Learn Cloud and AI with IBM Badges

 Life-long learning doesn't have to cost a fortune. I've put together a free 'summer study plan' that covers Cloud Native, Docker / Kubernetes, Data Science, Big Data, Blockchain and IoT - and best of all - it's free. Completing the courses will earn you badges on Acclaim that can be easily shared on social media.

My favourite IBM sites for free courses and badges include:

• developerWorks Courses for courses and badges on Blockchain, IBM Cloud / Bluemix, Node-Red, Chatbots, Raspberry Pi, API Connect, Streaming, Docker and Kubernetes. I've completed the entire set - and I can say by far ' Cloud App Developer V2' is my favourite. 21 hours of self-paced hands-on training. The labs are excellent - and highlight the twelve-factor app methodology.
• Data Science and Cognitive Computing Courses on CognitiveClass.AI for learning paths on Containers, Kubernetes and IStio, Big Data, Python, R, Deep Learning, Analytics, Hadoop and Spark. I found "Applied Data Science with Python" to be a fun and exciting course. All the courses have hands-on labs, with tools deployed and available on the cloud through IBM Cloud, Data Science Experience or CogntiveClass Labs!
• CognitiveClass Labs - comes in support of the courses available on CogntiveClass.AI - providing access to data science tools such as OpenRefine, Jupyter Notebook/Lab, RStudio, Zeppelin Notebook, SeaHorse and more.
• IBM Watson Academy for courses and badges such as "Watson and Cloud Platform", "Watson Assistant", "Watson Discovery Service" or "Watson Knowledge Studio".
• IBM Garage Courses for "Garage Method Explorer" and "Garage Method Advocate"- an excellent series on DevOps, Agile, CI/CD, practices and tools.
• Watson IOT Academy - courses and badges on Watson IOT offerings.
• IBM Analytics Product Skills Validation - various analytics badges and courses - that usually build on top of existing learning paths.

Additional free resources:

• Katakoda provides interactive scenario driven labs and excellent courses on topics such as Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Git, Jenkins, Istio, Machine Learning, Tensorflow and more. I highly recommend taking some of the courses here!
• https://www.edx.org - you can 'audit' courses for free, but verified certificates usually cost money. Worth taking a look for courses such as Introduction to Kubernetes from the Linux Foundation or Essential Math for Machine Learning: Python Edition
• http://www.fast.ai - free courses on Deep Learning, Computational Linear Algebra.

If you want to try something hands-on, respond to IBM's Call for Code - and build an application to tackle natural disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, extreme weather, etc).

This article was originally published on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learn-cloud-ai-ibm-badges-mihai-criveti/

 

Microsoft released .NET Core as open source. Find out what's inside!

Microsoft announced that .NET Core will be open source, including the runtime and the framework libraries.
There are several open source Microsoft .NET projects on GitHub and CodePlex:

• .NET Core 5 (corefx) - foundational libraries that make up the .NET Core development stack;
• .NET Core 5 buildtools - Build tools that are necessary for building the .NET Core project;
• .NET Compiler Platform (Roslyn) - open-source C# and Visual Basic compilers with rich code analysis APIs;
• EntityFramework - Microsoft's recommended data access technology for new applications in .NET;
• ASP.NET vNext Home - The Home repository is the starting point for people to learn about ASP.NET vNext;

So what's in this stuff, anyway? Let's dissect it using sloccount and cloc (count lines of code) and find out!

Grab the code for Roslyn:

$ GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1 git clone -v https://git01.codeplex.com/roslyn

Cloning into 'roslyn'...
error: RPC failed; result=56, HTTP code = 200
GnuTLS recv error (-9): A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.

Whatever - no time to rebuild git against OpenSSL. Let's use a workaround:

$ mkdir roslyn; cd roslyn; git init
$ git remote add origin https://git01.codeplex.com/roslyn
$ git checkout -B master origin/master

Great. Now let's grab the .NET Core dev stack, libraries and build tools (github clones fine):

$ git clone https://github.com/dotnet/corefx.git
$ git clone https://github.com/dotnet/buildtools.git

Analyze the .NET Core 5 (corefx) and buildtools

$ cloc --xsl=1 --xml corefx/ buildtools/

Language	Files	Blank	Comment	Code
C#	565	17312	24750	104192
XML	2	0	7	4456
MSBuild scripts	15	54	90	1820
SKILL	2	11	0	52
Visual Basic	1	17	1	43
ASP.Net	6	0	0	32
C/C++ Header	1	5	1	7
DOS Batch	1	0	0	5
Total	593	17399	24849	110607

Analyze Roslyn

$ cloc --xsl=1 --xml roslyn/Src

Language	Files	Blank	Comment	Code
C#	4138	186147	131956	1173792
Visual Basic	1767	178277	140738	981301
XML	4	1870	1920	12451
MSBuild scripts	74	0	216	10066
C/C++ Header	15	1607	428	7361
SKILL	33	888	0	4954
C++	12	322	186	1698
XSD	3	74	217	401
ASP.Net	44	4	0	351
XAML	3	3	1	128
DOS Batch	6	22	11	79
PowerShell	3	7	0	13
Total	6102	369221	275673	2192595

$ sloccount roslyn/Src

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 1,205,824
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Year (Person-Month) = 343.86 (4,126.29)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 4.93 (59.14)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 69.78
Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 46,450,431
 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

So - what have we learned?

• sloccount COCOMO estimates are just that - estimates;
• We have over one million lines of C# to play around with;
• Porting this thing will likely depend on Mono and will require quite a lot of work;
• It still doesn't make up an ecosystem - there's work to be done here to turn this into a cross-platform .NET environment;
• Microsoft is most likely pushing for the clouds - this open source seems consistent with their recent partnership with Docker.

Set up a highly available firewall and load balancer in the IBM cloud

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-setupfirewalloncloud/index.html
Summary:  Set up a highly available (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) firewall and load balancer (Linux Virtual Server IP Virtual Server) using Keepalived for Linux and the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise virtual IP and anti-collocation features.

QEMU and kpartx to perform bare metal recovery or forensics on cloud instances

Using qemu or kpartx to perform "bare metal" instance recovery or forensics on KVM cloud instances:


Use QEMU on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise to recover images after system disasters

HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source

Looks like after killing their TouchPad tablet, HP open sources WebOS:

• http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111209xa.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news
• http://developer.palm.com/blog/2011/12/open-source/
• I wonder.. https://github.com/hpwebos

Might mean the TouchPad will make a comback. We'll see.

Review: 1Q84

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I can't quite put my finger on it, but this books keeps reminding me of things I've forgotten or ignored.

I must say I've enjoyed Book 3 the most.

Well, that's it. For now at least - I'm out of Murakami :-(.



View all my reviews

Review: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've been using the methods and techniques described in GTD along side mind mapping in practice for over 8 years (mostly due to tools like OneNote, Emacs ORG mode, XMind/Fremind, etc). Reading this book has definitely helped optimize my workflow and planning into something quite a bit more efficient.

Right now I'm still looking to overhaul my tooling, OneNote isn't available on UNIX-like system (though it mostly works with wine), and Emacs ORG mode isn't practical for pasting images, screenshots, video, audio, files, etc. and such for reference.

It's tried a bunch of Java tools (Thinking Rock and GTD Free) but they're not very good for reference, note taking and reminders / calendar stuff. So far it's proving hard to beat the OneNote + Outlook + Project combo.

One tool I've been using for a while now (probably an year or so) along side OneNote is Tracks . It's a RoR webapp that covers most things in the GTD workflow. Although import/export isn't yet available as of version 2.0, it gets the job done. It's also available from Bitnami as a pre-installed stack.

If you're into GTD or just like to organize yourself with TODOS, tasks, projects and such, Tracks is worth a try.

View all my reviews

Convert AWK to Perl using a2p

Automatic conversion of AWK scripts to perl.

A little awk script that numbers lines:

ls -la /usr | ./linum.pl
  1 : total 240
  2 : drwxr-xr-x+  12 root root  4096 2010-06-21 06:47 .
  3 : drwxr-xr-x   22 root root  4096 2011-05-11 12:06 ..
  4 : drwxr-xr-x+   2 root root 69632 2011-05-24 14:07 bin
  5 : drwxr-xr-x+   2 root root  4096 2010-05-05 11:33 games
  6 : drwxr-xr-x+   5 root root  4096 2010-06-21 06:47 i586-suse-linux
  7 : drwxr-xr-x+  52 root root  4096 2011-05-13 04:17 include
  8 : drwxr-xr-x+ 156 root root 69632 2011-05-24 14:07 lib
  9 : drwxr-xr-x+  10 root root  4096 2010-06-21 06:47 local
 10 : drwxr-xr-x+   2 root root 12288 2011-05-24 14:07 sbin
 11 : drwxr-xr-x+ 213 root root  4096 2011-05-23 13:19 share

Let's convert this to perl using a2p.

echo '{ printf("%5d : %s\n", NR, $0) }' | a2p > linum.pl
chmod +x linum.pl

Let's try it out:

ls -la /usr | ./linum.pl
  1 : total 240
  2 : drwxr-xr-x+  12 root root  4096 2010-06-21 06:47 .
  3 : drwxr-xr-x   22 root root  4096 2011-05-11 12:06 ..
  4 : drwxr-xr-x+   2 root root 69632 2011-05-24 14:07 bin
  5 : drwxr-xr-x+   2 root root  4096 2010-05-05 11:33 games
  6 : drwxr-xr-x+   5 root root  4096 2010-06-21 06:47 i586-suse-linux
  7 : drwxr-xr-x+  52 root root  4096 2011-05-13 04:17 include
  8 : drwxr-xr-x+ 156 root root 69632 2011-05-24 14:07 lib
  9 : drwxr-xr-x+  10 root root  4096 2010-06-21 06:47 local
 10 : drwxr-xr-x+   2 root root 12288 2011-05-24 14:07 sbin
 11 : drwxr-xr-x+ 213 root root  4096 2011-05-23 13:19 share

The code block looks pretty good:

while (<>) {
chomp;      # strip record separator
printf "%5d : %s\n", $., $_;
}

NSA Operating Systems Security Configuration Guides

NSA published some rather interesting OS security guides:
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/security_configuration_guides/operating_systems.shtml

The RHEL Security Guides are quite good.

• Guide to the Secure Configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
• Hardening Tips for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

I've used these along with the Security Guide and the Security-Enhanced Linux guides from RHEL.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise tips: LVM and FTPS

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise tips:

Learn how to set up a 64-bit Linux® instance (starting with a Bronze-level offering) with the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM), capture a private image and deploy a new instance as a different offering (a Platinum tier) and then grow the LVM volumes and file systems to accommodate the new physical volumes. This article also shows how to configure and manage LVM across physical volumes using Linux LVM-type partitions:

• Configure the Linux LVM and file system to accommodate larger physical volume offerings

Set up a Microsoft® Windows™ Server 2008 R2 on the IBM Cloud so that it can act as a file server. This article details the steps to configure an FTPS and SMB file server using persistent storage; this enables the cloud user to upload and download files to and from instances in the cloud and facilitate data exchange:

• Configure an FTPS/SMB file server on a Windows Server 2008 R2 using persistent storage