Back from vacation, I had to think about how to go on with things. Things are going to change. Winter is coming. While running this blog for years, I finally decided to move the blog to another domain. I am looking for a “better” brand. aheil was my alias at Microsoft as well as in many other systems. It is my alias in many other systems, my XBOX Live ID and so on.

While this migration will cause a major disruption in the force, many search engines will have issues as well. But still, there are some good reasons for me to do so:

• It’s a DE top-level domain. Would you guess English content here? Yes, me neither.
• If you are not a German native speaker you probably can’s say this without causing some major dislocations of your tongue. No, I am serious. How do you pronounce it [éháyl], [áhájl] or [áhíɪ́l]? I think you get the idea.
• I am looking for a better separation of my interests. The blog is a pure personal kind of diary about tech, development, coding and geek stuff. At the same time, I am using the alias aheil for my consulting work for years as a trademark. I want a better separation in the future.
• The current domain name has nothing to do with coding, tech or even geek stuff. How could it at all, if you can’t even say it!?

I used to own the domain www.try-catch-finally.net for years, I canceled it some years ago, it was parked and offered for quite an amount of money bit released recently. So I picked it up again. That’s the name the blog is going to be branded as try-catch-finally.net in the future. And just to make it clear, you call it [traɪ kæʧ ˈfaɪnəli dɑt nɛt].

The domain is up, forwarding is active and if you read this, migration is in progress or already done. If eventually add some forwarding rules for blog articles, so sold links still work. But for now, I will go and think about a nice logo using my limited to non-existing graphical skills.

Since it was introduced in 2005, Consolas was my favourite monospaced font for development environments. More or less by an accident, I came along an article introducing Inconsolata by Raph Levien, which is a font inspired by Consolas.

While it is hard for me to tell the difference out of the box, you can see quite some differences when both fonts are compared to each other.

The differenced are subtle, the letters are tighter and look at the same time more fresh to me. Some major differences you can see at the ‘A’ or more obvious at the pound sign. Especially these differences drove me to try this font out. I started to change the font in my favorite editor, Visual Studio Code as I use it day by day.

To do so, you simply open Preferences / Settings and look up for font in the User section of the settings.

While I really like the font, it turned out that code and especially text files are much harder to read for me. You might see the differences in a side by side comparison when clicking on the image below.

On the left side, the text seems more squashed while Consolas on the right side appears more readable to me. In this case, both examples use a default font size of 14. The problem is, I liked the left side much more the way it looks but can work much better with the appearance on the right side.

I might stick with Consolas for quite some time, while I am looking for an alternative to use.

There are literally no good reasons to start Visual Studio Code on macOS with leveraged rights. Applications on macOS are not designed to run sudoed in general. If you would do so, this can have unintended sided effects. So much for the disclaimer.

If you want to start Visual Studio Code on macOS sudoed, just run

sudo open /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app

That’s all.

As you might know, I subscribed The Noun Project as my ultimate source for icons. I use them for presentations, lectures and sometimes web sites. It’s a lifesaver for me.

Recently I received a newsletter which pointed me to a tutorial on how to create animated icons. It’s quite a good tutorial and if you are in the need to create animated icons this might be something for you. As I am not very gifted with these tools, I just leave it here in case I need it at a point later in time.

Link: https://blog.thenounproject.com/how-to-create-animated-gif-with-icons-a9eb757948b3

Explaining Docker and Kubernetes to someone not familiar with all the technical details of container technology can be very frustrating from time to time.

At this point the video by Matt Bucher will come in handy.

Also as a little side effect, this video gives you some hints on how to explain something to… middle and upper management.

When looking for a nice design the colour palette is one of things I usually fail epic.

Lospec is a website providing a pixel editor, pixel art tutorials and more important to me some hundreds of colour palettes based on a wide range of 8- and 16-bit games.

The Lospec Palette List is a database of palettes for pixel art. We include both palettes that originate from old hardware that could only display a few colors, as well as palettes created by pixel artists specifically for making art. All palettes can be downloaded and imported into your pixelling software of choice 

I like using these palettes when creating a logo (also I am not good in this discipline) and presentations when not bound to any corporate identity.

The palettes can be downloaded as png image or even as Adobe Photoshop, Paint.NET or GIMP file to be used in your favorite application.

Link: https://lospec.com/palette-list

When you need a proper set of Kubernetes icons, just pick them up at GitHub.

This Repo contains a full set of Kubernetes icons to be used under Apache-2.0 or CC-BY-4.0.

You will find png and svg files as well as an extensive Google slide deck with additional information,

I told last post about setting up a streaming project. I usually do this to set myself a deadline. And it worked.

During the last few days, I set up my Twitch account, created a YouTube brand, and started my first live stream. During the first evening, I did set up the Website using Ansible and Docker in my first three hours live stream. I also tried a second stream with my s***y headset and even managed to record it and throw it onto YouTube. I have to apologize for the bad quality, but I am still learning.

I learned a lot about filters and hardware, are still looking for a schedule and how to manage this whole setup. I probably start streaming frequently in September.

For streaming and recording, I decided to use OBS Studio. There are some alternatives out there as well as some variants with various extensions.

I have set up a hardware wish list at Amazon (Hey! Sponsors where you?) as this is an educational and non-commercial project. Altogether it has been a busy week but a huge part of the infrastructure is in place, including a lot of learning but also failing.

Next step: I am starting chatting about the podcast. Maybe this will start soon as well.

Said that there was a major decision I had to make. All content created for and provided by Hack-The-Planet TV will be solely in German. The audience in the first place are students of mine speaking German most of the time. Also, there is a lot of content in English already available, Much more than German. But I see and feel the need for content in their first language.

I have struggled with this idea for a while. Meanwhile, I live in the countryside. I have to drive 45 minutes to the next city. It’s quite a distance. And I have a toddler. Two, there will be soon. Consequently, it is not that easy to quickly join a Meetup or User Group meeting in the evening. And I miss talking to other techies. Kids change you live. Especially if you are a nerd, geek, and techie.

In addition, I will start a new position in September 2019 as a professor for Software Engineering. I will cover all the hot shit topics like DevOps, Cloud Computing, maybe some Big Data stuff and basically everything that will come along in the future.

Teaching at university, however, is old school. Platforms like Coursera and others are nothing else. It’s just old school (but online, yeah). So I have a plan. I will try to make things different. I will meet my students (and probably a lot of other folks) in the world I grew up and still live. Here. Online.

Therefore, all the above points led me to a new project called Hack-The-Planet TV.

What do I do? Rising Geeks! Teaching computer science and software engineering by day, I will do the fun parts not covered in the official curriculum by night.

We’ll do Let’s Plays, Let’s Codes and just talk. I teach in German, and so the overall Project will be in German. Sorry to you all out there as you’ll miss the best parts.

While this is going to be a challenging project I want to cover a couple of things:

• Streaming: I’just started my Twitch channel HackThePlanetTV.
  I’ll be working on a schedule. I plan to stream once a week. I have to figure out a schedule. Until then I will rather stream occasionally. Apologize for the short notice in the near future.
• Let’s Code: Not only but also in the streams, I want to cover typical problems you are taught at university. I’ll do live codings with whatever technology and other stuff – record these and put the videos online.
• Open Source: I’ll try to put as much as possible everything OSS. Therefore, everything will end up on GitHub.
• Podcasts: I commute a lot. I enjoy listening to podcasts. I’ll try to set something up where we (currently looking for to with whom I’ll team up) talk about all the geeky stuff creating an own podcast.
• www.hack-the-planet.tv: Of course, I will try to host as much content as possible by myself. Therefore, during my first stream, I have set up my own web presence for the project: www.Hack-The-Planet.tv

And now you probably think: Why the heck is he doing this? I used to be a developer, architect, I run my own business, I was a team led and spend the last five years as a product manager. I got bored with engineering stuff. In was challenged by a higher manager, if I would do my job if it would not be necessary to earn money. That’s like living in the Star Trek universe. So I quit my job. I don’t think he is aware of what he caused by his question. I went to university to teach. I started to teach the kids to get well-paid developers. And I want to do the fun stuff.

For the last couple of years, I have seen many so-called “architecture” diagrams including those suffering from inconsistent notation, unclear depiction lack of information and ambiguity.

The worst scenario was in my last role, where I dealt with company-wide application integration. Each and every team had their own way to draw (or not to draw) security architectures. Guidelines? Nope. Nervous breakdowns n a daily base if something went wrong? Definitely.

So he/she who’s name is not known created a quite comprehensive PDF guideline which helps you to draw more precise security related architectural diagrams. Definitely worth a look.

Link: https://github.com/chaocipher/JunkDrawer/blob/master/Security%20Diagramming%20Guidance%20(2019).pdf