https://tech.crthaze.com/ Recent content on Nerd-World Problems Hugo -- gohugo.io en © 2008-2025: Diego Fernando Carrión Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/neovim-plugin-lsps-with-nvchad/ Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/neovim-plugin-lsps-with-nvchad/ A long time ago I fully assimilated to the Vim lifestyle. Vim navigation motions are what I expect everything to work with, and working with any other text-editor or IDE is only tolerable if I can make it somewhat immitate Vim. And a few years ago I finally made the jump from Vim (around verions 8) to Neovim, and even (after some very strong initial heistation) abandoned Vimscript for Neovim’s native Lua configuration language. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/helm-release-parsing/ Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/helm-release-parsing/ Helm 3 sometimes feels like little more than just a template rendering engine coupled with a very thin wrapper around kubectl apply -f. It does of course bill itself as a Package Manager (and this branding does make some sense. But perhaps more in the way of Gentoo’s ebuild packages, than like DEB or RPM packages…) but anyone who has to do serious work with Helm often finds themselves doing more template writing and reading, than simply running helm install <some repo>/<some chart>. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/udev-hwdb-keyboard-remapping/ Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/udev-hwdb-keyboard-remapping/ (To avoid the preamble and go straight to the solution, jump to the heading below.) Last week I took my first steps away from the warm safe and familiar embrace of X11 and into the new frontiers of Wayland, when I installed Pop!_OS Cosmic Alpha on my laptop. Part of my hesitance to move to Wayland was the fact that I knew this new frontier would bring a myriad of new challenges and that it would inevitably bring some rough edges. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/rpi1gpio/ Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/rpi1gpio/ Always a fan of timely posts, I decided I should share some knowledge about the Raspberry Pi 1 GPIO controller layout. AKA the Broadcom SoC BCM2835 GPIO controller. This week I’ve been revisiting Alex Chadwick’s excellent Baking Pi course. Yes, I still have my original Raspberry Pi 1 Model B. Though It’s been a while since I’ve used it. And so, to scratch a bit of a nostalgic itch, and also to brush up on my ARM assembly, I decided to revisit the course. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/implementing-slos/ Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/implementing-slos/ A couple years ago I worte a post which aimed to be a comprehensive reference to all the concepts I have gathered over my career about how SLI/O/As work. In many ways the goal was somewhat meant to help myself distil all of the various related concepts surrounding this observability concept into a cohesive framework. Because part of the problem one encounters when trying to learn about SLI/O/As is that there doesn’t currently exist a common approach to them across the industry. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/slioas/ Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/slioas/ Image Credit Increasingly we are seeing the terms SLI, SLO, & SLA used more and more within the tech industry. These days most are at least somewhat familiar with what they are, and why they might be important, still some might conflate them with older terms and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) like KPIs. Others may have already taken a stab at implementing them for their team or enterprise. There exist a number of excellent high level summaries and introductions to SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs which are no futher than a a quick Google search away. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/add-url-handler-to-gnome/ Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/add-url-handler-to-gnome/ Once in a while you may find that you have an app that has a URI which xdg-open and gnome does not recognize. If you’re running gnome or a gnome-based desktop (like Cinnamon) you can easily add a new handler for it. Let’s take Spotify URIs for example. They are identified because they start with “spotify:” (just as http URIs start with “http:”). All you need to do is run three commands to get Gnome to recognize that URI: https://tech.crthaze.com/post/chef-platform-handler-pattern/ Sat, 11 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/chef-platform-handler-pattern/ While I was working for Pagoda Box we brought Chef on as a solution for Configuration Management in order to solve our config drift woes. Before long it was a core part of how we did everything on our system and it eventually got woven into the core fabric of both our (then) current and next infrastructure iterations. A lot of our cookbooks had to be written from scratch due to our very specific needs and unique approach to PaaS Web-Hosting, and this was only complicated by the fact that we were running three different Operating Systems on our servers (depending on which the given machine’s task was suited for). https://tech.crthaze.com/post/how-to-install-spotify-on-fedora/ Wed, 27 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/how-to-install-spotify-on-fedora/ I love Spotify. I know it has a bit of a bad rap in some circles, but it fills the perfect niche in my music listening life, and while they do provide a very impressive web interface, you really can’t beat the power and flexibility of their desktop client. However, there’s a problem. I also love Linux. This actually wouldn’t be that much of a problem if I happened to use Ubuntu, or some other Debian based distribution of Linux. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/install-oraclejdk-with-openjdk/ Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/install-oraclejdk-with-openjdk/ Many professional developers, due to their work or dependencies, have a need to run Oracle Java instead of OpenJDK on their Linux development workstations. It’d be nice if there were a simple, straightforward way to do this, however we don’t live in such a world yet. But luckily it’s not too difficult to do this using the alternatives utility (available on many RedHat and Debian distributions). The alternatives utility allows you to create groups of sym-link configurations that you can easily switch between, thus allowing you leave the OpenJDK installation in-tact while allowing you to use Oracle JDK instead. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/chaos-of-terminal-terms/ Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/chaos-of-terminal-terms/ Update 2026 This post is now well over a decade old. And my understanding of these topics has since improved, and deepened. What I wrote previosuly still largely holds-up but some further clarifications could be added, so I’m adding those in an updated “tl;dr” style glossary here at the top: Glossary Noun Definition Examples Terminal Collection of Remote Hardware I/O components for a user to control/interact with a Computer System. DEC VT100, Teletype Model 33, HP t5700, Bloomberg Terminal Terminal Emulator A comptuer program that can behave like a physical Terminal, but runs on a computer. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/upgrading-wordpress-on-pagodabox/ Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/upgrading-wordpress-on-pagodabox/ Since hosting on Pagoda Box is a somewhat different animal from most ‘traditional’ hosting solutions, the standard automatic WordPress upgrade will not work with Pagoda Box. This is because Pagoda Box hosts your application in a read-only environment (of sorts). Instead the officially recommended way to upgrade your version of WordPress is to do so locally on your development machine. This is fairly simple if you run a local working copy of your WordPress application. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/broken-wordpress-after-pagodabox-upgrade/ Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/broken-wordpress-after-pagodabox-upgrade/ (Note: this may not be necessary on newer version of WordPress. Goto: Settings->General) So you’ve hosted your WordPress app on PagodaBox, perhaps you’ve installed it manually or used the provided quick-start, and things are going great. You’re loving the smooth development process and version controlled deployment, and having a lot of fun at the same time. But then you decide you want to rename your app, and disaster strikes. After the transaction completes you try to access your blog and find that the page’s CSS isn’t loading, and neither are the images and attachments in your posts. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/from-gates-to-jobs/ Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/from-gates-to-jobs/ Growing up in the Greater Seattle Area during the 90s and 00s was a good place for a young nerd. There was technology everywhere and everyone around me seemed to do something or other in the Tech Industry. If the San José region is Silicon Valley, then the Seattle area is surely Silicon Sound. One of my earlier memories is of sitting in front of an old 386 PC wandering around MS-DOS trying to see what else I could make it do. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/how-to-install-plan-9/ Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/how-to-install-plan-9/ For those of you who are not familiar with this particularly unique UNIX variant, you may wonder what on earth is the deal with this slightly strange looking bunny. But in the mid-80s, when Bell Labs began to move on from the development of UNIX, they began to work on a new project; one that would grow directly out from UNIX as the next step in its evolution, and they called it “Plan 9 from Bell Labs” (named after the old Sci-Fi flick ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’). https://tech.crthaze.com/post/apple-fixes-biggest-problem-with-macbook-pro/ Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/apple-fixes-biggest-problem-with-macbook-pro/ In my experience as a owner of a MacBook Pro, and formerly a user of the PowerBook, is some problems with it’s structural integrity. While this problem is really non-existent when these laptops are compared with PC’s. They are much noticeable due to the sleek design of Apple’s computers. They had a great tendency to get glaring injuries when dropped and miss handled. Injuries that would be much more hidden with the design of PC laptops, notebooks, and subnotebooks. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/will-google-become-our-blue-sun/ Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/will-google-become-our-blue-sun/ Many fans, like myself, of the acclaimed sci-fi series Firefly, are familiar with the Omnipotent Superpower company “Blue Sun” that permeated the entirety of the “verse”. Everything that you may need or want was brought to you by Blue Sun. With the advent of GeoEye-1, Google’s Satilite, and with Google now being probably the undisputed, at least not seriously, Rulers of the Internet, We must ask ourselves a question. What is in the future for Google? https://tech.crthaze.com/post/the-return-of-the-coolest-bsd/ Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/the-return-of-the-coolest-bsd/ For those of you who know a bit about me, you should know that I love UNIX. And all UNIX related things. Though out of all forms of UNIX, my favorite branch is the BSD family, or Berkley Software Distribution. And my favorite branch of BSD is the Darwin Variant. This includes OSX, OSX Touch, and the Darwin Operating System. For some time now however. To get a bootable version of Standalone Darwin, you were mostly out of luck. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/how-to-boot-osx-into-darwin/ Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/how-to-boot-osx-into-darwin/ Sometimes you need to debug OS X. See exactly what’s going on in the boot process. Or you may just be tired of the GUI (even I, a devout Cocoa addict, can get tired of it) and want to have a good old Command-Line/Shell OS. This is surprisingly easy to do. (This guide only applies to Intel Architecture Systems, which do not have a FileVault Encryption or a Firmware Password enabled. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/the-next-microsoft-ad/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/the-next-microsoft-ad/ Okay… so Microsoft has recently released the next installment in their recent ad campaign. This one is called… I’m a PC. I don’t know what to say about this exactly… except, I really wish Microsoft would release a commercial that actually says something about the quality of their product. (I guess they don’t want to risk a truth in advertising suit) https://tech.crthaze.com/post/google-day-lhc-end-of-the-world/ Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/google-day-lhc-end-of-the-world/ Well, While we did “technically” go live a day late, we are officially live…. So let’s get crackin’! Besides, the Geek Day isn’t over, since that starts and ends at 5AM instead of midnight anyway. First off, a belated happy birthday to Google! Which turned 10 on Sunday. Yes Google, our beloved tyrants. Even the most security savvy amongst us woke up one morning to realise that we had all handed our souls to Google on a silver platter. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/google-honors-firing-of-lhc/ Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/google-honors-firing-of-lhc/ Just look at this Logo design on Google.com posted today… Complete with Google getting sucked into the vacuum of a Black Hole. Thank-you Google, thank-you for once again connecting with us your brothers and sisters… The Geeks. https://tech.crthaze.com/post/everex-gpc2/ Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/post/everex-gpc2/ Many People have been interested in the Everex gPC2. The famed 200 dollar linux PC. While plenty of info is available online about the circumstances of this PC, not too much tech-spec info is available. This Post is dedicated to the people who want to find answers to the machinery of this PC. Now I won’t list off the individual parts and specs, but they are readily available on Newegg’s Specification List for the gPC2, though I will tell you a few bits of info that i could have used: https://tech.crthaze.com/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://tech.crthaze.com/about/ This blog started when I was still a teenager, as a place for me to try my hand at tech and science news commentary. It has since morphed into a place where I keep things I’ve written relevant to tech, as well as notes of things I’ve figured out, which might be useful/interesting to others. These also serve as a way to keep notes on these things for my own future reference.