I work with several clients and often we are using different version of tools at different times. While I’m endeavouring to move my development processes to use docker containers I still do a lot of development locally on my Mac. I’m still running Mac OS (or is that OS X??), and so I use brew to install many of my tools. What I’ve struggled with in the past is installing certain versions of the many tools. Read more

As many people know I usually use a GNU Linux desktop environment, and have for a few years. I have previously had to use Windows during stints at large Engineering orgs, but most of the time, I was able to setup a second computer with Linux on it for day-to-day tasks. I’ve also used macOS/OS X a few times in the last few years, and I’ve got pretty frustrated with it. Read more

We do a lot of support of OpenSource CMS’s at work, and one of them happens to be WordPress. I recently thought it might be cool to have a bit more of a play with W3-Total-Cache as it is a plugin of choice to assist customer with scaling issues. Since my blog is massively popular (not!), I decided to use the S3/CloudFront option, presented here. Well it didn’t work. Very sad face. Read more

I’ve been mucking a bit with go recently. Nothing special, just doing some small problems that I needed to solve. At work, I have built up a challenge for new candidates. One of them is the old trick of using all the inodes on a file-system. This is a quick one to rule out the ones who have real world experience. So I wrote some code: `I’ve been mucking a bit with go recently. Read more

I upgraded my laptop to Trusty Tahr today. One thing that didn’t work immediately was the Crashplan GUI. It crashes with a SIGSEGV. In summary “C [libsoup-2.4.so.1+0x6c2a1] soup_session_feature_detach+0x11”. I managed to find this bug, and then I found /usr/local/crashplan/bin/run.conf** ** which has a variable GUI_JAVA_OPTS. Adding ” -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla” to the end of that variable, and the GUI starts without fail. Win!