I have been told that pipx is a very good tool to install and run Python applications in isolated environments. That description almost immediately reminds me of another tool - pyenv. Even though they address different needs, I find myself mixing them up. The purpose of this post is to describe what the tools try to accomplish and how they go about doing so. A pre-requisite to this discussion is an introduction to how the system $PATH environment variable is used.

Someone I know had lamented on how difficult he found it to manage a dotNet application online; i.e. a webapp running on Microsoft’s dotNet Core technology. It got me pondering - is it really that hard to run dotNet on an Ubuntu box? At a fundamental level, we are still dealing with managing running processes/threads in an operating system. So I challenged myself to provision just such a system! This post mentions some of the memorable moments I had in accomplishing that challenge.

It is very useful to see *** symbols appearing I type passwords in the terminal window. Sadly, the feature is not enabled by default when using sudo in Ubuntu. Thankfully, it is simple to activate!

I want to be able to quickly spin up game servers for small sessions and tear them down afterwards. Online investigation reveals that docker-machine paired with DigitalOcean as a provider might be just what is needed. That claim needs to be tested, but a pre-requisite is that the docker and docker-machine tools be available on the local system. This post will describe how to install them on an Ubuntu box.

I like to change the default shell environment on systems that I use to zsh and theme them a little. This post describes my usual changes.