December 12, 2018

Hugo Static site generator

This post marks tmoving this blog to Hugo , the static site generator written in GO. Yes I’m still a fan of static sites, this blog had been using a static site generator since 2015 Pelican Why a static site generator? Static sites of this type have a number of advantages over more conventional CMS systems. Unhackable. Forget wordpress security updates and mysql injections. The only way someone is modifying your site is if they have your upload credentials. Read more

December 5, 2015

Local Git?

Some of you may know I’ve started a new job recently, as a Senior Infrastructure Developer. The word developer there means I have to come to grips with source control in general and git in particular. I wanted to make a few notes on this here. What is git? Git is a distributed code management system, at times you “commit” your files into the repository where it is forever remembered. Read more

August 13, 2015

Hot Linking in S3

Hot linking (also known as Inline linking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, or offsite image grabs), is a where one website directly includes a resource on another website. This means the user is looking at website A, and some of the images or other content on the page is actually being served from website B. This is a problem because while B is paying for the server space and bandwidth, they are not getting credit in the users mind (or the ad revenue). Read more

August 1, 2015

Perl style backticks in Python

A great feature in Perl is Backticks. Copied from the shell, and built right into the base language, this allows you to capture the output of any shell command. But something that seems so simple in Perl, has always given me problems in Python. It’s not built in, and using the full “open” semantics seems to take far too much time and effort. To the rescue, from the Python standard library, we have the subprocess module. Read more

July 14, 2015

Tips for new Mac users

So you have opened up that shiny new macbook or macbook pro, but have only ever had a windows computer before. What is going to be different? What is going to be hard? You will have to think about some things that you have done a thousand times before by pure reflex. But you will soon be loving your new mac, I promise. Hopefully some of these points can help you reach that point a little sooner. Read more