Category: Software

  • Replacing ISY with Home Assistant – Part 1a – Transition Planning

    This is the continuation of a short series on transitioning away from the ISY using Home Assistant. The Experiment I mentioned in my previous post that I had ordered some parts to run an experiment with my PowerLinc Modem (PLM). I needed to determine that I could use my existing PLM (an Insteon 2413S, which…

  • Tech Tip – Not all certificates are the same

    I have been trying to build a model in Azure to start modernizing one of our applications. Part of that is configuring an application gateway correctly and getting end-to-end SSL configured. As it turns out, not all certificates are good certificates, at least to Azure. Uploading the Cert I have a wildcard certificate for a…

  • You can’t trust anyone…

    Did I “hack” a major online website. You could call it that. If using the browser’s built-in developer tools to change an element id so that I could submit my order… well, then, yes. I “hacked” the site so I could buy something…. “Refresh your cache” and other tall tales I was helping someone I…

  • Collecting WCF Telemetry with Application Insights

    I got pulled back in to diagnosing performance issues on an old friend, and it lead me into some dead code with a chance for resuscitation. Trouble with the WCF One of our applications has a set of WCF Services that serve the client. We had not instrumented them manually for performance metrics, although we…

  • Maturing my Grafana setup

    I may have lost some dashboards and configuration recently, and it got me thinking about how to mature my Grafana setup for better persistence. Initial Setup When I first got Grafana running, it was based on the packaged Grafana Helm chart. As such, my Grafana instance was using SQLite database file stored in the persistent…

  • Why I am not using Resharper anymore

    I have been a subscriber to JetBrains Resharper for a number of years. Additionally, my employer carries a number of licenses for Resharper, and some teams still use it. But I recently decided to cancel my subscription, and it might be worth a few words as to why. IDEs are uniquely personal To developers, IDEs…

  • Tech Tip – Configuring RKE2 Nginx Ingress using a HelmChartConfig Resource

    The RKE2 documentation is there, but, well, it is not quite as detailed as I have seen in other areas. This is a quick tip for customizing your Nginx Ingress controllers when using RKE2 Using Nginx Ingress in RKE2 By default, an RKE2 cluster deploys the nginx-ingress Helm chart. That’s great, except that you may…

  • Snakes… Why Did It Have To Be Snakes?

    What seems like ages ago, I wrote some Python scripts to keep an eye on my home lab. What I did not realize is that little introduction to Python would help me dive into the wonderful world of ETL (or ELT, more on that later). Manage By Numbers I love numbers. Pick your favorite personality…

  • My 15 pieces of flair… Cloudflare

    With parts of my home lab exposed to the internet for my own convenience, it is always good to add layers of protection to incoming traffic. At a colleague’s suggestion, I took Cloudflare up on their free WAF offering to help add some protection to my setup. As a bonus, I have a much better…

  • Badges… We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!

    Well… Maybe we do. This is a quick plug (no reimbursement of any kind) for the folks over at Shields.io, who make creating custom badges for readme files and websites an easy and fun task. A Quick Demo The badges above are generated from Shields.io. The first link looks like this: My Github username (spyder007)…