WebMethods

IBM WebMethods: From Customization to Connector

It took less than a year for IBM to break backward compatibility for custom Node.js actions. I brooded over this back in 2024, trying to find a workaround.

Configuring Cline on Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows, Linux, macOS, and web browsers. It supports many programming languages, debugging, extensions, source control and more. Also referred to as VS Code, it can be downloaded from here. Cline AI is an open-source AI coding assistant designed to integrate

GitLab

GitLab: Clean Up Pipes

If you have multiple projects running numerous builds, your job history will grow, even when you chop off repository branches. Let's discuss a few methods to keep it tidy.

AI Code Generation

Creating an API key on Anthropic

If you want to get started with AI-assisted coding (aka AI code generation, vibe coding, autonomous coding), one way is to use a plugin within your IDE. You will often need an API key so that your IDE can connect to a 3rd party model to do all its AI

GitLab

Joint Forces: AWS and Docker

The GitLab CI/CD and its partners offer an extensive library of templates, components, and ready-to-ship solutions to automate your application builds and deployments. But real-life cases make you search for non-trivial scenarios. Here is a simple one that may save you days down the road.

Docker

The Magic Docker Command

Sometimes, when you build multiple containers for different architectures, the container may exhibit unpredictable behavior. That happens to me when the PostgreSQL container throws some odd error messages.

Oracle Database

Oracle Database and Windows.

Oracle Database on Windows always marches to its own drums. And most of the time, you should tag along because some of your Unix/Linux experiences are not applicable. Let's talk about password files.

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 Featured

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.