• Service Container Manipulation

    Posted on September 24, 2020

    The Github actions functionality has been pretty spectacular, in particular service containers for setting up a test environment. One bit of annoyance though can be trying to do setup on a container. When the container gets created the repo hasn’t been checked out yet. So I can’t do the normal... [Read More]

  • ktool for Building OSDev Samples

    Posted on September 10, 2020

    The other day I packaged up a build of cross-compile tools for i686 bare images using the instructions from the OSDev wiki for making a cross-compiler suitable for building bootable images and kernels. I had started fooling around with dockcross to do the builds, but some of the OSDev samples... [Read More]

  • Using Docker to Cross Compile

    Posted on September 4, 2020

    I’ve been poking around with a bunch of low level programming stuff. Looking at old source code and playing with some newer examples, like Alex Parker’s fantastic example of a boot loader with assembly and C++. There’s lots of interesting stuff out there. But I never like having to setup... [Read More]

  • Booting MMURTL in VirtualBox

    Posted on September 3, 2020

    I was looking through some of the old books on my bookshelf when I ran across my copy of Developing Your Own 32-Bit Operating System. I spent a bunch of time playing around with the code when I picked up the book, uh… more than 20 years ago. Wow. Eventually... [Read More]

  • Finished a Program 29 Years Later

    Posted on November 19, 2013

    My parents were getting ready to sell their house a few months ago, and while I was there I grabbed a few super old computer books from when I was a kid. Nostalgia I suppose, and I figured they would be cool to have around. What I didn’t expect was... [Read More]

  • Firefox OS with App Manager

    Posted on October 28, 2013

    One of the nice things about getting FFOS 1.2 on my device is being able to use App Manager instead of the simulator plugin to do development. Given that the App Manager replaces the Simulator Dashboard in the newest versions of Firefox, it seems like the kind of thing developers... [Read More]

  • FirefoxOS 1.2 on ZTE Open

    Posted on October 24, 2013

    I picked up a ZTE Open Firefox OS device a little while ago. Given that developer hub says it’s a “powerful device aimed at developers and early adopters worldwide” I figured it would be good for some hackery. I read the specs, so I knew that “powerful” should be pretty... [Read More]

  • knife-block for Chef Testing

    Posted on September 19, 2013

    A few weeks ago Nathen Harvey was kind enough to stop by and give us a critique of how we do Chef automated testing and some workflow suggestions. We had been using chef-solo to do some of the recipe development and automated testing, but all our real deployments were done... [Read More]

  • Scaling Technology

    Posted on July 14, 2013

    A few weeks ago Arte and Mario asked me to swing by to chat with folks participating in the Momentum accelerator to talk about scaling technology. While we were talking I pointed folks to a few posts and videos of talks I consider to be some of the root nodes... [Read More]

  • Consistent Test Methodology for Inconsistent Projects

    Posted on May 28, 2013

    How do you start introducing some testing if you have a huge group of existing projects, for the most part all implemented using different languages and technologies? That’s the problem I’ve been poking at recently. The first issue is that none of the technology choices were made with testability in... [Read More]