Some thoughts on switching to Pulumi

I’ve become very comfortable with Terraform over the past several years of my career. So of course, the company wants to switch from Terraform to Pulumi, a newer competitor with a very different outlook on how IAC should be written. Prerequisites Terraform uses declarative code for IAC — you declare what you want to exist, and it generates the path to get there itself. Pulumi is much the same, however, while Terraform is written in Hashicorp Configuration Language which boils down to a bunch of static json-like declarations, Pulumi code is written in any of a number of turing-complete programming language. Continue reading

Quick Tip: How to get your Facebook and Google calendars in the same view

In looking for a replacement for Sunrise.am (which shuts down next week), I keep being stymed by my inability to find a calendar that can do everything. I have a work calendar on Outlook, a personal calendar on Google, and my steampunk group uses Facebook events. I can typically find an app that will do two of the above, usually leaving out Facebook, but never all three. The last time I looked I don’t think this was possible, but now you can import your Facebook calendar into Google, allowing the apps on your smartphone to access it as a Google calendar. Continue reading

How to force Bamboo to build on Linux

So let’s talk about build servers for a minute. I manage the company’s Bamboo server, which we use to do builds and continuous integration. I don’t know if this is an unusual use case or what, but some of my builds require Windows and others perform best on Linux. So we have Windows agents and Linux agents. Some things you would think are intuitive are not. For example, there’s no way to differentiate in a Script Task between CMD and Bash. Continue reading

Quick Tips: How to set an mp3 as a ringtone for a person in Android KitKat

This was frustrating enough that I wanted to document it, as it’s surprisingly complicated. Let’s say you have a sound file on your computer — maybe a baby laughing that you want to set for the baby’s mom’s ringtone, or something like that. Legally recorded MP3 files, let’s assume, for the purposes of demonstration. How can you go from “file on my computer” to “ringtone for a contact on my phone” with Android Kit-Kat? Continue reading

Quick Tip: passing parameters from Jenkins to Maven

I saw bits and pieces of information all over the internet about parameters and properties and command-line arguments, but what I was looking for I didn’t find: a simple, straightforward explanation of how to use a Paramaterized Build in Jenkins to pass arguments through to the jUnit tests that run the functional tests that I’ve built on Webdriver. So: here it is! Step 1: Command-line via Maven to jUnit Use the System. Continue reading

Quick Tip: KDE For Windows looking bad

For most of you, the takeaway from this Quick Tip will probably be “You can run KDE applications on Windows?”. To which I say, yes! Check out https://windows.kde.org/ if you’re interested. For the un-linux-savvy, KDE is a desktop environment for Linux; I personally have been using Konversation as my IRC client ever since I was stuck with Kubuntu for a few years as my primary operating system due to an issue with a busted Windows install disk. Continue reading

Quick Tips: Posting as yourself on a group facebook page

This isn’t my usual domain for quick tips, but Facebook moved this feature, and some people I know have been having trouble with it, so I thought I’d put this up. If you want to post under your own name on a page, and you happen to be able to post AS that page, here’s where the button you need to click lives: Click this dropdown Then choose an identity from this list