Pragmatism in the real world
I recently needed to modify the emails that a client project sends out. It was set up to send via SMTP and so the easiest way to do this for me was to add a local MailHog instance and point the application at it. Manually running via Docker The quickest and easiest way to do this is via Docker. Manually, we can do: $ docker run -p 8025:8025 -p 1025:1025 mailhog/mailhog This will run MailHog… continue reading.
Dorothy Hodgkin by J.S. Lewinski, 1697.© estate of J.S. Lewinski / National Portrait Gallery, London To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day today, I want to highlight Dorothy Hodgkin, a British chemist who made amazing discoveries with X-ray crystallography of molecules. In particular, she confirmed the structure of penicillin and discovered the structure of vitamin B12 and also of insulin. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on vitamin B12, which was described as… continue reading.
One project I'm working on has multiple separate parts in different git repositories that are brought into the main project using linked composer directories. I needed to get step debugging working in PhpStorm and this is the approach I took.
Recently, the ability for my Apple Watch to automatically unlock my Mac started failing on Big Sur betas and then on my main Catalina installation. I'm not sure, but it's possible that updating to WatchOS 7 caused it, though it might have been related to re-pairing to fix the battery life issues I was having. Or, of course, some other software gremlin! Whatever, it was annoying. Scouring the Internet, I discovered what to do in… continue reading.
There are many scripts that recursively execute php -l on a set of files or directories. This is mine: #!/usr/bin/env bash set -o nounset # Recursively call `php -l` over the specified directories/files if [ -z "$1" ] ; then printf 'Usage: %s …\n' "$(basename "$0")" exit 1 fi ERROR=false SAVEIFS=$IFS IFS=$'\n' while test $# -gt 0; do CURRENT=${1%/} shift if [ ! -f $CURRENT ] && [ ! -d $CURRENT ] ; then echo… continue reading.
I have an external drive attached to the USB hub on my Thunderbolt Display that I use to clone my laptop's internal drive every night using the schedule feature of SuperDuper!. At the appointed time, SuperDuper! will mount the external drive, clone the internal drive and then unmount the external drive again which is very convenient. However, whenever I plug in my laptop, the drive automatically mounts. This doesn't particularly worry me, but when I… continue reading.
I've recently merged a PR by Stephen to rst2df that reformats the entire codebase to align with PEP 8. As rst2pdf is over a decade old, this has resulted in a lot of changes to the files which now have Stephen's name attached. This affects git blame. For example: git blame -L 137,145 rst2pdf/findfonts.py e753c71eb (roberto.alsina 2008-09-05 14:49:24 +0000 137) d56705e4f (roberto.alsina 2009-10-30 15:07:05 +0000 138) # So now we have a font we know… continue reading.
I'm in the process of writing a little command line app in Go that uploads images to Flickr. It's called Rodeo and it's working well as a project with which to learn Go in 2020. Rodeo uses ExifTool to interrogate an image file for meta data. ExifTool is wonderful and very comprehensive and with the -j switch can return JSON. Today I want to note down what I learned about dealing with JSON. $ exiftool… continue reading.
I recently needed to validate the value created by PHP for its session ID. After a bit of research, I realised that there are two interesting php.ini config settings that relate to this value: session.sid_length is the number of characters in the ID session.sid_bits_per_character controls the set of characters used. From the manual: The possible values are '4' (0-9, a-f), '5' (0-9, a-v), and '6' (0-9, a-z, A-Z, "-", ","). Therefore, to validate the session… continue reading.
I recently received a MySQL dump file where the various tables in it had foreign keys to each other. I usually restore with this command: mysql –login-path=rob < dump.sql but this generated the error: ERROR 1217 (23000) at line 288805: Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails It turns out that the easiest way to solve this is to use the –init-command switch to set foreign keys off for this… continue reading.
