• 3 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • My reason for stipulating that is that lot of people saying it do so either from ignorance (they simply don’t believe/understand that you might not be able to opt out) or on the basis of outdated information, e.g. “I bought my TV ten years ago and never had to do this”. Your experience being in the recent past I guess I could try this as a sale stipulation point, thanks.











  • Ok I’m British and I don’t get this. Yes there are specific turns of phrase or idioms that are different in British/American/Indian but really, is anyone who can actually read and write going to stumble on them?

    Example of British English (since I’m guessing most readers here are American): “oh, we suggested Wednesday by accident, shall we meet on Thursday instead”. Is anyone really going to struggle with ‘translating’ to “oh, we suggested Wednesday on accident, shall we meet Thursday instead”


  • People who think this about current music simply aren’t hearing/listening to a lot of current music. There’s great stuff out there being created all the time but you’d never come across it in ‘mainstream’ places. Take a genre I really like (I realise not everyone does), blues guitar/vocals. 3 brilliant current artists:

    • Grace Bowers (will be 18 in July)
    • Christone “Kingfish” Ingram (currently 25 years old)
    • Muireann Bradley (also currently 17 years old)

    Obviously with those ages, these aren’t golden agers coating on past glories. To take someone totally different, Ren isn’t ‘commercial’, even if some of the people he’s worked with, e.g. Chinchilla, are. I don’t expect to see any of these artists become ‘mainstream’ like e.g. Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift.




  • Coming from what looks to me like a different perspective to many of the commenters here (Disclosure I am a professional platform engineer):

    If you are already scripting your setups then yes you should absolutely learn/use Ansible. The key reasons are that it is robust, explicit, and repeatable- doesn’t matter whether that’s the same host multiple times or multiple hosts. I have lost count of the number of pet Bash scripts I have encountered in various shops, many of them created by quite talented people. They all had problems. Some typical ones:

    Issue Example
    Most people write bash scripts without dependency checks ‘Of course everyone will have gnu coreutils installed, it’s part of every Linux distro’ - someone runs the script on a Mac
    We need to pass this action out to a command-line tool, that’s obvious Fails if command-line tool isn’t available, no handling errors from tool if they aren’t exactly what’s expected
    Of course people will realise that they need to run this from an environment prepared in this exact (undocumented) way Someone runs the script in a different environment
    Of course people will be running this on x86_64/AMD64, all these third party binaries are available for that Someone runs it on ARM
    Of course people will know what to do if the script fails midway through People try to re-run the script when it fails mid-way through and it’s a mess

    The thing about Ansible is that it can be modular (if you want) and you can use other people’s code but fundamentally it runs one step at a time. You will know for each step:

    • Are dependencies met?
    • Did that step succeed or fail (in realtime!)?
    • (If it failed) what was the error?
    • (Assuming you have written sane Ansible) you can re-run your playbook at any time to get the ‘same’ result. No worries about being left in an indeterminate state
    • (To an extent) It is self-documenting
    • Host architecture doesn’t really matter
    • Target architecture/OS is specified and clear