Technology on ngmarley.com

Passed the AWS DevOps Pro exam

Fri, 05 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Two days ago I sat the exam and passed with an 83% overall!

Here are my actual scores and domains:

Overall Score: 83%

Topic Level Scoring:
Domain 1: 75%
Domain 2: 87%
Domain 3: 100%
Domain 4: 100%

I’m actually surprised that I did this well, as I was a bit nervous and not sure if I’d pass or not. I did spend a couple hours the night before studying CloudFormation (WaitCondition & WaitConditionHandle), OpsWorks and Elastic Beanstalk.

AWS DevOps Pro - Practice Exam Passed

Sat, 29 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I spent a couple hours reviewing my previous exam answers and writing down what I would have done differently and why. I also played around with OpsWorks and ElasticBeanstalk a bit yesterday so that I could better understand those technologies… and then took the exam again this morning.

I passed this time, and here are my new results:

Domain 1. 72% (Continuous Delivery and Process Automation – passed this time, and the only change)
Domain 2. 75% (Monitoring, Metrics, and Logging)
Domain 3. 100% (Security, Governance, and Validation)
Domain 4. 100% (High Availability and Elasticity)

AWS DevOps Pro - Practice Exam Take 1 (Failed)

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Just failed an AWS practice exam for the first time!

I currently hold all 3 associate certifications and am going for the DevOps Pro certification next.

Was actually a bit surprised! Fortunately the parts that I failed are the parts that I really don’t care about and will never use (ElasticBeanstalk and OpsWorks). Unfortunately, we’re still tested on those bits and I’ll have to study up. Since I got a 60% overall score, I really think I could have got a “pass” if I’d gotten just one or two more answers correct.

HD Wallet Standards for Interoperability

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Note: I originally wrote this in April 2016 while traveling thru Asia and kept it in my private log area until now.

Many different software vendors have produced different HD (e.g. BIP32-compliant) Wallets, and it’s nice, but the supposed features/benefits of HD wallets aren’t really able to be used except by the most-technical of end-users. That’s because the HD standard is both really flexible (by enabling a multitude of derivation paths), and because multiple standards are used by wallet software vendors, some of which are conflicting, and each developer will use whichever standard he/she thinks is best, without regard to interoperability or what’s best and easiest for the end-user.

Where Apple Went Wrong...

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

People don’t give a shit about things like a “Touch Bar” with emojis and the ability to pay for stuff via ApplePay. People don’t care about ApplePay, or about “eliminating cash”. And, although governments want to eliminate cash for other reasons, Apple is not the entity which is going to do so.

You know what people want?

Good hardware and software that works well.

Honestly, I don’t even think anybody cares whether their laptop is 0.005 inches thinner or 4 ounces lighter, but the ability to have 32 or 64 GB RAM is fucking huge. HUGE, I say.

What is Docker? (And good luck finding out.)

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s an example of how technical people still can’t explain things:

I search for “What is Docker”, and I even get to the “What is Docker?” page on the official website:

But as you can see, I still don’t get a straight answer.

This page tells me what Docker allows me to do … and what Docker containers are… (but I still need to know what Docker is first).

Some Things That Will Be Obsolete in 5 Years

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Just 20 years ago, the world was a completely different place. And in 20 years, it’s going to be completely different than it is today. Everything’s gonna change. Lifestyles, standards of living. It’s already in progress. We just don’t always see it that way.

Think about it: can you imagine a time before YouTube? That’s just ONE service that’s changed the way we learn, share, entertain and, in some cases, make a living.

Review: Wiko Lenny 3 Smartphone

Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Wiko Lenny 3 — A Game Changer? Hardly.

Update: Be sure and see my update below. Even more brickkery!

I was in Chiang Mai, Thailand when my Nexus 5 finally just gave out. The infamous Nexus 5 “power button issue” meant that I could not use it for more than 2 minutes without the phone just shutting down again, just immediately, as if the battery had been removed. Then my screen cracked when I was trying to get it to work. It cracked bad, so much that I couldn’t see anything even when I could get the damn phone to power up. So it was finally dead.

WordPress 4.4+ — How to Fix the Disappearing Admin Panel in the Post Editor

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Well, the geniuses behind WordPress did it again. Enabled a change that Automattic thinks is the latest thing since sliced bread, and forced it upon the entire rest of the WordPress world.

This time, it’s in the form of a disappearing admin panel when you write posts. Apparently everything else is a “distraction”, and when writing, the only thing you should see is your little text box and nothing else. Well, fuck that. It’s annoying, and most of all, distracting! The distraction-free feature is actually distracting the hell out of me and I just want to write my post with a standard static screen with all my buttons and checkboxes that I’m used to.

Institute Policies to Avoid Breaking Hard Rules

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Today I had a conversation that went something like this:

Girl: “Hey, can I borrow your laptop?”

Me: “Hell no!” (jokingly, but not really joking)

Girl: “I’m working on something now, so I’m gonna need to borrow your laptop. This font size is just too small for what I’m working on.”

Me: “…”

I personally have a hard rule about my laptop: no one uses my laptop. For any reason, ever. That rule is slightly bendable for one person - my wife. And even then, she has her own account on my Macbook, she doesn’t log on using mine. Why?

Ctrl-P to print...

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Most people don’t think about how their websites or blogs print out. Probably because most people don’t print things anymore. But for me, if I’m starting on a long article, I’ll try and print it so that it doesn’t hurt my eyes.

When I Google related searches, I see people posting thoughts along the lines of:

“Why bother? Nobody prints things anymore.”

Those people are ~~assholes~~ inconsiderate, or ignorant, or both.

Email Anxiety

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Breathe while reading your email!

I don’t know if email anxiety is a real thing, but I definitely have it, regardless.

When composing an email, sometimes it takes me one, two, … up to three hours or more. To write an email. Not a long email of a few thousand words (I don’t believe most emails should be that long). Just a simple, short introductory email.

“Hey, how are you? I’m Nathan. I see you’re doing [INSERT COOL THING HERE], I think that’s cool because [REASONS] and just wanted to connect with you. I’d love to help if you need it with [SOME THINGS I CAN HELP WITH].

Anyway, take care,
Nathan
"

Be Ruthless with your Email

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Email is sacred ground. It’s where you get important notes from friends and family, as well as the businesses and organizations that you care about.

But for a lot of people it’s become a wasteland, a junkyard to be traversed, only every once in a while finding a gem here or there.

Me? I’m ruthless with my email. If any company, organization, or marketer sends me something that I don’t want to receive even once, they’re gone. Done. Unsubscribed. I don’t care how much they might have improved my life or condition. By giving over my primary email address, for any reason, I’ve given you my trust, and that doesn’t come lightly.

10 Ideas to improve your site's SEO

Sun, 24 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

SEO

I wrote these ideas for a local photographer that I know, who was asking on Facebook about SEO for her website. But since I think they’re pretty generic, these could apply to just about anyone with a local business. So I’ll just share them on here for everyone, and point her to this post.

SEO is basically broken into 2 things:

How relevant is your site’s content to the people searching for it? You improve this by optimizing your site - content and meta information (e.g. meta tags, internal links to other pages on your site, etc.)
How popular is your site? (Sites with the same relevance, but more popular = higher in Google results.) This means how many “backlinks” your site has, which is other people/websites linking back to yours. You improve this by what’s called “link building”.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s a list of ideas that might help improve any site’s SE rankings.

Open Financial eXchange (OFX) is Broken (Online Banking Security is a Joke)

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Am I the only person in the world who thinks that it’s utterly ludicrous that we have to give our passwords to sites like Mint.com so they can help us keep track of our spending habits? Surely I can’t be the only one. It’s like giving away the keys to the kingdom.

It kind of irks me a little that if I want to use a site like Mint.com to track my spending habits and help me keep my budget in line, I have to give my username and password over to them.

Bitcoin eliminates PCI compliance

Sun, 09 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was just reading up on wrapping APIs and just came to another realization regarding Bitcoin. In a payment system using only Bitcoin, there is absolutely no need for PCI compliance. Zero. That’s right:

Bitcoin eliminates PCI compliance.

There’s no private data to store. No customer data exists that a criminal can then steal and rack up charges. Since Bitcoin payments are a push from the customer, instead of a pull from the merchant, there’s no need for any PCI compliance. Customer security is simply “baked in” to the protocol.

Here's why Bitcoin will change the world...

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve said before, a lot of people a lot smarter than me could explain Bitcoin a lot better than me… so I’ll leave it up to them.

Both of these videos feature Andreas Antonopoulos, a network and security professional and major Bitcoin evangelist.

Watch This First

The first clip is Andreas speaking at the Milwaukee Bitcoin meetup a couple of weeks ago. You can start watching at 47 minutes and 15 seconds (the link should take you there).

Bitcoin

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve refrained from posting about Bitcoin until now, mostly because I haven’t had time, which is to say that it hasn’t been prioritized. I have also refrained from posting because I’ve been considering a site re-design, and didn’t want to take the time to mess with it. But I’ve got too many thoughts which I need to get out, plus the “Twenty Fourteen” WordPress theme is pretty clean and simple. I like it. Anyway, here goes…

My Wife Has a Website

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago my wife began her quest toward becoming a full-fledged web developer.

She’s now got a good basic understanding about computers in general, and today she set up her very own website (without any help from me!). The link to her site is here:

http://huckleberry.site44.com/

Needless to say, I’m very proud of her and wish her continued success on her long and rewarding journey.

Firefox, You've Done It Again

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem

After upgrading to Firefox 24, some fonts weren’t displaying correctly in one of my own websites. I was referencing a Google fonts URL in my CSS, because they’re so pretty. And free. And apparently a security risk, according to the new Firefox default settings.

The Fix

Type about:config in the address bar.
Search for “security.mixed_content.block_active_content”, set to false.

For the love of G-d, Firefox devs, please stop trying to protect us from ourselves. It’s ok. We know what we’re doing.

HTTP Response Header: Content-Disposition

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For the longest time, I always wondered how WordPress.org always served the current version of wordpress from a file named “latest.tar.gz”, and whenever I downloaded it with a browser (such as Firefox), my browser would always save it as something like “wordpress-3.5.2.tar.gz” instead. This never happened when I would retrieve the file using “wget”. I never really bothered looking into it much.

Just tonight I stumbled across it while downloading a driver for a USB wireless adapter that I have.

Password Policy

Thu, 04 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Hackers/crackers use modern GPUs (and possibly ASICs) to brute-force passwords. The old-school password policies from the early 2000’s really shouldn’t apply now, because to a computer, it’s irrelevant which characters are which. Computers can run through the entire UTF-8 charset in fractions of a second, and they’ll eventually guess a short password whether or not it contains a mix of character types (upper, lower, numbers, special, etc).

I’m tired of seeing password policies like this (I saw this when trying to change one of my passwords today):

Remove Ubuntu/Debian version from sshd server string

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For security reasons, I don’t like that “Debian/Ubuntu” shows up on my sshd server string.

You can see the sshd server identification string by telnetting to port 22.

$ telnet ngmarley.com 22 Trying 106.187.97.211... Connected to ngmarley.com. Escape character is '^]'. SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_6.0p1 Debian-3ubuntu1 ^] telnet> quit Connection closed.

It’s very simple to just remove the “Debian…” part off the end.

Just edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and append

DebianBanner no

to it.

Then re-start your sshd:

Disable "Speed Dial" Feature in Firefox 13

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When you open a new tab in Firefox 13, you see a preview grid of most-visited web pages or something. Maybe. I’m not sure where that list comes from. Doesn’t matter, I don’t like it. There’s no way to disable it in the Firefox preferences, so you have to tweak the config settings to disable it.

I don’t know what the guys at Mozilla were thinking when they added this not-so-optional “feature”. Someone suggested they were trying to win… “The Most Retarded New Features Competition”. I would change that to “The Most Superfluous New Features Competition”.

OSX - How to change the root user's shell.

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Or the default shell of any user for that matter. I don’t know if this is recommended or not, but changing from /bin/sh to /bin/bash will enable tab-completion, and since I’m a lazy admin that’s what I’ll do. (Plus, less keystrokes = longer hardware life for my keyboard.)

This command will display the user’s default shell (replace root with desired username):

rivendell:~ root# dscl . -read /Users/root UserShell

Now change the shell (in this case to /bin/bash):

Analysis of a Chinese Phishing Scam - Global Payments, Inc.

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post will be of particular interest to customers of Global Payments, Inc. I received an email which seemingly came from them, asking for account login details. Since I don’t have an account with them (and before this morning didn’t know who they were), I did some detective work. It turns out to be a phishing scam.

phish·ing/ˈfiSHiNG/
Noun:
The fraudulent practice of sending e-mails purporting to be from legitimate companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal or confidential information, such as such as credit card numbers or passwords by directing a user to a fake email message or website.

Convert .m4a files to .mp3 format (with tags)

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A Perl utility I wrote to convert .m4a files to .mp3 format. It will also pull the tags over from m4a format. If there are no m4a tags, the script will die. (But of course you can just comment that part out.)

Here is the direct link to the script: m4a2mp3.pl

Note: I’ve updated the code to reflect my more current programming style. If I had time to re-do this, I’d have used IPC::Open3 or something else for IPC, instead of the system call used.

Facebook account deletion link

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In case anyone is looking for it:

https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

This is the official Facebook delete account link. You can permanently delete your account by visiting this & entering your password & a (Re-)Capcha.

Be aware that it will be gone forever – this doesn’t just de-activate it. For now, there is still a 14-day grace period, so if you log back in within 14 days, the account deletion request will be cancelled.

spicnspan.pl – “clean up” text files

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

At times I get tired of editing code with tabs. And by “at times”, I mean every time. I hate tabs in code. I hate trailing spaces in code too (makes it more difficult to navigate using vi/vim). And more than anything, I hate Windows CR/LF (carraige return/line feed) line terminator characters.

So I wrote a script to take care of it. I call it “spicnspan”. To use: spicnspan

Simple enough. This script:

CPAN changing permissions on OSX

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

some Perl code

If you are looking for a Perl module to interface with Amazon’s S3 hosting service, do not use the Net::Amazon::S3 module. It has an unrealistically huge list of modules on which it’s dependent (one of which is more like a framework — a pain in itself) and you’ll likely never get it installed. The Amazon::S3 module by Timothy Appnel installs without a hitch, and it was based on an earlier version of the Net::Amazon::S3 module.

How to break out of an exit popup in Firefox

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ever gone to a site and tried to close the window/tab and instead of closing, you get a popup? “Wait! Don’t go yet! Come back and sign up to my email (legit spam) list!”.

It looks something like this:

And keep trying to get your ass outta there, and each time it gets more & more frustrating, because the site won’t let you close the damn window.

Why you should NOT use short tags in PHP

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Where’s My Damn Emulator?

So I was trying to find a good SNES emulator for Mac. I read somewhere that Snes9x works for OSX, so I went to the site and then the downloads page to find one to… well, to download. The page started out “Here is a list of all the known available mirrors for Snes9x…”, but then it was an empty list.

I thought of two possibilities. Either the list contains exactly zero available mirrors, or something is wrong with the page. It struck me as rather odd that the site would put up an empty list of download mirrors for its own product, so I did some investigative research to check out possibility #2.

Greasemonkey script to remove ‘Who to follow’ box on twitter.

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Note: It’s now April 2015. This is really old & probably won’t work anymore. But I don’t like removing old content, so I’ll keep this post up anyway

Here’s a Greasemonkey script to remove the “Who to follow” (aka “recommended users”) box on twitter.com.

It’s annoying as hell and way too facebookish.`// ==UserScript==

// @name No Recommended Twitter Users // @namespace https://ngmarley.com/

// @description Remove ‘who-to-follow’ box on twitter.com.

// @include http://twitter.com/* // ==/UserScript== function disable() { location.href=“javascript:(function(){ $(’#recommended_users’).remove(); })()”;

Mac OS X – madplay mp3 player

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This was originally posted on my old blog, ngmarleyDOTnet, on May 8, 2009 @ 11:20 CST. That blog is now defunct and the content is slowly being absorbed into this one. I pretty much do use iTunes exclusively on my Macbook now, but wanted to preserve this for posterity.

I’m not a huge fan of iTunes. On my Linux systems, I use a command-line MP3 player. I simply type the names of the files I want to play as arguments.

check gmail from command-line on Mac OS X

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This was originally posted on my old blog, ngmarleyDOTnet, on Apr 19, 2009 @ 18:47 CST. That blog is now defunct and the content is slowly being absorbed into this one. I’ve rewritten this one just a bit to make it better.

I bought a new Macbook ~~last week~~ (several weeks ago, when this post was originally written) for my anticipated travels. I wanted something both lightweight and stable. For several reasons, I like to check my gmail using the mutt email client (command-line based).

make a universal binary on OSX 10.6 – Snow Leopard

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes how to create a “fat binary” on Mac OS X. If you’re using Snow Leopard, I don’t know why you’d want to make one of these, except maybe to compile for distribution to an older OS version (Leopard) or something. In fact, I can’t even remember why I wrote this, but I wrote it some time last fall or winter and thought I’d go ahead and post it now since I’d already spent some time working on it.

basic Perl log function

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I believe any good Perl utility should have a log to which pertinent information should be written. I’m not even going to go over the merits of having a log file, but all good scripts should have one.

Setup - Define the Function and Log Filename

Here’s the log function which I use in my Perl scripts. This could easily be exported to a log module. Yes, I realize there are probably a lot of good logging modules out there already, I’m just offering this for the lazy sods who don’t currently log anything in their Perl scripts, but realize that it’s a good idea to start.

Linux shared library error

Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Note: this was originally written on Apr 23, 2010, so that’s why the dates are from about a week and a half ago. Because I’m a lazy sod, I didn’t get around to publishing this until now.

After installing ntp on my Arch Linux server via pacman, I received this error message while trying to update my system time with ntpdate:

# ntpdate ntpdate: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

my personal daily caloric intake tracker

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Update {2010 Ago 10}: I am no longer updating the DCI Tracker. At the time, it was a good thing for me to do, it fit in with my life/lifestyle and it was also a great start with CakePHP. I still eat healthy, but don’t have time to update it. I also don’t feel the need to update it anymore. My life is taking on a new direction with me getting involved in Internet Marketing and also traveling to New Zealand. Those pursuits are now taking up most of my time. I will keep the tracker up for posterity’s sake.