Broadcom Torched VMware. Here’s the Open Source Lesson.

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware sent licensing costs through the roof. Here’s what it teaches us about open source, vendor lock-in, and why the safe choice isn’t always safe.[……]

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Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware sent licensing costs through the roof. Here’s what it teaches us about open source, vendor lock-in, and why the safe choice isn’t always safe.[……]

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Testing Paperclip: What I Learned

Paperclip recently caught my attention as it allows you to orchestrate teams of specialised AI agents through a beautiful self-hosted web UI, so I had to give it a try.

What Works Well

The concept is solid: specialized agents for different tasks, all tracked through a ticketing system. The UI[……]

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AWS dynamic IP ranges

Need to know the dynamic IP ranges used by AWS in a specific region? AWS publishes this as a JSON file.

curl -s https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json | jq '.prefixes | .[] | select((.region == "eu-west-1") and (.service == "EC2")) | .ip_prefix' | sed 's/"//g'

This filters for EC2 in eu-we[……]

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The politics of the Linux desktop

Open Source software was becoming more and more popular in 2009, even though many of these applications were still little known. According to PCWorld, here are ten of the greatest.

Firefox — The open source browser that challenged Internet Explorer and changed the web.

Chromium — The open source pro[……]

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Find sdx device/ATAx mappings

When dealing with hardware, you often see log messages like:

ata9: hard resetting link
ata9: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)

To map an ata number to the actual sdX device:

ls -l /sys/class/ata_device/ata9/device/host*/target*/*/block

This shows which sdX corresponds to ata9. Che[……]

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Convert Squid/timestamps to a human readable format

Somebody had the brilliant idea of using Unix timestamps in Squid log files. It makes parsing easy but reading them is not so human-friendly.

This is an elegant way of solving the problem:

cat /var/log/squid/access.log | perl -p -e 's/^([0-9]*)/"[" . localtime($1) . "]"/e'

The Perl one-liner captu[……]

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bash – remove first line with tail and last line with head

Say you have a file called test.txt:

line 1
line 2
line 3

Remove the first line:

tail -n +2 test.txt

Remove the last line:

head -n -1 test.txt

Remove both:

tail -n +2 test.txt | head -n -1

Simple, portable, works on any Unix system.

Enjoy!

[……]

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