Pragmatism in the real world
I've been following the work of Matt Gemmell for years. His techno-thriller Kestrel series a great fun to read and I recommend that you read them if that's your thing. He also writes short stories, one every week. These are excellent. They are free and as they are short, they don't take long to read at all. A wonderful break from the reality of the world of work, I enjoy reading each week's story with… continue reading.
With some commercial projects, it can be useful to know that all your dependencies have licences that your organisation deems acceptable. I had this requirement for a few clients now and came up with this script that we ran as part of our CI which would then fail if a dependency used a license that wasn't allowed. This proved to be reasonably easy as composer licenses will provide a list of all packages with their… continue reading.
I install Python apps on my Mac using pipx like this: pipx install rst2pdf This will then install rst2pdf into its own isolated environment so that its dependencies do not affect and are not affected by any other Python app I have installed. Internally, it creates a venv at /.local/pipx/venvs/rst2pdf with symlinks to the currently installed python in the bin directory: lrwxrwxr-x@ 1 rob staff 10 24 May 2023 python -> python3.11 lrwxrwxr-x@ 1 rob… continue reading.
In order to verify a JWT created with an asymmetric key, the verifier needs to get the correct public key. One way to do is described in RFC7517 which describes the JSON Web Key format. Within the header of the JWT there is a kid property which is the key ID which is then used to find the correct key within a list provided at the /.well-known/jwks.json endpoint. The JWT header therefore looks something like… continue reading.
The most common use of JWTs is as an authentication token, usually within an OAuth2 workflow. Creating these tokens is part and parcel of the authentication library that you use. I recently had a requirement to use a JWT independent of authentication and these are some notes on what I learned when researching with Lcobucci\JWT. Make up of a JWT To really understand JWTs, read RFC7519. For a more readable introduction, read the one on… continue reading.
One annoyance I had with my external USB hard drives is that they weren't sleeping when idle which makes them noisy. We can't have that! My first port of call was hdparm and its -S parameter: sudo hdparm -S 60 /dev/sdb However this didn't help. Fortunately, I found hd-idle which worked! After installing, you need to edit /etc/default/hd-idle and change the HD_IDLE_OPTS setting from -h to whatever you need. For me, I have set: HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i… continue reading.
I recently added a second SSD to my Linux server and had to look up how to format it and set it up, having not taken notes for the first one. These are the notes I took the second time. This is all done from the command line and the monospace text is to be typed directly – though change the identifiers if requried. sudo lshw -C disk to confirm disk is seen by the… continue reading.
Shortly after building a script to create binaries for Rodeo, my command line Flickr uploader, I realised that I could use a Github Actions workflow to run it and attach the created binaries to the Release page once I had created it. This is what I did. Trigger on release A GitHub Actions workflow is a YAML file and each workflow has to be triggered. For Continuous Integration, it's common to trigger when new PR… continue reading.
Last week, I attended PHPUK 2024. This is one of the major PHP conferences and I was pleased to speak about DDD there. Sam and the team did a fantastic job this year with the videos already published. To my mind, attending a conference provides a number of benefits. The first and most obvious one is that you learn some amazing things, from people who tend to know what they are talking about. At PHPUK… continue reading.
One nice thing about Go is that it can cross-compile which allows me to use my Mac to build binaries for different operating systems. This is increibly useful for providing binaries for Rodeo, my command line Flickr uploader. To do this we set the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables before calling go build. For example to build for x64 on Linux, I do: version=`git describe –tags HEAD` env GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build \ -ldflags "-X… continue reading.
