A little while back, in June, I sat my last exam for what I hoped would be the
last module in my degree. For seven years, I've been working on a degree with
the
Open University and have been taking advantage of the opportunity to
have a somewhat self-directed course load by taking the 'Open' degree track.
When asked why I bothered to do this, I guess my answer has been a little
varied. In principle it's because I felt like I'd already done a year's worth
of degree and didn't want it wasted, but it's also because I have been, in the
dim and distant past, overlooked for jobs simply because I had no degree and
thus was an easy "bin the CV".
Fed up with this, I decided to commit to the Open University and thus began my
journey toward 'qualification' in 2010. I started by transferring the level 1
credits from my stint at
UCL back in 1998/1999 which were in a combination
of basic programming in Java, some mathematics including things like RSA, and
some psychology and AI courses which at the time were aiming at a degree called
'Computer Science with Cognitive Sciences'.
Then I took level 2 courses,
M263 (Building blocks of software),
TA212
(The technology of music) and
MS221 (Exploring mathematics). I really
enjoyed the mathematics course and so...
At level 3 I took
MT365 (Graphs, networks and design),
M362 (Developing
concurrent distributed systems),
TM351 (Data management and analysis -
which I ended up hating), and finally finishing this June with
TM355
(Communications technology).
I received an email this evening telling me the module result for TM355 had
been posted, and I logged in to find I had done well enough to be offered
my degree. I could have claimed my degree 18+ months ago, but I persevered
through another two courses in order to qualify for an honours degree which
I have now been awarded. Since I don't particularly fancy any ceremonial
awarding, I just went through the clicky clicky and accepted my qualification
of 'Batchelor of Science (Honours) Open, Upper Second-class Honours (2.1)'
which grants me the letters 'BSc (Hons) Open (Open)' which, knowing me, will
likely never even make it onto my CV because I'm too lazy.
It has been a significant effort, over the course of the past few years, to
complete a degree without giving up too much of my personal commitments. In
addition to earning the degree, I have worked, for six of the seven years it
has taken, for
Codethink doing interesting work in and around Linux systems
and
Trustable software. I have designed and built
Git server software
which is in use in some universities, and many companies, along with a good few
of my F/LOSS colleagues. And I've still managed to find time to attend plays,
watch films, read an average of 2 novel-length stories a week (some of which
were even real books), and be a member of the
Manchester Hackspace.
Right now, I'm looking forward to a stress free couple of weeks, followed by
an immense amount of fun at
Debconf17 in Montr al!
This post attempts to chart my journey towards getting usefully started with Ansible to manage my system configurations. It s a high level discussion of how I went about doing so and what I got out of it, rather than including any actual config snippets - there are plenty of great resources out there that handle the actual practicalities of getting started much better than I could.
I ve been convinced about the merits of configuration management for machines for a while now; I remember conversations about producing an appropriate set of recipes to reproduce our haphazard development environment reliably over 4 years ago. That never really got dealt with before I left, and as managing systems hasn t been part of my day job since then I never got around to doing more than working my way through the Puppet Learning VM. I do, however, continue to run a number of different Linux machines - a few VMs, a hosted dedicated server and a few physical machines at home and my parents . In particular I have a VM which handles my parents email, and I thought that was a good candidate for trying to properly manage. It s backed up, but it would be nice to be able to redeploy that setup easily if I wanted to move provider, or do hosting for other domains in their own VMs.
I picked Ansible, largely because I wanted something lightweight and the agentless design appealed to me. All I really need to do is ensure Python is on the host I want to manage and everything else I can bootstrap using Ansible itself. Plus it meant I could use the version from Debian testing on my laptop and not require backports on the stable machines I wanted to manage.
My first attempt was to write a single Ansible YAML file which did all the appropriate things for the email VM; installed Exim/Apache/Roundcube, created users, made sure the appropriate SSH keys were in place, installed configuration files, etc, etc. This did the job, but I found myself thinking it was no better than writing a shell script to do the same things.
Things got a lot better when instead of concentrating on a single host I looked at what commonality was shared between hosts. I started with simple things; Debian is my default distro so I created an Ansible role 
In a few days, I ll be attending 
long time no blog post. & the 
asterisk fails to start on my raspberry pi.
I don't quite understand what the error message is but systemctl tells me there was a timeout. Don't know which timeout it hits.
I got several interesting and useful replies, both via the blog and by personal email, to my two previous posts where I mentioned I would be starting a translation of the 
All those working in academics or research have surely heard about 
This is about he same you pay for Netflix, or some other streaming service. If you remain on the free side, what remains for you to do is SNS-like stuff, and uploading your papers so that academia.edu can make money from it.
What I am really surprised that they can pull this of at a .edu domain. The registry requirements state
I wrote this code, and it made me super happy!
The packages on this site are not distributed inside TeX Live proper for one or another of the following reasons:
