Matt Williams

Author's details

Name: Matt Williams
Date registered: August 9, 2008
URL: http://matt@matthewkwilliams.com

Biography

Matt Williams lives in Columbus, OH, in a house filled with computers, cats, books and fiber. Pursuing the goal of being a modern Renaissance person, he plays with his daughter, cooks, roasts coffee, reads, weaves, studies, and hacks, including crazy ideas like a Cloud in a Box. Docker has been an especial passion since June of 2013.

Latest posts

  1. Weaving with Light Pt. 1 — August 31, 2016
  2. Abusing HAProxy: Stupid Simple Easy Dashboards — June 24, 2016
  3. Rules for Operations — April 25, 2016
  4. DevOps Creed (Work in Progress) — April 24, 2016
  5. I am not a Mindreader: a mini-saga — April 11, 2016

Most commented posts

  1. Swarming Raspberry Pi – Part 1 — 13 comments
  2. Docker, Cgroups, Memory Constraints, and Java: A Cautionary Tale, or Here be Reapers (sometimes) — 9 comments
  3. Shrinking Docker Images — 7 comments
  4. Rails & JRuby in a Jar — 7 comments
  5. rspec, restful_authentication, and login_required — 6 comments

Author's posts listings

Sep 18

OBS for Videos

Categories:

gotchas, tips, tools

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I recently discovered a really interesting tool for producing videos of screen captures, optionally with webcam inserts. It’s called Open Broadcaster Software and it works on Linux, Windows, and there is a beta version for Apple OSX. It seems that it was originally intended for streaming to websites, but it has a lot more features …

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Sep 14

Creating Mini Sagas

Categories:

howto, mini sagas

by

saga

First start with an idea. It can be fiction or not. Then start to write. Write your story and then count the words. The goal is fifty words, no more, no less. Trim if need be, otherwise add words. Edit, rinse, repeat until you’re done. Publish it; write some more.

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Sep 12

Minimum Viable Configuration (a mini saga)

Categories:

devops, infrastructure, mini sagas, philosophy, rants

by

Balance. 3D. Out of Balance

Too many believe that bigger is better; elaborate systems, multitude layers, and diverse architectural patterns demonstrate a maturity of design. Unfortunately they aren’t called at 3am when it breaks. I prefer the simplicity of less — kissing Occam’s razor; trimming away until perfection… when there is nothing left to take away.

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Sep 07

Bulk Adding Hosts to a Pi Swarm

Categories:

cloud, cloud computing, cloud-in-a-box, Docker, hypriot, Raspberry Pi, swarm, tips

by

Raspberrbee Pi Swarm!

I’ve refreshed my stack and am rebuilding the cluster. I’m using Hypriot for the linux distribution, but I’m a smart sysadmin (read lazy) and don’t want to manually add them each time. Also, I want to make a script so that I can quickly rebuild. This is inspired by Let Docker Swarm all over your …

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3 comments

Sep 07

Getting the Docker Swarm Discovery Token

Categories:

Docker, swarm, tips

by

At the moment, docker swarm doesn’t have a self-discovery method. If you’ve mislaid or forgotten the discovery token you can’t add new elements. It just so happens that if you do a docker inspect $SWARM_AGENT_MASTER, the token will show up in the command line arguments.

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Sep 07

Viewing Raspberry Pi Config Variables and More

Categories:

howto, Raspberry Pi, tips

by

1732879

Sometimes it’s helpful to see if a particular parameter is set or not on the raspberry pi. This is where vcgencmd. However, vcgencmd is useful for many other things.

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Sep 07

PDF-XChange Editor Review

Categories:

reviews, tools

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I was in training last week — rather than a printed text, we were provided with a PDF of the slides. PDF files are not the easiest thing to annotate without special software and, well, Adobe Acrobat isn’t precisely cheap. I was very pleased to find Tracker Software’s PDF-XChange Editor. There is both a free …

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Sep 07

Troubleshooting MicroSD Card Problems

Categories:

gotchas, howto, troubleshooting

by

computer-is-friend

The Computer employs Troubleshooters, whose job is to go out, find trouble, and shoot it. — Paranoia While re-imaging the MicroSD cards for my cluster, I ran into a few issues — nothing insurmountable, but I figured that I would share them to help others….. MicroSD cards generally come with an adapter to allow them …

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3 comments

Sep 03

Power Loss (a mini saga)

Categories:

mini sagas, rants

by

powerfist(1)

Virtual presence doesn’t work too well when the power is out. It is hard to see in the dark and TCP/IP is pretty slow over semaphore or pigeon. The huddled masses hover over their phones and laptops, hoarding the last few precious voltamps of power, praying for Light’s return. (Over 36K customers lost power in …

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Sep 02

Times have Changed: Virtual Training

Categories:

miscellany

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I’m in hadoop admin training for ${WORK} this week — it’s a virtual course, but the interface is actually the nicest I’ve seen yet. The training is being held by ExitCertified and the virtual bit pretty much just works. They provide a webcam and headset to cut down on technical issues. So I have a …

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