Author: Andrew Baker

19 Jul 2022 Networking 👁 7 views

How to Poll a URL with Watch and Curl in Linux

If you want to quickly test a URL for changes, then the linux Watch command couple with Curl is a really simple way to hit a URL every n seconds (I use this for blue/green deployment testing to make sure there is no downtime when cutting over):

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23 May 2022 AWS Cloud 👁 14 views

How to Trigger Autoscaling Events with stress-ng Command

If you are testing how your autoscaling policies respond to CPU load then a really simple way to test this is using the “stress” command. Note: this is a very crude mechanism to test and wherever possible you should try and generate synthetic application load.

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03 May 2022 Macbooks 👁 11 views

Enable Apps From Anywhere on Mac: Terminal Command Guide

Previously Macs would allow you to install software from anywhere. Now you will see the error message “NMAPxx.mpkg cannot be opened because its from an unidentified developer“. If you want to fix this and enable apps to be install from anywhere, you will need to run the following command line: Once you have run the […]

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10 Nov 2021 Corporate Culture 👁 10 views

Bonuscide: How Toxic Bonus Schemes Destroy Organisations

bonuscide noun Definition of bonuscide: Bonuscide is a term used to describe incentive schemes that progressively poisons an organisation by ensuring the flow of discretionary pay is non does not serve the organisations goals. These schemes can be observed in two main ways, the loss of key staff or the reduction in client/customer base. Bonuscide […]

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22 Sep 2021 AWS Cloud 👁 7 views

How to Scale Cloud Consumption Without Costly Mistakes

Introduction This article follows on from the “Cloud Migrations Crusade” blog post… A single tenancy datacenter is a fixed scale, fixed price service on a closed network. The costs of the resources in the datacenter are divided up and shared out to the enterprise constituents on a semi-random basis. If anyone uses less resources than […]

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18 Aug 2021 Open Source 👁 30 views

How to Iterate the COM Running Objects Table in C#

Back in the day I had to do quite a bit of COM / .Net interop. For some reason (and I cannot remember what it was), I need to be able to enumerate the COM running objects table (ROT). I think it was to do with createboject/getobject and trying to synthesis a singleton for an […]

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16 Aug 2021 Technology 👁 6 views

How to Delete the Icon Cache in Windows (Fix Glitches)

I remember getting weird flashing on my laptop and eventually figured out my icon cache was full. So if you ever get this, try running the script below. This is obviously quite a weird/random post – hope its helpful 🙂

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12 May 2021 Corporate Culture 👁 32 views

Why Least Privilege Security Is a Lie: 3 Root Causes

In technology, there is a tendency to solve a problem badly by using gross simplification, then come up with a catchy one liner and then broadcast this as doctrine or a principle. Nothing ticks more boxes in this regard, than the principle of least privileges. The ensuing enterprise scale deadlocks created by a crippling implementation […]

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23 Mar 2021 AWS Cloud 👁 14 views

AWS S3 ETags: Verify File Integrity Using MD5 Hashes

I was playing with S3 the other day an I noticed that a file which I had uploaded twice, in two different locations had an identical ETag. This immediately made me think that this tag was some kind of hash. So I had a quick look AWS documentation and this ETag turns out to be […]

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15 Mar 2021 AWS Cloud 👁 15 views

TPC-H Test Data for AWS Redshift and EMR: Setup Guide

If you need to test out your big data tools below is a useful set of scripts that I have used in the past for aws emr and redshift the below might be helpful:

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