We’re building out an Operations team at Puppet Labs (we’re hiring!) and one of the aspects of that build-out is the opportunity to play with new ideas and renew our acquaintance with some old ones. And who doesn’t like building green field teams and tools? :) At the moment we’re frantically busy but we’re also slowly starting to look at tools and to clean up the technical debt we’ve accrued in building a start-up from scratch.

Years ago I remember coming across some choice graffiti in the Engineering facility toilets at my university. Above the toilet roll dispenser some wit had added the comment: “Please take an Arts degree” with an arrow pointing down to the roll. I have an Arts degree (Liberal Arts degree to my American readers). I majored in Politics and Philosophy. My politics interests were largely around political theory and US politics and my philosophy major was in Cognitive Science.

One weird thing I’ve noticed since I moved to Portland was the number of people carrying knives. Or Leathermen tools. But mostly lots of folding clasp knives. In Australia you rarely see it outside of farms or occasionally tradespeople. I am not even sure it’s legal in some states to carry a knife at all. Initially I thought it was a bit silly: a bunch of office workers wandering around with knives.

Whilst at the Puppet Triage-a-thon today we put on a few films that featured hacking and hackers. This prompted a discussion of the worst hacker movies of all time and their appalling representations of technology. I present our brief list. Note SOME of these movies were good despite the appalling use of technology … others not so much. Hackers What a cast of off-beat and improbably handsome computer hackers: Crash Override AKA Zero Cool, Acid Burn, Lord Nikon (token black hacker!

I’ve written a Puppet report processor that allows you to notify Flowdock - a nifty tool for team collaboration - of failed Puppet runs. It requires the flowdock gem to be installed on your Puppet master: $ sudo gem install flowdock You can then install puppet-flowdock as a module in your Puppet master’s modulepath. Now update the flowdock_api_key variable in the /etc/puppet/flowdock.yaml with your Flowdock API key. Then enable pluginsync and reports on your master and clients in puppet.