Ansible

Ansible: Eliminating Compatibility Gaps

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece on a similar compatibility issue, where the issue was functional impairment. Now, I have to solve the backward compatibility problem when the module exists in both environments but is missing some operators in earlier releases.

WebLogic

WebLogic: Identity Federation and Certificates

A recent system upgrade turned my whole day into a hide-and-seek playground. After the WebLogic domain migration, everything worked and looked healthy except the primary application. Accessing it results in a 5xx server error without any plain reason. The most reasonable explanation is that something is wrong with the WebLogic

Cybersecurity

What is Google Dorking?

I recently connected with Nguyen Nguyen, founder and CEO of CyberArmor. I was impressed with his thought leadership in the field of cybersecurity and invited him to speak at our company and share some of his knowledge and expertise. During his presentation, he brought something called Google Dork. I had

AI Code Generation

Comparing Cline and GitHub Copilot for Autonomous AI Code Generation

This will be a quick blog post as I share my raw feedback. I haven't captured screenshots and this won't be an exhaustive comparison, but it will describe my initial reactions to doing the same exercise in both Cline and GitHub Copilot. I previously conducted basic

AI Code Generation

Lightning speed AI code generation with Diffusion LLM

The speed at which LLMs perform are starting to become bottlenecks in scaling up usage. It is not unusual to wait for minutes, or even tens of minutes, for your AI code assistant to spit out some code. Recently, I played around with Mercury Coder Mini, a Diffusion LLM (as

Ansible

How to Distinguish Ansible and AAP

I realize that Ansible was meant to describe a target state rather than run complex algorithms. This approach simplifies uniformity on different targets. Unfortunately, some Ansible enthusiasts may encounter situations where they have different execution environments.

AI Code Generation

Impressive Autonomous AI Code Generation with Cline

I was truly impressed with my first experience using Cline, an open-source AI coding assistant. In this blog post, I'll demonstrate how to use Cline to fully and automatically generate code from a natural language prompt, requiring zero coding on part of the developer. Granted this is a

Ghost

Ghost-In-A-Box: Live For Two Years

Suddenly, I realized I had boxed our site engine and database over two years ago. Since then, I have never complained about database compatibility, odd Ghost upgrade requirements, or OS product support. It's boring, stable, and predictable.

How-tos

A Few Moving Tips

Personal device upgrades have always been an exciting journey and, of course, a challenge. Software reinstallation, moving your local projects, and interface compatibility were a thrilling personal challenge that may take months of joy and loss. Cloud services drastically changed the game and left little room for novelty - you

Generative AI

AI generative fill still sucks

I wanted to upload a new image to my LinkedIn profile as my last one was actually 14 years old! But the one I liked was a bit cropped in the original photo and wouldn't have worked out the way I wanted. Here's my original photo:

Linux

Segmentation fault when running X program on Linux

I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.10. Yes, I installed Xming on my workstation. Yes, I configured Putty correctly. Yet I still had an issue. Problem When I tried to run an X program on my remote server with the display set correctly to my local

Zero Trust

Examples of implementing Zero Trust in your cloud architecture

Zero Trust, or Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), was coined in 2010 by John Kindervag for the Forrester Research Group. The Zero Trust model shifts from "trust but verify" to "never trust, always verify". This post is intended to share a few concepts that can be easily

Oracle Database

Oracle User-Defined Functions

Last week, I presented to the Quest Oracle Community SIG on using Oracle User-Defined Functions and Oracle OCI Functions and how they could be instrumental in battling technology debt.

Cybersecurity

Setting up TruffleHog for repo security scans

There are a lot of code repository scanners out there, but I recently used TruffleHog to scan our GitHub repos due to its simplicity in setup and execution. TruffleHog is an open-source security tool that scans code repositories for hardcoded secrets, such as API keys, passwords, and private encryption keys.

SecDevOps

Principles of SecDevOps

DevOps is a methodology first introduced in 2007 and focuses on collaboration between development and operations teams to streamline software delivery. DevSecOps later came into the picture around the 2010 timeframe and extends this approach by integrating security practices into the DevOps workflow. DevOps addresses security concerns later in the

CloudFront

Removing AWS CloudFront access restriction from a country

We are developing a small web application on AWS, but we also restricted geographic access through WAF and CloudFront. However, we later wanted to give one of our offshore developers the ability to test the application, but he got an HTTP 403 error through CloudFront. The error on the browser

webMethods.io: Transformation Service, Ready to Go.

We completed the development of the Flow service last week. Today, we will test it and use the service in a webMethods.io Workflow.

WebMethods

webMethods.io: Transformation Service, part 2

We continue to build our transformation service for ChatGPT completion response. We can define service steps with the input and output documents in place.

WebMethods

webMethods.io: Transformation Service

In my last post, we discussed avoiding custom code for complex projects. It's time to get your hands dirty creating the first Flow Service for the integration project.

WebMethods

webMethods.io: Flow Services

In my previous posts, I have the custom transformation to normalize the ChatGPT completions. It's a low-level approach, thus a very effective one, with one significant issue - forward compatibility.

ChatBot

Creating a custom AI Chatbot in Java and OpenAI

This post describes how to build a basic AI chatbot in Java, leveraging the OpenAI API. Before beginning, make sure that you have Eclipse, Java, and Maven installed (see this post for instructions). Create an API Key on OpenAI An API key needs to be created on OpenAI. You must

Eclipse

Setting up Eclipse and Maven for Java development

This blog post describes how to set up the Eclipse IDE and its Java and Maven dependencies to get started on your Java development. These instructions are specific to Microsoft Windows. Install Java The Java Development Kit (JDK) is required. 1. Navigate to https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/

cURL

Quick Domain Spoof with cURL

Occasionally, you need to quickly check service availability, make sure your application is alive, or retrieve a certificate using internal interfaces.

Ansible

Ansible: K.I.S.S. Optimization

It's fascinating, but our automation code is mature enough to have compatibility issues during the operating system upgrade. Let's see how violating the "Keep it simple stupid (K.I.S.S.)" principle leads you to trouble.

PowerShell

How To Watch in PowerShell

Every system administrator who runs a big system knows how to make long-running tasks less boring. Watching progress is one of those little fun things.