Hi everyone,
I’m changing the site layout. It’s going to be a work in progress for a bit, so don’t be alarmed. Nobody has tampered with my site.
Thanks for your patience,
Tom
How I Dockerized an Ancient Rails Application
I ran into a problem reviving an old application from a few years ago. I want to install it on my server, but the version of Rails is so old that it won’t run on any sane version of Ruby to develop against. Docker to the rescue…
Continue reading “How I Dockerized an Ancient Rails Application”
Bitcoin – Two (ish) Years Later
It’s been a couple years now since I’ve really even thought about Bitcoin. Now, seeing it in the news breaking the $4000 barrier, I decided to take another look at the landscape, not just Bitcoins, however, but Ethereum as well. Continue reading “Bitcoin – Two (ish) Years Later”
How-To: Export Google Hangouts Archive
I had to export my Google Hangouts conversations with a certain person to a spreadsheet. You would think Google could do this, but it’s nowhere as easy as it should be. Google isn’t entirely unhelpful, however – they do provide all of your Hangouts messages – albeit in a user-unusable format. So I had to write a tool to do it. Continue reading “How-To: Export Google Hangouts Archive”
Upgrading an OpenVZ VPS from 12.04 to 14.04
I’ve recently gotten tired of dealing with old packages like Apache 2.2, and decided it’s time to take the plunge and try to upgrade Ubuntu on my VPS. I approach this with much trepidation; as the last time I tried something like this, I ended up with a VPS that needed to be reinstalled from scratch. Continue reading “Upgrading an OpenVZ VPS from 12.04 to 14.04”
pclzip.lib.php : Missing zlib extensions
This problem took me awhile to solve, and required a bit of digging, so I’m going to post my solution here, in hopes that it helps anyone with the same problem. After upgrading my VPS from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS, I got pclzip.lib.php : Missing zlib extensions on a bunch of my PHP scripts. Continue reading “pclzip.lib.php : Missing zlib extensions”
Kill-A-Watt Testing
I picked up one of these Kill-A-Watt units awhile ago from Amazon and started doing experiments with it. Well, time went by, the Kill-A-Watt sat in my toolbox, and other things took priority. Now, I’m looking back on it and have decided to have another go at this. Continue reading “Kill-A-Watt Testing”
Fast random post in WordPress (with Apache’s help)
In this tutorial, I’m going to walk through how to use mod_rewrite‘s RewriteMap directive to redirect to a random WordPress post any time a visitor visits a specific URL, in this case /random. This technique is very fast, requires no PHP overhead beyond that which is normally needed to serve pages from WordPress, so it should be compatible with any caching methods being employed within WordPress. If you are using an upstream cache, like Varnish, you’ll need to exclude the URL you set up in the rewrite. Continue reading “Fast random post in WordPress (with Apache’s help)”
Decimal hour display for Taskcoach, Part 2
UPDATE: The latest version of TaskCoach (1.3.37) has this patch included. So, head on over to the download page and update.
This is an update to an earlier post which changed the effort panel display to use decimal hours instead of hh:mm:ss, but it did not have any settings or configuration. This new version provides an entry in the features tab of the preferences for turning this functionality on and off, for those of you who only want the feature enabled when it’s time to create an invoice.
Continue reading “Decimal hour display for Taskcoach, Part 2”
How to prevent Linux from waking up due to USB devices
I’ll start this one off with a funny story. Whenever I spark something in the room (like, my hand on a doorknob), my linux box wakes up from sleep. I tracked the problem down to the wireless receiver for the Logitech M570 wireless mouse on my desk – the electrostatic discharge from the spark causes the USB receiver to send some signal to the computer.
The problem is, that every time this happens (4+ times per day), it wakes up my machine. I then have to wait for everything to wake up, enter my password to unlock it, then put it back to sleep. Not fun. So I determined what I needed to do was prevent the USB ports from waking up the machine (or replace my beloved mouse). I chose the former, but for the longest time, could not figure out how the hell to do it. I finally figured it out, and to save anyone else from my misery, here’s the short version.
Continue reading “How to prevent Linux from waking up due to USB devices”