Month: July 2015

Categories
docker nerdy stuff

The Bleeding Part of the Edge

Over at WePay, we’ve been hard at work over the past couple of months on working on some new internal initiatives. On the engineering team, one of the initiatives that we’ve put forward is to completely embrace microservices using Docker and I’ve had the privilege of being one of the engineers to lead the charge and help figure out how this will all fall into place within our existing structure.   Docker took me a bit to understand and wrap my head around but after wrestling with it for so long, I’ve grown to love it and now I don’t remember how the world worked before it came into existence. There was a lot of stumbling and guessing along the way but that was fine as long as I was okay with failing fast and recovering even faster. I would like to preach about all of the wonders of Docker but funny enough when I tried to do so recently, I ran into a wall with a bug that took forever to figure out.

Tl;dr, Docker requires another piece of software called boot2docker to run on a Mac. Docker requires some Linux packages to run and the way boot2docker gets around it is that it runs a tiny Linux VM using VirtualBox and your Docker commands are issued to that VM instead of your Mac when you set it up right. Recently, I tried to get my coworker set up with Docker so I can talk his ear off about how wonderful it is and he told me that he was running into an issue with running any of the Docker commands.

An error occurred trying to connect: <em>...</em>: x509: certificate is valid for 127.0.0.1, 10.0.2.15, not 192.168.59.103

What? rip dockerWhen I got Docker installed on my setup, I took down notes on how I got it up and running. I sat there with him and we both re-ran through the installation process multiple times using both my notes and what’s on the official documentation. After a couple of tries, I went on Google and started searching away. Eventually, I found a thread on the official GitHub repo and saw someone who was having a similar issue as us. At the time, the thread didn’t figure out what the issue was yet and the ticket was still open. It did appear that the issue was isolated to the then-new 1.7 release.

It hasn’t been a long time since I started using Docker and I didn’t realize that I was already 2 major versions behind. The simple fix for us was to use a previous release of boot2docker and that allowed me to get my coworker up and running. I laughed to myself for a bit after the experience; it felt like the universe was reminding me that I’m not the only one that’s rapidly trying to release something and breaking stuff along the way.

Categories
mma

UFC 189: The Aftermath

rory_robbie

Holy shit. UFC 189 is going to go down as one of the greatest events in Mixed Martial Arts history. The event started off kinda boring but once Matt Brown sacrificed Tim Means to the MMA gods of yore, we were blessed with several fight of the year candidates. The UFC was banking on this event to draw new viewers in with all the advertising they did and having McGregor get as much media attention as he could and I think that it paid off very well.

From the main event of the undercard and onwards, each fight was compelling in their own way. Brown and Means battled each other out to see who has the best “hellbows” of the UFC with Brown getting the better of the two. Almeida struggled against the veteran Pickett but was able to fight back to a spectacular flying knee KO after being dragged into deep waters. Gunnar Nelson managed to outstrike the incredibly dangerous striker in Brandon Thatch and showcase his slick BJJ. Jeremy Stephens and Dennis Bermudez was a back and forth war where Stephens would manage to land a bomb on Bermudez and in turn Bermudez would use his superior grappling to bully Stephens. Ultimately, Stephens managed to time one of Bermudez’ takedown attempt into another flying knee KO.

Then we get to the co-main event. Words cannot express how wonderful this fight was. Both men took several years off each other as they battered each other with strikes and broke each others’ bones. The fight also had what is currently my favorite moment in any MMA event ever. Lawler ultimately was able to stop MacDonald by completely shattering his nose on the 5th round when he was down on the scorecards. Rory now finds himself in a similar position to where Robbie was 10 years ago. We’ll see him come back and hopefully be better than ever.

McGregor and Mendez had an incredible atmosphere to the fight as a crowd full of Irishmen cheered their fellow countryman on. McGregor managed to land several body kicks early in the first, killing of Medez’ normally incredible cardio. Mendez also struggled to through McGregor’s reach advantage but he managed to do so and land several bombs onto the Irishman’s noggin. Mendez also managed to take down MgGregor several times and did a lot of damage when he was able to keep him down. Finally, at the end of the 2nd, McGregor managed to get up after a failed guillotine/necktie attempt by Chad and secure a TKO victory with 2 seconds left in the clock.

McGregor Mendez
Chad shaking Conor’s hand after he won the Interim UFC Featherweight Championship.

The only question left is: WHERE YOU AT ALDO?!

Categories
mma

Get Hyped for UFC 189!

UFC189

This Saturday’s going to be nuts! UFC 189 is one off the most name-stacked cards that we’ve had in a while with an undercard that easily could’ve been a Fight Night by itself. It’s unfortunate that Jose Aldo got injured but Money Shot Mendez is a great replacement that will test the Notorious One’s grappling skills. I’m not one of the haters that think that Connor McGregor is immediately going to fold against an elite wrestler; its silly to think that he wasn’t getting ready for it considering Mendez or Edgar would’ve likely been the next contenders where he to beat Aldo.

The Fight Pass prelims are going to be capped off with Neil Seery and Louis Smolka. Seery’s someone who i’ve been very interested in after he made his debut in the UFC on short notice against a very tough Brad Pickett. Pickett’s one of the best in his division and Seery neutralized him on the feet and stalemated him when Pickett managed to take him down. I wasn’t able to see Smolka’s last fight but I do remember his fight against Chris Cariaso and that was a sick fight where both men fought at a high pace the whole time and I thought that he got the better of Cariaso in that fight.

The undercard in turn will be capped off by Matt Brown vs Tim Means. This has fireworks all over it. Both men are savages and will push the pace. Watching Brown is always interesting because it’s been shown that he’s weak to taking body shots almost like a video game boss with a big red blinking weak point. If Means can exploit that, then Brown will be in a lot of trouble. Erik Silva nearly managed to put Brown away with a savage kick to the body but couldn’t follow through as he gassed out trying to finish Brown. I’m guessing that this one will take fight of the night.

Finally, the fight i’m looking forward to the most is Lawler vs Macdonald 2 for the UFC Welterweight Championship. Their first fight was incredible with both men getting their time to shine and ending with what I thought was a razor thin victory for Macdonald. Rory Macdonald has been widely promoted as being part of the “new breed” of MMA fighters who’ve immediately started training MMA since they were in the womb rather than taking up one art first then expanding outward. Intelligent, methodical, and honestly a little bit psycho, there’s a good reason why he’s also heralded as the successor of his training partner Georges St. Pierre. Robbie Lawler on the other hand has been around forever and is a throwback to the days where fighting was half about a showcase of technique and half about trying to out-scowl and out-man your opponent. He has had a career resurgence lately from getting beaten by Lorenz Larkin to becoming the champ. What interests me the most is how Rory and the Tristar Gym folks has done to evolve Rory’s game and ensure that their second fight doesn’t end up as close as their first fight. Like GSP, Rory is one of those fighters that you simply don’t beat twice as they’re very open to changing their game plan and their training regiment to shore up any faults that lead to their initial defeat.

I haven’t mentioned the other fights on the card but that’s a disservice to the fighters on it as every match on it is intriguing in its own way. This is definitely a card that you’ll want to see from start to end and I really hope that it delivers. Don’t forget this Saturday to go out, find a bar that’s showing it, and get rowdy with the rest of us. Join the team!

Categories
nerdy stuff

Getting Started All Over Again

It feels weird having a blog again after abandoning my old one. I accidentally allowed ellardli.com’s registration and hosting to expire without renewing them and I just never noticed the warning emails that my hosting company were sending to me. Sometime around April, I remembered that I had one of these personal site things and decided to bring it back to life.

Things didn’t go smooth in bringing the blog back up. I rarely had a good chunk of time to sit down and get it done. To add to that, I didn’t keep good notes on how I set everything up and the few things I remembered having were also lost when I allowed my hosting to lapse. Goodbye my old SVN repository with whatever notes I saved in a text file. So long my old MySQL database with little that it had stored on it.

However, this time will be different! Bitbucket offers free hosting for personal projects so that’s one thing that I don’t have to worry about anymore. I’ve placed all of my setup scripts there so that in the even that I have to set up a development environment, I can just install Xubuntu and run some bash scripts and i’m all set again. In the past couple of years, i’ve become something of a documentation addict and that’s helping me make sure that I don’t forget how i’ve set everything up again.