Blog posts

My notes from the first day of DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2016.

Before the ’normal’ DevOpsDays, there was a day filled with workshops. These are the notes of the workshops that I attended.

My browser of choice has been Chromium for quite a while now. A couple of podcasts recently discussed how Chrome has become a memory hog and how Firefox has improved over the years. Time for an experiment.

This is a description of how I created a custom Vagrant box starting from a Lubuntu 14.04 desktop CD.

There are several technologies (in the Python world) to have isolated environments for projects. In this post I will describe how we use Virtualenv, Buildout and Docker for a project I’m working on at Fox-IT.

When I was experimenting with an SVG sprite to replace my current icon font, suddenly some of the icons disappeared without a clear reason. It worked fine when I accessed the demo page via the file URI scheme, but as soon as I used an HTTP server, some of them did not show up.

To introduce a coworker to our project and Django in general, I suggested that he would try PyCharm, a Python IDE. One of the (many) nice things of PyCharm is that you can easily jump to the place where something is declared—ideal for exploring a project.

The Heartbleed bug triggered a review of the configuration of my own web server. As a result I discovered that I had my Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) stapling configured wrong. In this article I will briefly explain OCSP and OCSP stapling, what I had done wrong and what is a—as far as I know now—right way to implement OCSP stapling in Nginx.

Django offers useful classes to easily send email. It is also easy to add attachments to emails. I did have to puzzle a bit to get embedded images working. This article describes the way I do it now. I will first describe the most important elements and then I will show a more complete example.

When I started on a project it seemed to make sense to put a part of the project in a separate Git repository. In hindsight that wasn’t such a smart move. Here’s how I fixed it.