When I started playing with Xamarin Forms I quickly found that I would have alot of properties in my class simply pointing towards Fields, and the fields’ behavior validators (the things that validate inputs, and potentially highlight invalid input.) Exasperated at having two class members for each input, like so: I wrote an ultra-simple wrapper […]
Author Archive | Michael Blouin
Testing Chef Scripts with Vagrant
I’ve recently started building chef scripts to manage server configurations in Azure. This is a nice way of creating VMs that can then make use of the Azure autoscale features. I did not however have a convenient way of quickly testing these scripts when I made some modifications. Therefore I decided to use Vagrant to […]
Build and Run Logstash Forwarder on a Rasperry Pi
The Logstash Forwarder project is designed to be run on small systems that don’t have alot of resources, and where the logs need to be sent somewhere else to be stored and analyzed anyways. This description matches Raspberry Pis pretty much perfectly: they’re tiny, and if you have alot of them you probably want a […]
Install Custom Script Extension in Azure Linux VM using the REST API
Figuring out how to install Microsoft Azure VM extensions using the REST API can be a bit of a pain — especially when you don’t know the Publisher name, version, or specific name of the extension.
Kubernetes Pods Explained
Kubernetes Pods can be an interesting concept to get your head around. Despite the fact that the idea is pretty simple, many people often have trouble figuring out the relationships between pods and all of the other Kubernetes components. In this brief article I will describe pods and how they are used. (more…)
Why What You Think About Passwords Might Not Be Quite Right
The What Something that an XKCD comic recently pointed out to me in its oh-so-unconventional wisdom was that the passwords that most people think are very secure aren’t necessarily. Most of us have had the media and our IT departments screaming at us for years about how the passwords that people naturally choose have a […]
The Best Way to Manage Passwords and Other Secure Information
Chances are the second that you first touched a computer, you had to create a password. Not a big deal… Until you go on the internet. Now, it seems, every site needs to know something about you; your name, your address, sometimes even your credit card info! And to safeguard this information they ask you […]
Multiple Roles Per User in WordPress
WordPress started out simple. Since its initial 1.0 release, WordPress has added many user-focused features such as plugins, themeing, custom menus, custom post types, widgets and just about everything else we now have come to love and expect from WordPress – including a permissions system. A permissions system that has encountered a good deal of […]
Getting Started Building WordPress Plugins
So, you’re looking to build a WordPress Plugin eh? Well here’s a couple things that I found after I started building my first plugins that I really wish I would’ve known beforehand. Now I’ve got a few hours ahead of me re-coding my plugins to my new standards (the things you’ll find below) which wouldn’t […]