Something I have avoided in my ansible roles is using hash variables to define user-configurable values. This is largely because of how Ansible treats hashes. To explain the problem and my solution to it, I will create a hypothetical role that installs postgresql, with the correct package name for Debian and RedHat systems. Have a look at this pull request for a real-world application of the solution.

I’ve not been writing much for this blog recently, however I have been writing for tictoc a fair bit. Most recently on the subject of Net Neutrality. While I tried to keep a balanced tone, it should be clear where my thoughts lie on government-funded companies trying to make access to the internet (something that is quickly becoming a human right) more difficult and expensive. Selfishly this is because I don’t want to pay more. Morally I feel it’s wrong that tax-funds should go to billion-pound profit margin-earning corporations to fund projects which will ultimately lead to more profits for those companies with the costs passed to the taxpayer through those tax-funds and through increased service costs. This is without even mentioning my first drafts of the blog which included more explicit references to, and condemnation of, a certain family that controls the majority of media in the western world.

Ansible is a tool we used at tictoc only sparingly about a year ago. A previous developer had written the template of our current ansible projects but they weren’t quite ready for full production deployment. When they left the company, someone had to step up and take some control over the maintenance and provisioning of new servers and since I was itching to do something other than the standard Rails projects I’d been doing for about a year and a half at that point, I decided to give it a go.

Reddit in all of it’s glory directed me to the Jekyll Now repository so I figured I had better actually do something with this site for once! With that in mind, let’s go over what I’ve been doing while not blogging for the past few months.

If this is too long an entry here’s the gist: Go try Ubuntu Linux if you think your computer is slow and all you use your computer for is web browsing, e-mails and office work.

In my last post I mentioned that I had disregarded Ruby for almost no reason at all other than unfamiliarity. Well I have now completed several of the tutorials on Codecademy.com and I can safely say that I was worrying over nothing!

Tasked with creating a lightweight web application with a small list of requirements, my first thought was not to use Django. For starters it has a wide range of features, most of which I wouldn’t need so that wouldn’t help the “lightweight” nature of the app. I also disregarded Ruby on Rails as I hadn’t used it before which in retrospect was a poor decision as I should have considered all possibilities. I also leaned towards python simply because I feel proficient in it. Again, a potentially foolish decision but that’s by the by. In essence I decided to limit my search for web frameworks to ones I could work with in python.

My first post with Jekyll. Hopefully this will be the first of many more to come!