matter here) and namespaces, to create containers, or isolated environments where you can run processes separately from your host system. This has roughly the same advantages of virtualization: isolation (not), portability, separation of concerns, reproducibility. These are all good things for a lot of applications, including CI, orchestration, resilient setups, etc...

ZigBee is a stack of protocols intended to enable IoT devices to efforlessly form mesh networks and communicate with one another wirelessly. I’ve been fascinated with the ZigBee platform for a long time now, but I had always been put off by how corporate-y the technology looked like (and boy, I was right). A couple years ago I decided to buy a few cheap CC2530 boards off AliExpress. The CC2530 is a SoC by Texas Instruments containing an 8051 clone as the main processor, with RAM (128K or 256K) and Flash, and the PHY for IEEE 802...