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Come’on RedHat!

Come’on RedHat – give us the MSDN version for home labs and training.

I recently signed up for the RedHat Developer Program and have setup my lab system with a fully updated RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system with all of the bells-and-whistles the OS provides.

The Developer Program not only gives you a fully licensed RHEL system, it also provides access to JBoss, and the RedHat Container Development Kit which contains a set of development tools and additional resources (Python, PHP, Ruby, OpenJDK, etc).  All great stuff, especially for developers looking to hone their OpenSource development practices.

Unfortunately, for those of us on the systems side of the world (not hard-core developers) the package omits a couple of great RedHat products: Cloudforms and RedHat Virtualization.

I know that I could attempt to knit together the upstream versions of each of these (ManageIQ and oVirt), but there is a reason that the Cloudforms and RHV exist to save us from the complexity of configuring all of the components together.  As a learning platform, the effort of researching numerous blog posts and reams of documentation for each project (and their pre-requisites) might be worthwhile, but for some one like me who is interested in learning more about Cloudforms/ManageIQ itself (automations, hooking into a lab VM environment, etc) it severely skews away from the objective I’m trying to educate myself on.

Microsoft has their MSDN – Microsoft Developer Network – that provides a license for a nominal fee (at the low end) that provides licensing for Windows OS installations (five licenses, many versions, both standard and Server), SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Office and Office365, Azure, etc.  Windows Server has Hyper-V as an option – it’s answer to RHV/oVirt.  (I don’t believe they have a Cloudforms/ManageIQ alternative, though one might exist.)

I understand that MSDN is not free ($0.00 expense) like the RedHat Developer Program is, so it’s not a perfect comparison but Microsoft has a range of offerings price points.  If a small ($99/year) cost would expand the RedHat option to include Cloudforms, RHV, and multiple server subscriptions (not the single RHEL instance), I could greatly expand my experience with the options RedHat provides.

So RedHat, what do you say?  Expand the program for those of us who want to learn about the full breadth of RedHat products!

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So, what you’re saying is…

Had Chinese with my family last night and I got this in my fortune-cookie:

 

Fortune: :) You are soon going to change your present line of work. :)
Interesting fortune…

I’m wondering if this is foreshadowing upcoming events?  What do the fates have in store for me?

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When precision comes naturally

My wife has some wonderful traits, one of my favorite is her joy of cooking fits well with my joy of eating.  She is also very logical and efficient in her work so it didn’t surprise me that when we had to bake cookies, so she used the recently cleaned kitchen (weekend cleaning spree) to make the job easier.

I entered the kitchen and saw our recently cleaned counter looking like this:

That’s a photo of our kitchen counter with the recipe card laid in the geometric center of the work area.  It struck me as how symmetric it was and I joked about it with my wife.  After looking at it a second time I realized that it was VERY close to the center along both axis of the counter.  So, to satisfy my curiosity I grabbed a tape measure and put my life (and happy marriage) on the line.

 

I measured the depth of the counter and it was 26″.  I then measured the center of the recipe card and it was exactly 13″ from each edge.

Both my wife and I laughed at this, the precision of the placement even though she had just “laid it down” while she was getting other things ready in the kitchen.

 

 

Well, I had gone this far, I might as well measure the other axis.  (If you know my wife, you won’t be surprised with the results.)

Yup, you guessed it.  The width of the working area of the counter is 61″, and the center of the card is just under 30″ from the edge.  While not a perfect 30.5″, we decided that the corner area that wasn’t readily usable for baking, and her intrinsically logical mind accounted for this and the ‘usable center’ of the counter is slightly skewed to the left away from the cluttered end.

The human mind amazes me all the time, and the cookies were great too!

Edit 1: Fixing math.