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Writing a Résumé in LaTeX

Way back in my college days, I was trying to write the first version of my résumé. As a pedantic IT guy, I wanted to get everything perfect so that I could stand out despite having very little practical experience.

Trying to write my résumé in OpenOffice--yes, I'm that old--proved …


Fully Encrypted Disk

An intelligent mind once said, "if I can touch your system, then it's not your system." This phrase shaped the way I approached security, and increased my paranoia.

Although many guides exist that describe full disk encryption, they unfortunately fall a bit short of the claim and leave a bit …


Tips for Living with an Ostomy

My experience with colorectal (adenocarcinoma, T3aN0M0 [Stage 2]) cancer officially began on the 9th of October in 2017. After 8 rounds of chemo and 27 rounds of radiation, I arrived at surgery. Unfortunately, I came out on the other side of surgery with a permanent colostomy. Learning to live with …


Secure Password Vault Using Yubikey

Up until recently, my passwords were stored in a rather precarious manner. For my birthday, I decided it would be a nice gift to myself to perform a complete password refresh. This involved taking inventory of every password there was any record or memory of and resetting it to unique …


Long Term Secure Backups

Not that long ago, I managed to delete all of my physical HV hosts, backup server, all external backups, and a bit more. The first question that most people would ask would probably be how that's even possible. That may become a post by itself; it probably won't, though. What …


Ground Up Infrastructure

I've been working with a company that recently lost a very large amount of their infrastructure. Not only were servers lost, but also backups, application data, and much more. Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to share too many details, but I am able to say that it was the situation …


Geo Point with Elasticsearch 2.x

I was recently brought into an interesting project that deals with analyzing some exciting data. I have my preferred search solutions and hate java, but I had to bite my tongue and acknowledge an ELK stack is the best tool for this particular job.

ELK Stack

An "ELK stack" refers …


Getting a Perfect SSL Labs Score

ssllabs_100.png

Running web servers is both fun and infuriating. We get to do some really neat and fun things, sure. We also have an ever changing battlefield. When we sleep, the other guys are wide awake. Keeping a web server secure is tough.

Just one of the many battles in this …


Book Review - Nginx Module Extension

I apparently do enough work with Nginx that people keep asking me to review things. In this case, Packt asked me to review another book called "Nginx Module Extension." Well, a decent module development book doesn't exist, so I'm rather excited to dive in!

While Reading

Instead of just a …


Blog With Pelican and Nginx

I used to be a big lover of Drupal as a blogging platform. It's incredibly easy and trivial to deploy a new site with it and it comes with everything needed to write a blog. It's also incredibly easy to extend and with little work the whole SEO buzz stuff …