Twas the night before christmas and not a creature was stirring save an infrastructure engineer. The rest of my family has gone to sleep, the tree is nicely lit and tomorrow will come early. But we’re burning SLO and the contract will expire for Void’s current build machine on the 31st of December. I’m capturing all the state with Ansible to stand up the new build server on the 26th so that it will be ready to go in the next few days.

Its the start of December. I’m pretty much finished with finals and projects for this semester. Because of the stuff for the next semester this largely represents the end of my undergraduate career. Its been a long time gettings here and I wouldn’t be here without the help of many people. Looking back at this semester has had some incredible things: In September the LUG started up in earnest and I worked to get the office up and running as a functional space.

As I imagined getting Void into the T100TA would not be easy. It required custom install media and lots of fuss to get it to boot and then even more to install. Right now this just isn’t ready for prime time, the wifi doesn’t even work! Update January 2017: Wifi works out of the box now Update March 2017: Void supports hybrid boot, its possible to run x64 kernels now

Its a late night tonight as I setup the honors network for a smooth start one last time. Its been a long summer to make a clean startup on Void after migrating off of Ubuntu. Here’s what’s happened. So Ubuntu is a fine platform and I still would probably recommend it for new Linux users. It worked well for setting up the platform and was a decent system for a long time.

Well that didn’t last. A midst the reports of Microsoft telemetry that can’t be disabled, continuous system updates that are broken, and a lack of real need anymore for Windows. I’m uninstalling from my T100. Given that this platform wasn’t designed to run Linux it will be an interesting learning experience to get Void running on here. A later post will incorperate the complexity.

I am a staunch supporter of Linux and open source software. Why then, would I run an MS Windows system, much less a system on the bleeding edge? Why? A year ago I was working for UTD Residential Life in the capacity of an RA. Like many departments that have a high dependence on technology, they used Microsoft Office for forms regardless of if that was the best solution available. As a result, I found that when I turned in reports they were often malformed or improperly formated due to LibreOffice 3.

One of the many irons I have in the fire is amatuer radio. A good friend of mine is way better at it than I am and tomorrow he will be demonstrating his skills. A year ago Andrew Koenig and I were working with UTD’s Science and Engineering Education Center running a space themed summer camp. In the first week there was lots of ballistic rocketry, and the second week had lots of weather balloon fun.

This site is a dramatic improvement over the apache webserver’s default page. I obviously do not have a large amount of content yet, but as time goes on I will add to this site accordingly.

My name is Michael Aldridge, I work with computers and this is my website. From time to time I post information here on projects I’m working on or on things that I’ve found that I want to make sure I can find again. I’m probably one of the most demanding engineers I know. I don’t tolerate bullshit and I expect correctness in work I am expected to review, maintain, or otherwise support.