Compile Scrivener books into Asciidoc

By on July 14, 2014 - Geekery, News Tags: ,

My favorite writing tool is Scrivener. I wrote the Learning MCollective book for O’Reilly Media entirely in Scrivener. I was afraid this wouldn’t work very well, but it ended up working just great.

To do this, I created a Scrivener compile format which set up chapter headings correctly with a link target above them as recommended. Then I wrote some scripts to process the output from Scrivener compile to make AsciiDoc in the flavor that O’Reilly wanted.

I have released my Scrivener compile settings and scripts so that others can use them should they want to produce asciidoc from Scrivener. They are open source under an Apache license at https://github.com/jorhett/scrivener-asciidoc.

Updated ActiveMQ 5.9.1-2 RPM with REST APIs

By on June 13, 2014 - Geekery, News Tags: ,

As previously reported in my ActiveMQ 5.9.1 RPM post, I’ve created an RPM for Active 5.9.1 on RHEL/CentOS that matches the one published on the Puppet Labs EL6 dependencies repository.

I discovered last night that I hadn’t included the new REST apis in the image. So there is now a new version. I’ve bumped the release version so that you can upgrade if you installed the previous version.
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ActiveMQ 5.9.1 RPM for CentOS / RHEL 6

By on April 20, 2014 - Geekery Tags: ,

There are some significant scaling issues with ActiveMQ 5.8 and MCollective, especially around SSL connections. I’ve been working with some clients and solved many of these problems by using ActiveMQ 5.9.1 as the middleware.

I’ve created an RPM for Active 5.9.1 on RHEL/CentOS that matches the one published on the Puppet Labs EL6 dependencies repository, with the following changes:
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Learning MCollective now available in Early Release

By on March 7, 2014 - Geekery, News Tags:


Learning MCollective is now available in Early Release.

This has pretty much every chapter and subchapter we expect to have in the final book, but my editor and I are still polishing some rough edges. As O’Reilly says on their website:

You’ll receive updates when content is added, as well as the completed ebooks. You get free lifetime access, multiple file formats, and free updates.