Some time ago, I wrote a post about my experiences studying for and undertaking the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist exam. Well, the two year validity period for that certification expired for me this past week, and since I’m still floating through the world of Kubernetes in my daily job, I figured I’d attempt to re-acquire it. Now that I’m on the tail-end of that experience with the certification back under my belt for another two years, it feels like a good opportunity to revisit this topic and provide some pointers for anyone looking to take (or re-take) the plunge themselves.

This blog first appeared in 2008 as a guest article for a friend’s (long since removed) website. To consolidate some of my previous writing in the one place, it has been re-posted with permission, with some edits and lots of additional media added. Think of it like the HD remaster of an old videogame, except it’s a videogame no-one played because it wasn’t very good. I was a failed teenage game developer.

The story so far In order to explore the origins and prevalence of a personally-beloved drum loop sample named BRBEATLP.958, I fingerprinted and catalogued every sample of every MOD/S3M/XM/IT file in the Mod Archive so that I could hunt it down amidst tens of thousands of different songs. Now that we’ve solved that mystery, let’s wrap this up with an excursion through that data! Disclaimer: I’ve done the best I can to clean the data I gathered and ensure its accuracy, but I’m not going to stake any rigorous claims of perfection against it.

Having just passed the exam myself, I wanted to do a write-up whilst many of these thoughts are fresh in my mind. Disclaimer: opinions are my own, not my employer’s, etc. What is it? The Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) is a certification course offered by the Linux Foundation. It builds on the skills required by the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification with a focus on Kubernetes and cloud security. It’s a relatively new certification, having been released in November 2020, and requires the practitioner to firstly hold an active CKA certification.

After a recent commit to a Python project that I work on, I noticed that my resulting OpenShift pod had begun crashlooping after the rebuild. A quick check of the pod logs showed why: for some reason, it could no longer find the alembic module, despite that being a transitive dependency of SQLAlchemy, which my project already had in its requirements.txt. Curious, I checked the build logs and noticed an odd error during the dependency install:

The story so far In order to explore the origins and prevalence of a personally-beloved drum loop sample named BRBEATLP.958, I’ve fingerprinted and catalogued every sample of every MOD/S3M/XM/IT file in the Mod Archive so that I can hunt it down amidst tens of thousands of different songs. Now it’s time to see where this takes us. Part one Part two Part three How many songs used BRBEATLP.958? I found fifty-four different songs which all used (or at least included) BRBEATLP.

The story so far Obsessed with the muffled, 8KHz mono perfection of a drum-loop used in an old ScreamTracker III module, I aim to seek out how many other modules may have used the same sample.. but not before some hard nostalgia-blast reminiscing over the tracking subculture as a whole. Part one Part two Forming the battle plan First thing’s first: if I was to figure out how many other songs might’ve used BRBEATLP.

Advent of Code has wrapped for another year, so I figured I’d write a companion piece to last year’s blog about the same topic with some brief thoughts and reflections on 2020’s event. Overall feelings I quite enjoyed this year’s collection of puzzles. Unlike last year’s Intcode theme - which spanned almost the entirety of the month - each puzzle this year was its own standalone thing. There were also no puzzles that I felt demanded much algorithmic knowledge, with nary a shortest-path problem to be seen - much to my relief, as they’ve historically always been the more challenging ones for me.

The big four One of the fascinating aspects of tracker music is the way in which it has evolved over the last three decades. A whole ecosystem of music creation tools grew from the homebrew efforts of talented programmers and musicians. Composition programs were born, forked, cloned, abandoned and reborn. File formats, too, were devised and revised - and sometimes even documented. Composers migrated from tool to tool as successive programs presented them with more sophisticated abilities to realize the music in their head.

Preamble In my small amounts of spare time these past few lockdown-fueled months, I’ve been casually poking at a dumb idea. Like so many dumb ideas, it didn’t really amount to much itself, but it did spawn some other successively dumber ideas. And, well, those didn’t amount to much either. But! It sure was a fun, nostalgic and educational ride.. and I guess there’s a bit of entertaining trivia to be gained along the way.