Igor Oseledko

GPT Prompt Engineering

Igor — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:34:22 +0000

Originally published July 21, 2023 @ 12:24 pmPicture a giant maze. In the end – a particular piece of cheese (there are many, but this one is special) representing the answer you seek. ChatGPT is the rat traversing the maze. You can help the rat by blocking off the dead-end paths obvious to you. And […]

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Identifying JAR Version Requirements

Igor — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:36:27 +0000

Originally published July 20, 2023 @ 9:51 amRecently, I had to upgrade an old Java application running on an equally old Sun Solaris 11 server. Several upgrade candidates arrived as JAR files without much detail about the system requirements. For reasons outside this discussion, upgrading the Java version on the server was out of the […]

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Searching Twitter

Igor — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:55:15 +0000

Originally published July 10, 2020 @ 12:14 amHere are just a few hopefully useful tips for searching Twitter to get more relevant results. Twitter’s “advanced” search option is not all that fancy, but it is better than nothing. Not a lot of people use it or even know it’s there. Here are the parameters you […]

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Bash Scripts and MySQL

Igor — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:59:12 +0000

Originally published June 26, 2020 @ 12:24 amI frequently use MySQL to store data collected or processed by various shell scripts. The database comes in handy when massaging data with good old awk and sed gets too cumbersome. This is really very basic stuff: just loading some data into MySQL and retrieving it. The usual […]

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Bulk Create Linux Users using Salt

Igor — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:16:05 +0000

Originally published June 19, 2020 @ 1:23 pmRecently I ran into a situation where hundreds of VMs recently built via OpenShift/Ansible automation were missing an important local user account used for security audits. While our automation guys were working on tracking down and fixing the build configuration, I needed to add the account manually. Luckily […]

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Relocating WLS2 Images

Igor — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:56:18 +0000

Originally published June 16, 2023 @ 6:19 pmJust a quick note, mostly for myself, on how to move a WSL2 VHDX image to an alternate location. Previously, I already touched on the subject of backing up WLS images. However, now I am looking to move my default Ubuntu WSL2 image to a detachable drive because […]

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College Students Demand Refunds

Igor — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:42:00 +0000

Originally published May 20, 2020 @ 1:51 amThe University of Illinois at Chicago students are trying to get a partial refund for tuition and fees paid for on-campus studying that’s been moved online due to the pandemic. A similar situation is developing at other US colleges with lawyers getting involved and a growing potential for […]

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Randomizing Filenames

Igor — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:50:42 +0000

Originally published April 30, 2023 @ 12:15 pmI had a bunch of folders with some old photos, and I needed to randomize the filenames as an easy way to get a random selection of files. This should’ve been easy, but I made the mistake of googling the answer instead of writing this one-liner myself because […]

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Finding Gaps in Timestamps

Igor — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:57:47 +0000

Originally published April 25, 2023 @ 8:29 amSometimes knowing when something didn’t happen can be just as valuable as knowing when it did. For reasons yet to be determined, my Salt Master server needs to be bounced occasionally. Not the whole server – just the salt-master service. I needed to find a good time to […]

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The Black Box on the Org Chart

Igor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:17:50 +0000

There’s a particular kind of delusion that takes hold in tech booms. It starts with a true thing, wraps itself around a useful thing, and then inflates into a preposterous thing. The true thing is that large language models can be useful. They can summarize, scaffold, autocomplete, translate from one notation to another, and generate […]

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