Posts by lennys (68)

lennys October 23, 2023

Blog titles are hard...

Today started out with me reading through my CCNA notes for about an hour (I think). It's slowly coming back to me now. I'll need to start messing around with my Cisco switches and routers again to see where I'm really at, but I think I can figure it out. I'm just glad I don't have to make a living with the Cisco stuff right now, because I'd be in trouble otherwise. I also spent a few hours going through my Django for Beginners book. I started this a couple of days ago, and I'm working through the lessons all over again. The thing that makes this challenging is that Django has released a whole new version of itself since I bought the book a few years ago, and because of that I've run into some issues with the book's code not being up to date. I've been able to figure it out okay so far. Right now I'm building a Newspaper project, but I haven't got to the point where I build the newspaper itself yet. So far it's been about setting up the user login system, email authentication etc. I'll probably start on building the newspaper app itself on Thursday, provided nothing blows up in the meantime. I had to re-setup my account with SendGrid to get the email password reset features working, and that was a bit of an ordeal since they had deactivated my account from a few years ago. I had to setup a whole new account with a different email address, so I used my lenny@lennyshort.com email address to get things going. That was the first time I had logged into that mailbox in over a month, but it doesn't get any email really. I'm not looking forward to the day when the spammers discover my email address.

lennys October 22, 2023

Thinking about technology

So yesterday I started reading through my old notes from when I was studying for the CCNA exam earlier this year. I was worried that I was getting rusty, and boy was I right. It's a bit upsetting to see how much I've forgotten since April when I passed the exam. I want to be able to administer all the equipment I have, which is a daunting task, so I need to stay fluent in the Cisco IOS platform. Eventually I want to start using Ansible with my Cisco gear to make it easier to administer. With Ansible, I wouldn't have to log into each device individually to check on things or make changes, so based on what little bit I know about Ansible it seems worth the effort. But I'll still need to have a basic understanding of Cisco IOS to make it work. Here's a list of things I've had to learn to use to host this website: - HTML and CSS - Python and Django - Git and GitHub - Linux - Apache - Proxmox - Mikrotik RouterOS - Networking - setting up my own AS - getting a business license ...and that's just for this one website. It also doesn't count the number of years I've spent messing around with computers, learning how hardware works, installing operating systems, using Windows (ugh) and I'm sure I'm forgetting at least one or two other things I had to pick up along the way. It's mind-boggling to think of all the various technologies required just to make the Internet and Web work properly, and I've probably just scratched the surface (hopefully it's a deep scratch). I struggle to think of what comes next. It seems like every few years a new technology comes around that will supposedly change everything. I wonder what I'll have to master next.

lennys October 20, 2023

Sigh...

So Summernote just doesn't want to work in this blog, because of the way the blog is constructed. I spent hours looking at the site's code trying different things, and while I can get Summernote to work in the admin pages, I can't get it to work on the publicly-facing blog post form. Making my posts via admin doesn't really work either because Django "escapes" all the text I type in when it publishes the blog post, which means that any image or HTML tags I use in the text are rendered literally. So making H1 tags, for example, comes out in the published blog post as <h1>Here's some text</h1> literally, instead of being parsed as an HTML tag. I haven't given up on this completely, but I'm moving on to other things rather than waste a bunch more time trying to figure things out. I dug out my "Django for Beginners" book last night and brought it with me to work, so I'm going to start working my way through that instead. I've been through this book once before, but it was a few years ago so I hope this will be a good refresher for me. I also grabbed one of my CCNA notebooks on the way out the door this morning. I could use a refresher on that material too, so I'll spend a little bit of time reading through that today. I still have 4 Cisco switches and 3 Cisco routers racked in my cabinet, and in the future I'm planning on using Ansible to manage them so a fresh look at Cisco commands and stuff is definitely needed. I'm not planning on using this gear for anything other than learning how it all works. Ansible is written in Python, so I think I'll be able to understand it, and it would be a good bullet point on my resume to say I have Ansible experience. Not much happening at work today (so far). I am fortunate to have an employer who allows us to work on our own projects while we're on the clock, otherwise I wouldn't have made it anywhere near this far.

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