I was listening to the 99PI from last week and it reminded me of a childhood friend who had MS. Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago.

He was a year younger than I was but we both had a mutual love of video games. I remember carrying him up my front porch and setting him into a computer chair so I could roll him to the TV. We played games for hours. When he needed to go home, I’d carry him back to his chair and he’d head out. I have fond memories of playing Halo and Baldor’s Gate.

Unfortunately, we grew apart once I got involved with cars and girls and we stopped spending time together.

Jonathon, I miss you and I hope we meet again some day.

Take care.

The politics as I see them in a nutshell:

Democrats say that gun violence is a symptom of easy access to powerful firearms, inequality, and mental health issues. Their prescription is increasing the background checks and/or barring access to particularly powerful and/or large numbers of weapons and increasing investment in healthcare by way of ACA.

Republicans say that gun violence is a symptom of mental health issues. Their prescription? I haven’t heard one. Perhaps prayer.

You can stand on either side of the fence, but you have to admit that there is a stark incongruency in the response offered by the two parties. Republicans recognize that there’s a problem but offer no solution. You can disagree with the prescribed fix, but you cannot agree with inaction assuming you believe this is a real problem. Not doing something is admitting that you’d rather, to use a rather apt euphemism, stick to your guns than try to resolve a problem you recognize as legitimate. I will never recognize the bloodletting of innocent bystanders as being a just, necessary price to pay to uphold 2A.

Full disclosure: I vote Democrat. I own guns. I appreciate the point of 2A (as ineffective and insane as a civil uprising would be in todays day and age). I support things like stronger background checks, purchasing limits, mandatory safety training for firearm ownership, removing the “gun show loophole.”

Stay safe and have fun.

I just wrote a little script to backup the database of this blog. This script is absolutely not good for a production server and I do not warranty this to work correctly, but if you want something for backing up a DB this might not be a terrible way to start.

I have this script setup in /etc/cron.daily/ so it will run everyday at midnight. Keep in mind that the script must be executable for it to run.

Script

#!/bin/bash
# Backups WordPress database to the path defined below.
# Variables.
TIMESTAMP=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H%M")
FILENAME=$TIMESTAMP.sql
FULLPATH=/path/to/db/exports/
DBUSER=username
DBPASS=password
DBSCHEMA=databasename
# Setting working directory to FULLPATH provided above.
cd $FULLPATH
# Execute DB backup command.
mysqldump -u $DBUSER -p$DBPASS $DBSCHEMA > $FILENAME

If the script is deployed like mine is, it’s executed by root, so you shouldn’t have to worry about permissions issues. Again, just remember the script is executable by doing this:

chmod +x /path/to/script.sh

Again, I don’t warranty this and it’s by no means a production quality script.

I’m not entirely sure what my purpose of this blog is, but this seems like an interesting exercise. So, how about some background? I’m a release engineer at a software company in the Atlanta area. Currently, my duties include the following:

• Managing our JIRA instance
• Determining our migration path from TFS to GIT for source code management.
• Determining our migration path from TFS to Bamboo for builds. In time, this will grow into full blown CI.

Looking at the list, it doesn’t seem like much, but I’m swamped a lot of the time and completely in over my head. I’ve never really dealt with SCM before outside of using git for personal projects. Also, JIRA is new to me too. With that being said, I love this. Previously I was a PM handling black sleep projects that no one else wanted to deal with. I didn’t enjoy that and requested a move. Luckily, I work for a great company and they were super accommodating and allowed me to jump into something completely new.

I guess the point of this is chronicling my experiences as a release engineer and any goodies/tidbits I come across along the way.