It has been quite some time since I have written anything on here (Almost 1.5 years!) and quite a bit has changed in that time. You probably noticed I re-designed the whole site, but what you may not have noticed is that I ported the whole thing to a static blogging engine called Hugo. This process is something that has been on my to-do list forever and kept me writing anything. The more I wrote the more I would have to convert (Hugo uses Markdown to store its posts, Wordpress does not), so I kept putting it off. More on that later.

I also have shifted the focus of my work towards automation and immutable infrastructure and I have quite a bit to write about the things I have learned doing that I have learned along the way. I am pretty excited about a few of the posts I have brewing on those subjects.

Update (8/4/2014): I have created a tutorial on how to create a ThinApp package to help get around this, check it out!

If you suddenly start seeing something the following error in vCloud Director 5.1.x:

This is because your Firefox upgraded to Firefox 30 automatically, as it does. This error seems to be due to some sort of change that Mozilla added into Firefox 30, I haven’t tracked it down yet (if anyone has let me know!). Even force enabling the plugin won’t help, Firefox 30 looks to have gone to an whitelist only model, doing so will make this error go away but the console sessions never connect.

Update (8/4/2014): I have created a tutorial on how to create a ThinApp package to help get around this, check it out!

This morning it came to my attention that my customers were no longer able to upload any media (OVFs or ISOs) to their vCloud catalogs. This seems to be due to the most recent Java JRE version released by Oracle. The behavior I experienced was that the applet would appear to load but when I would click on the browse button nothing would happen. This happens across all different browsers and browser versions. The reason for this seems to be a change in the requirements for certificates and applet signing in JRE 7uU51.

A few days ago I pushed live a new update for the vOpenData Dashboard which included a few interesting things from an application perspective, I wanted to highlight some of them here.

###The Code

The first major thing is that the first version of the dashboard was written using a framework called Dashing which is a sweet frame work for developing dashboards from any datasource really quickly but, as it turns out, is not great at efficiently handling hundreds of connections.

Because of this I re-wrote the dashboard from scratch using a simple Sinatra app, it ended up only being about 40 lines of actual logic (not including the HTML part) to get the job done, pretty awesome.

This simplicity also allowed me to throw some memcache caching up infront of it to handle just about any traffic I can throw at it. I actually tested up to 250 hits/second using blitz.io and it functioned flawlessly. Awesome.

It has been quite some time since I have gotten a chance to write on this blog but recently I was able to work with Willian Lam (@lamw) on a really awesome project so I thought this was a great opportunity to start up again. This project really started from a tweet by Duncan Epping (@duncanyb):

This really got me thinking, I get asked these questions all the time and there really isn’t a good answer to it. Since I am going to need to answer this question more often in the future I decided that I would take on this challenge, thus vOpenData was born.