Misc

Walkthrough – Creating a Linux VM in Azure

I saw this great post recently by Donovan Brown. Thought I would take a waltz thru it really quick and share.

Creating a Linux Based Development Box on Azure

It might be a good idea to first create an availability group – add a Storage and a Cloud Service with a good naming convention you like. This way it won’t arbitrarily assign some wacked out names for you and you can delete them later.

  1. Open up the Azure Management Portal – the Plus sign on the lower left (Add) -> select Compute -> Virtual Machine -> From Gallery.


  2. Look at all these Ubuntu images we can pick from. Select Ubuntu, open up port 3389 for RDP.


     

  3. Select A2 for the sizing. I unselected the SSH option and picked out a good strong admin password.


  4. Pick a good region and your (previously selected) storage accounts. Very important here – open up a port for RDP for 3389. (If you forget, you can also do this later in the Endpoints section of the Azure dashboard.)


  1. This next portion will take a while. Open up your SSH client of choice – some people like Putty, I like Bitvise. Then enter in the following into command line:
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install xrdp
  • sudo apt-get install xfce4
  • sudo service xrdp start
  • sudo apt-get install eclipse
  • sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-1.0-0
  • sudo apt-get install firefox

OK, that’s done. It takes, well, about forever. Once that’s done though you’re about there.

  1. Use remote desktop to dial onto ____.cloudapp.azure.com.
  2. R-click on the Panel – Add New Items, select Launcher. R-click, Properties, and add Eclipse. This will drop an icon onto the bottom part of your window.
  3. Click on the Earth to open up fireFox.
  4. Start up Eclipse and select the Help menu. select Install New Software…
    1. Click Add… enter “TFS Plugin for Eclipse” for the name, and location of http://dl.microsoft.com/eclipse/tfs

  5. Select Team Explorer Everywhere. Click Next > , and then Next>
  6. Accept the Microsoft Software License Terms
    1. Click Finish
  7. Restart Eclipse when prompted
  8. Close the Welcome page
  9. Select Window / Open Perspective / Other…
  10. Select Team Foundation Server Exploring
  11. Click OK
  12. Click Connect to Team Foundation Server and follow the instructions to connect.

And that’s it. You’ve got a fully running developer VM running Ubuntu, Eclipse and plugged into TFS – all on Linux.

 

Some DevOps Links for Today

A little something on that dirty word… money.

Just a little riff on personal finances.

Had the pleasure recently of reading “The Debt Free Spending Plan“. It’s very practical and pragmatic in dealing with debt and managing money. For too many of us, we’re never taught personal finance like we are other essential topics like math, reading, etc in school. As a result – and I think this is deliberate – we get stuck in these cycles with large amounts of credit card debt and spending on things we really can’t afford or even enjoy. I know in my case – when I think of my household expenses (and fishing equipment!) – I tend to think of my house as being a type of colander. I dump money into it and it just runs out the bottom!

So, time to put some thinking into managing a budget. The book is fairly long; I’ll boil it down to the essentials, and you can think about picking it up on your own.

  1. Gather up all your credit cards and freeze them. (Some people literally freeze them into a block of ice in their freezer – so before they use them, they have to defrost it!)
  2. Make up a monthly budget. (more on this below) Everything should be categorized, from income – to Bills and lastly Daily Needs (fuel, food, etc).
  3. Total this up. What’s left over – the balance – can go into Short Term Savings (for things like car expenses that are impossible to predict), Long Term Savings (a buffer), and lastly Fun Money (vacation getaways, fishing gear, etc).
  4. The basic principle is you should always be running in the black. ONce you do step #3 above you will know how much you have to live on each month. You should have money set aside even when you say things like “Oh, I never buy clothes.” Stick cash for clothing – even if just $10 – into an envelope. You can stash it or spend it – but don’t forget to save up for that category. Make sure money is left over for fun and vacation $, even if just a few dollars each month.
  5. You will need to go through this budget every month on the 28th and refactor. Add $ where it’s called for to each category, or take it away. The author recommends picking a category each month (like Gym, for example) and seeing if you can reduce it. could you go to a less snazzy gym and save a few bucks for fun money?
  6. Now buy a notebook. (Or use Mint for us tech savvy types!) Each daily need should have its own tab, with the $ you have to spend on it on the title. (Fuel – $275 for example). Once each day, you will take your receipts – or your debit card expenses – and write down what you’ve spent on each category and update the running total. (2/6/2015 Chevron -$46 = $184.84, for example)
  7. Have two savings accounts – a short term savings and a healthy reserves for emergencies.

There’s some other money saving tips there that she explores in more detail – avoiding bulk stores (it encourages overspending), cooking at home, getting a cheaper cell phone etc with three quotes minimum for any major purchase, using a HSA/Medical Savings Plan, etc. But in short it’s a nice and sweet little 5-step program:

  1. Plan for monthly bills and daily needs.
  2. Keep a running total of daily needs spending.
  3. Have a bill payment plan where bills are paid each month automatically
  4. Have a savings account for what you want and need
  5. Keep a record of all of the above.

 

That’s it! Nice and simple. I’m going to give this a try – and see if it doesn’t improve some things. I really miss the days of being a DINK (double-income no-kids) kind of family. Hopefully with this program we can have the room to do more fun things guilt free- because we’ll be in the black.

Just a few thoughts before I go…

… back to bed that is. 103 degree fever and I’m finding it VERY hard to get any kind of work done.

 

On the plus side, I’m rediscovering my love of junk 80’s science fiction. Interstellar Pig and The Man Who Never Missed didn’t age too well – I remember loving those books as a teen. But Harry Harrison, you are STILL a genius. Love the Deathworld trilogy, it’s everything I could ever want. And that West of Eden series is a masterpiece. Genuinely got choked up at the end, it’s wistful and tragic with the lost potential. How he could build such a dynamic alien culture is beyond me. I miss those days and it seems like creativity like that – real craftsmanship – doesn’t exist anymore. Where are books like that anymore?

I am going through my goals for the year and what it will take to have My Best Year Ever. I’ll keep y’all posted.

And, did you know it’s incredibly easy to set up RM in the cloud with VSO? Here’s your link candy.

It’s not how hard you work – 3 essential tips for productivity.

A few months ago I was sitting in my garage, frustrated. It seems like every time I had to get ready for a fishing trip, I would have to go through dozens of boxes looking for gear. And I was always forgetting something important. Why is this so painful?, I thought, rummaging through another unlabeled box of mismatched junk, hoping not to end up with a rusty #4 hook embedded in the ball of my thumb.

It all came to a head on a river rafting trip last August. It’s OK, I told my friends at the launch, a raft is never full. But after we loaded everything on, I felt much less smug about things. The gear and boxes were piled up so that it teetered over my head at the back of the raft, nearly tipping it over, and the sides of the boat were barely above water. This was on a stretch of river that was known for having some truly frightening rapids, and as we gingerly eased ourselves into the raft, a small crowd gathered to watch the show. No one said anything as we paddled the wallowing boat out to midriver, and I remember one older gentleman taking off his hat. It was one of those trips where the best you can say at the end is, “Well, we survived.” The tipping point for me was when a family of four, with a dog, came by with one quarter the gear we had – floating high and dry while we barely stayed afloat. The father looks us over a little and kind of cocks his hat, and asked us when the garage sale was.

Getting home I refused to put any of the boxes back until I had gone through everything and separated out the essentials, and moved everything else out to Goodwill. Suddenly what was six boxes of miscellaneous and jumbled junk became one box. Hmmm, I thought. That’s interesting. Then I took my fly boxes – a mishmash of fur, hackles and hooks – and laid them out in order, as you see below, and took out anything that I’d bought on a whim that would never see a fish. Suddenly, my boat was a lot lighter –and I was spending a lot less time rummaging through gear and fly boxes every trip.

 

My flies all tied up and ready for a fun day on the river.

By not taking the time out to do a little tidying up and reorganizing, I was costing myself valuable time. I’ve found the same thing to be true at work. Time is a diminishing resource for most of us. For me to keep my head above water at work, I would need to learn how to focus on the important things and let the rest of the clutter slide. Below are three tips that I’ve used over the past six months that has dramatically increased my happiness and reduced stress. I hope you find it of value!

Tip #1 – Taming The Savage Inbox

How many times have you gotten into work excited – today is going to be a great day, I’ve got all these cool things to do – and decide, while your coffee is brewing, well, I guess I’d better check my email – and the next thing you know, it’s 10 a.m. and your daily slog of meetings is beginning, and you haven’t really gotten anything done? The biggest tyrant of our time by far – besides runaway meetings – is email, by a mile. If you’re not careful, you’ll be sucked into a reactive cycle of compulsively checking your email almost constantly. Your company is paying you to be productive – and responding to emails within minutes is NOT adding business value. With very few exceptions, emails can and should wait on the back burner so you can address them in a batch. Our goal should never be too have a “clean” inbox at the end of each day – but to as efficiently as possible pick out the emails that are truly important from the pack and knock them out quickly without allowing it to dominate your workday.

So do yourself a favor. Only check email the afternoon, never the morning – and turn off your email alerts. Set expectations with your customers and close partners that your SLA for emails is within one business day, and that for urgent issues they should call you. And take the time to identify that one special thing that you want to get done each day in advance – and don’t check your email until it’s done, finished, kaput. This one tip alone will quadruple your productivity and your work satisfaction level – and make you feel like the master, not the slave, of your own time.

Tip #2 – You Come First

As a team lead I was always running around every day, harried, stressed. I would look at some of my developers at the company gym, working out or hitting the treadmill, and think bitterly – I wish I had time for that. Over time though I noticed something – the developers who took the time out every day, usually in the morning, to exercise, go on a walk, have a healthy breakfast – they were consistently the top performers. Somehow, by putting themselves first and ignoring all the urgent deadlines and project pressures we had as a team, they were able to get more done than others like myself, slaving away at a hot keyboard for 10-12 hour days. So, I started to walk in the mornings, and took a few minutes to make a good healthy breakfast instead of that Egg McMuffin and a coffee to go. Guess what? I was happier – and midway through the walk I would often get clarity on how to solve a problem that was nagging me at work. Difficult things suddenly became easy. I lost weight and felt happy and healthier – and I got more done.

In the end you have to remember that, even for those lucky few of us that work for great companies – we may love our jobs, but they don’t love us. In the end work is a large but ultimately rather meaningless part of our life. It has to be kept in perspective. Put yourself first with a great morning ritual – a walk through a wooded area, a nice healthy breakfast and a shower, a few minutes to meditate or read. You’ll be amazed at how much more you get done when you treat yourself with compassion.

Tip #3 – Reflection

One of the best things I liked about Scrum and Agile techniques as a team lead is the opportunity to reflect a little. “What did we get done? What will we shoot for next? What could be improved?” We would write these up and email it to the team and partners – and I can’t even tell you how many mistakes this prevented me from repeating, and how much more on-target our development activities became.

To stay on course, first thing in the morning write down the three most important things that you want to do today. If it helps, put them on sticky notes on a whiteboard. (It always gives me a nifty little feeling of satisfaction when I rip one of them off the board and crumple it up.) In the evening, cover in a journal the three reflection points I mentioned above – “What did I get done today? What will I do tomorrow? What could have gone better?” I usually put this as a reminder in Outlook for me, as – if I don’t block out time for this meditation – it often gets crowded out. Spending a few minutes reflecting really helps me keep my focus on the important things that can slip away with the chaos of each workday.

Finishing Up

Shakespeare said:

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

 

For too many of us, sometimes our life becomes a little like that. There is a ticket out of that very frustrating and unproductive cycle though. You don’t have to do all of the suggestions above at once. Try one or two for a week or two – and if it works, keep it up. For all of us though, learning how to control interruptions like email, building a healthy morning routine, and spending a few minutes reflecting will help you feel more in control of your life – and perform better when it counts.