Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Install Postman on Fedora 31

Postman is a great tool for building and testing APIs. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t come packaged as an RPM, so there’s some trickery involved in installing it on Fedora.

This blog post was very useful, with some minor corrections. Here’s what I had to do:

  • Download Postman from the site.
  • Move the archive to somewhere global: mv Postman-linux-x64-7.16.1.tar.gz /opt/
  • Extract the archive: tar xzvf Postman-linux-x64-7.16.1.tar.gz
  • Remove the archive: rm Postman-linux-x64-7.16.1.tar.gz
  • Check which directories are in the path: echo $PATH
  • Create a symbolic link in one of path directories: sudo ln -s /opt/Postman/Postman /usr/local/bin/postman
  • Create the desktop file: touch ~/.local/share/applications/postman.desktop
  • Edit the file with the content below.
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Postman
GenericName=API Client
X-GNOME-FullName=Postman API Client
Comment=Make and view REST API calls and responses
Keywords=api;
Exec=/usr/local/bin/postman
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/opt/Postman/app/resources/app/assets/icon.png
Categories=Development;Utilities;

Now you can run Postman both via the command line (postman) and from the Gnome/Mate menu. You’ll find it under Applications->Programming.

dive – Docker image explorer

dive is a Docker image explorer. This is a very handy tool when you are trying to figure out how a Docker image was built and what’s in it, and you don’t have the original Dockerfile.

It uses the meta information for each layer to show you which command was used to create the layer, and which files were added, removed, or changed.

Additionally, you can use dive to make sure your Docker images are optimized and their size is under control. You can even integrate dive into your CI/CD pipeline!

Fedora 31: Docker Fix

I’ve updated my laptop to Fedora 31 over the Christmas holidays. Pretty much everything works as it did before. Except for Docker, which suddenly fails to start the service.

A quick Google search pointed to the discussion in this bug report, where I found the solution that worked for me:

  1. Edit /etc/sysconfig/grub
  2. Append systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable
  3. Run “grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg“
  4. Reboot

Once the machine came back up, docker service was running normally.

IMDb : The new design

IMDb is widely known for two things: the overwhelming size of its movie database, and the fact that it never changes the way it looks.

Well, guess what, IMDb update its look and feel, and it’s not a minor change. It’s fast, it’s functional, and it no longer looks like it was built 20 years ago.

The funny thing is that while I was looking for a blog post announcing the changes, I came across this one from 2009. I haven’t realized that it was from 2009 until I saw the screenshots.

Some time ago the incredible happened: our beloved movie database site IMDb finally realized that it was not 1996 anymore and dared to hire some designers in order to – you won’t believe it – change the design of the page! When I visited the site the other day, I couldn’t believe my eyes

And just so that we keep the history, here are a couple of screenshots of how it used to look:

  • IMDB: 2007
    IMDB: 2007
  • IMDB: 2009
    IMDB: 2009

Great job IMDb! Even if it’ll take all of us a bit to get used to the new design. At least we know it’ll last another decade.