For over a decade, I have had a rack of servers which I have used for both personal and work related tasks. Indeed, here is a picture of my server rack from back in 2007 (with 6U of rack space containing what was at the time around $140K worth of high-end network switches).

Common Table Expressions, or CTEs as they are often called, are an area of SQL which can by some be considered to be no different than magic. This is because few of us use them, and even fewer of us use them regularly enough to make them like the familiar of some powerful wizard in some book. And just like those familiars sometimes do in the books, they can give us great frustration or even turn upon us like some demon or Djinn who has escaped the bounds we thought would control them.

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about why I use windows. Here is part of why I hate it, and why I do so less than willingly (to put it mildly).

I have been using Chrome for many years now, having become a convert from Firefox when it first came out. But it has been getting to be a persistent pain on a number of fronts, and I have almost reached my Popeye moment, where "I have had all I can stands, and I can stands no more..."

...or why do I subject myself to the muck flowing from MicroSoft...

I have two machines which are my original two CentOS 7 installs, which date back several years. At that time, I was running an old (now ancient) version of cobbler which had a history of blowing up when I tried updating to newer versions (more on that in a different, future post), and there was no support for RHEL/CentOS 7 installs using it. And I don't mean that it was just missing the "signatures" and what defines an OS version to cobbler... the network boot just went ***BOOM*** as it was bringing up the installer.

If you have not figured it out, I am a strong proponent and user of cobbler and kickstart installs. It is rare these days that I build a machine in what one might call a "hands-on" mode, whether using a Live DVD/USB flash drive, network install, or any other media.

Granddaddy built houses for decades, and while I don't think I heard the adage from him, I learned all about using the right tool for the job growing up, between what I learned from Mom, and from what I learned through personal experience. For example, it is quite obvious that you don't use screwdrivers for driving nails into boards, but then you are faced with all the different hammers, all slightly different, for driving a nail... and we have not even considered the size of the nail.

The past couple of weeks have been filled with lots of little "I need to do X, but to do X, I first need to do Y, and to do that I need to do Z" type tasks. One of those items was learning about and then writing a new Releaser plugin for tito. More on it specifically in a post to be written shortly, but now that I have my client SSL certificate updated in my browser (yet another upcoming post), I can write this post to talk about an issue I had while working with tito and Jenkins.

What is it with spammers, crackers and the like? Before doing my previous post, I took a quick look at some comments left on a couple of posts which I had noticed a few days ago, but which were lower on my priority list. As noted in my privacy policy, when you leave a comment, your IP address is tracked. Indeed, this is true if you even access the website, or any website or most any service for that matter.