Mastodawn

Today's journey back from a conference has not been fun. Due to "a problem" my flight aborted a takeoff and then was later cancelled.
I have not slept in well 29 hours. Things are getting weird.

Rob Parker Mar 12

Interested in learning how you can use #HashiCorp Vault Agent to automate your certificate renewal process for your #IBMMQ queue managers?
Take a look at this fantastic article written by Justin Jarae. In it he provides the scripts, templates and guideance necessary to set up Vault automation that allows you to comply with a 47 day certificate lifetime.

https://github.com/lawnjarae/ibm-mq-vault-agent-certificate-renewal

Rob Parker Mar 10

A while back i posted about changes coming up to how public Certificate Authorities like DigiCert and Let's Encrypt issue certificates. This change, affecting the ExtendedKeyUsage extension was driven by Google updating their Chrome Root policy.

The original deadline for this change was May of this year, however, Google have just pushed that back to March 2027.

I've taken this updated my original blog post with more information and the new dates, you can read it here: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/robert-parker1/2025/09/23/ibm-mq-and-extended-key-usage

IBM MQ and Extended Key Usage

Rob Parker Mar 6

Need to remember this year to submit a talk proposal to #EMFCamp the BEFORE the deadline not the day after....

Rob Parker Mar 3

Electromagnetic Field Mar 3

We're finally ready to announce the ticket sales dates for EMF 2026!

Monday 9th March, 20:00 UTC
Sunday 22nd March, 15:00 UTC
Thursday 2nd April, 18:00 BST

Tickets will go on sale at https://www.emfcamp.org/tickets and you can see the ticket prices there now.

Buy Tickets

Electromagnetic Field

Rob Parker Feb 27

It's weird that at 38 years of age this is the first time I've made a dough ball from scratch by hand.

Rob Parker Feb 2

Great start to a monday morning.
Get into a grove writing a load of code. Realise i have misunderstood one part of the requirement and have to throw away _all_ of the code. 😭

Rob Parker Jan 30

I've decided that every Friday I'm going to try and cook something I've never cooked before. Mainly to improve my cooking but also to try different foods. Last week I did Gordon Ramsey's Mac and cheese. It came out really well.

This week Tuna Steaks with a romesco sauce and Dauphinoise potatoes/carrots as a side.

Rob Parker Jan 21

Fantastic day visiting Moonwalkers at the lightroom in London. Second time doing it and it was just as amazing as the first time.
They're wrapping it up now ready for the next showing of dinosaurs, may have to do that one too especially with the little one!

Rob Parker Jan 18

A long time ago i was gifted "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" by Samin Nosrat. I intended to use it to try and inspire myself a better cook. I never got around to reading it.

Now i'm trying to read more, perhaps it's time to dust it off and once again try to improve myself as a cook. I may need some cookery classes as well though 😅