My Year of Fitness

A few weeks ago I was talking with a cousin who declared that 2015 was her "Year of Food", a year she spent exploring and devouring dishes from around the world and documenting them in a diary. My year of food could have been any year in the past 10, since I met my better half my exploration of food from cultures around the world has been an experience!

What has 2015 been a year of for me?

2015 was my "Year of Fitness", most of it documented via the wonders of Strava!

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Delete a lot of gmail

[Updated 06/11/2015 - new method!]

At some point in 2011, I decided to start reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), so I subscribed to the list from my gmail account.

Those that know the LKML will know why my reading streak didn't last long due to the shere number of e-mails and the technical nature of them. The list has all patches and discussions related to Linux kernel development which can be very heavy going!

Fast-forward to 2015 and I realised I was running low on google mail storage...

80% gmail storage used 50 e-mails selected

... and after finding I had over 140k e-mails from LKML I thought I'd delete those and free up some space. This turned out to be a little harder than I had expected!

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Get Ansible to wait_for ssh

Whilst writing a follow-up to my last post, I noticed that Ansible was failing to connect to a newly spun up Linux server on the Rackspace Cloud and spent a bit of time troubleshooting the connection. All articles I've read using Rackspace & Ansible didn't mention much about ssh connection timeouts so I thought I'd put this together.

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Spin up a Rackspace Cloud Server with Ansible

Ansible is a configuration management, provisioning and work flow automation tool that is written in python. I've been playing around with for a little while and it's a rather refreshing change from the other configuration management tools I've spent time with (Puppet & Chef). Ansible is extremely simple to use and understand, so I thought it was time to write up some of my notes to help anyone getting to grips with using it on the Rackspace Public Cloud.

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Road Warrior 101

I've been very fortunate enough to have travelled a lot in the past 6 years in my roles as a Consultant at both Red Hat, Canonical and now Eucalyptus, but also for holidays. Those countries have included: Philippines, India, Australia, USA (San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Boston, New York, Washington DC, Florida), Canada (Montreal), South Africa, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Poland... to name a few!

Suffice to say, when you spend a bit of time "on the road", you learn a few tricks to help make life a bit easier. This blog post is a break from my technical posts to impart a few of those tricks on you, the public.

do you have any tips? I'd love to hear them, stick them in the comment box below!

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