Cloudflare SSL/TLS setting for an encrypted connection to upstream

I was helping a friend set up a new website and hit a problem where the website was in an infinite redirect loop: I could see this in curl quite easily: $ curl -I https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://myfriendswebsite.example.com/ To debug, we turned off Cloudflare by setting the Proxy status on the DNS record in Cloudflare's admin to "DNS only" and the problem went away. Further investigation led to the SSL/TLS setting in… continue reading.

Posted on 4 March 2025 in Computing

Converting a PHPUnit TestListener to an Event Subscriber

One of the bigger changes in PHPUnit 10 was the introduction of the new extension system which replaced listeners and hooks. The old way On one of my projects we have a TestListener that sets up the database before we run some functional tests against it. It looks like this: <?php declare(strict_types=1); namespace App\Test\Listeners; use App\Test\Functional\Helpers\DbHelper; use PHPUnit\Framework\TestListenerDefaultImplementation; use PHPUnit\Framework\TestSuite; class TestListener implements \PHPUnit\Framework\TestListener { use TestListenerDefaultImplementation; public function startTestSuite(TestSuite $suite): void { if (str_contains($suite->getName(),… continue reading.

Posted on 25 February 2025 in PHP

OAuth scopes vs user roles

There is a different between OAuth scopes and roles. A scope is the abilities that the client requests that the user can then decide if they are going to authorise that client to do those things. A role is the rights that a given user has within the application. Scope examples are "read-name", "read-address", "read-email", 'write-all", etc. Example roles might be "moderator", "user", "administrator", etc. and is used by the app to determine what the… continue reading.

Posted on 18 February 2025 in Development

Writing out the page contents in Playwright

I recently had a problem with a failing Playwright test that only happened when running in Docker. The test that was failing was: let locator = page.locator('a[href="/login"].nav-link'); await locator.click(); await expect(page).toHaveTitle(/Log in/); The test clicks the link to go to /login and then checks that the next page's title contains the text "Log in". Not an especially complicated test, so I was quite surprised when it failed claiming that the title was blank. To work… continue reading.

Posted on 11 February 2025 in Development, JS

Activating rather than relaunching a menu bar app on macOS

One very minor thing that's been bugging me since macOS Sequoia came out is that if you launch an app that lives in your menu bar, but also has a hidden Dock icon a second time, then the Dock icon will re-appear. This happens to me a lot because I use Alfred to launch apps and also to bring an app to the front. This works because opening a running app will bring it to… continue reading.

Posted on 4 February 2025 in AppleScript, Computing

Using uv as your shebang line

I create a fair few scripts in my ~/bin/ directory to automate tasks. Since discovering uv and inline script metadata, I've started using Python far more for these. As ~/bin is on my path, I want to run the script by calling it directly on the command line. To do this, I use this shebang: #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run –script The command line will now run uv run –script and pass the file as the… continue reading.

Posted on 28 January 2025 in Python

Always expand the Fantastical editor popover

My preferred calendar app for the Apple ecosystem is Fantastical as I've found that it meets my needs well. One minor irritant is that the editor popover defaults to a collapsed view and I have to expand it to see everything, in particular the notes field which I use frequently. I recently discovered that there's a hidden preference to change this. It's set via a custom url of x-fantastical3://defaults?key=AlwaysShowAll&value=1&type=bool&group=1. Just click this link to set… continue reading.

Posted on 21 January 2025 in Computing

Global git ignore patterns

One thing that I've found helpful is to add a set of patterns to my global git ignore file (config/git/ignore for me) that allow me to create temporary files that are automatically excluded from git. The patterns I use are these: # Ignore a file by renaming it with ignore its name *.ignore ignore.* *.ignore.* This lets me create a file with a prefix ignore., a postfix of .ignore or add .ignore. somewhere in the… continue reading.

Posted on 14 January 2025 in Computing, git

Enabling a focus mode when an app is running on Mac

When I'm on a Zoom or FaceTime call, I want stop all notifications on my Mac so that I'm not distracted by them and would like this automated. It's not easy to tell when a call is happening, so I simplified the problem to stopping all notifications if the Zoom or FaceTime is running as I only run these apps if I'm on call. To do this, I created two Shortcuts to turn the Do… continue reading.

Posted on 7 January 2025 in Computing

2024 in pictures

As usual, at the end of the year, I look back over the photos I have taken and think about the year. This year I have published 1162 photos to Flickr. It has been a good year, seeing friends and family, taking photos, attending conferences all coupled with enjoyable work for a good client. I am pleased to have kept up with taking a least one photo every day as part of my Project 365,… continue reading.

Posted on 31 December 2024 in Me, Year in Pictures