New Ubuntu and Node.js versions released recently. While neither is a long-term service (LTS) release, they still represent the best that both parties have to offer. Even though Ubuntu 20.10 is here, it’s still shipping with an older version of Node.js, v12.x to be exact. If you’re like me, you
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While it may seem counter intuitive to have a test that doesn’t have any assertions, PHPUnit’s unique method of sharing data between tests can put you in a situation where you have a test that just doesn’t need to actually test anything, and simply returns some data. In those scenarios,
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I’ve been back on Chrome (by way of Chromium) since earlier this year and recently, I started to experience some extreme slowness when attempting to type in the address bar. This slowness was enough for me to file this post in the “productivity” category, as it was enough for me
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Switching things up a bit for Spooktober (doot doot) by running some benchmarks on the CPU-centric plans. Unfortunately, Lightsail and UpCloud are lacking this sort of offering, so they are omitted this month. It’s also worth noting that even though all of the plans are touting a dedicate CPU, it’s
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Redis is one of my favorite data stores. The multitude of data types makes it flexible enough to serve as a simple caching layer (replacing Memcached) or as a full-blown RDBMS replacement if you’re willing to jump through a few hoops. Because Redis is an in-memory data store, it’s limited
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I had high hopes for the UHC Motion program. Earning some cash just by doing what I was already doing, being active. The problem for me was in terms of how much data they wanted access to. Even though the program is based solely on your number of steps you
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I’ve been a bad Arch Linux user recently. Even though I speak highly about being able to run the most cutting edge software, I’ve been slacking and didn’t run an update for a while. This was primarily because I didn’t really feel like having to figure out any problems that
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Bringing things back around to the price point that I had started with many moons ago, the $20 plan. While the lower priced systems are sufficient enough for a lot of use cases, moving up to a meatier server instance can provide instant performance gains, give you better priority on
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Generally speaking, when I need to work with an array or dictionary type of variable, I tend to reach for something other than Bash / shell scripting. This primarily stems from the fact that Bash didn’t support arrays until version 4.x and when I first learned about them, macOS (then
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One of the biggest offenses that I’ve seen over my entire software engineering career is a total disregard for code comments. I don’t subscribe to the idea that code should be self documenting. I do believe that human are inherently forgetful and code left undocumented is code that will bite
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Even though the command-line is like my second home, I still fall short in terms of being able to some basic things. This is primarily because they just don’t come up that often so when I do figure out how to do it, I just don’t retain what I’ve learned.
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As the world has been shifting away from using terms like master and slave in technology, I was left wondering what the heck I was going to do about my git aliases that relied explicitly on the word master. git itself makes it really easy to swap the default branch
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Starting to feel like I’m taking a virtual vacation as I test out different data centers each month. This month we step into Europe to explore Frankfurt. Next month may end up taking us to Australia, but head’s up, not every provider has a data center there. Usual setup this
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Generally speaking, I don’t use dots (periods, full stops, whatever else they may be called) in the URI for a website. That was, until I made the . an allowable character for user names on one of my projects. Allowing the character was a big deal at all with Express.js
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One of the great features of MongoDB is the ability to store an array in a document. While I’m fully aware that there are issues with storing unbounded arrays in MongoDB, due to document size limitations, there are times when you may want to store data in an array that
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While I do absolutely adore Arch Linux, it wouldn’t be Arch without running an upgrade and having a problem crop up out of no where. This time around, the issue showed up after a reboot when I saw the following error scroll past before I was presented with the GNOME
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By request, we’re revisiting the Singapore data centers for this month’s VPS Showdown. Incidentally, while not part of the benchmarks currently, Linode did expand their S3-compatible Object Storage to the Singapore data center. They also turned 17 in mid-June with their usual slew of announcements, and upgrades for existing customers.
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Been hitting the lottery with system upgrade related issues as of late. The latest come in the form of ssh barking about an invalid public key when connecting to a server. This wasn’t happening on all of my servers, just one in particular. Also, it wasn’t actually stopping me from
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As luck would have it a Google Chart I had created some time last year, which was looking great for a while, recently decided that the background color of the chart itself was going to switch from the color I had set to the default color, white. This was quite
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I run into my fair share of “gotchas” as an Arch Linux user. I also stand firmly that I’ve always ran into my fair share of “gotchas” running Linux in general. In fact, I’ve even run into my fair share of “gotchas” on both macOS and Windows systems, so maybe
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From time to time a routine upgrade on Arch Linux ends up causing me a bit of grief. Fortunately, I do like a bit of chaos from time to time and the opportunity to solve problems is why I got into software engineering to begin with. This particular issue was
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After a few months of without Lightsail and UpCloud, it’s time to bring them back into the fold and subsequently roll back to benchmarking on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead of 20.04 LTS. That said, the only provide that doesn’t support the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu is Amazon Lightsail
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Gone are the days of stitching together disparate services in an effort to create a solid continue integration and deployment pipeline. GitLab has had it’s Runners for a while and recently GitHub stepped into the mix with their Actions offering. Because of this, using external services like Travis CI or
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My blog is generated by Jekyll. Jekyll uses Liquid for it’s templates. I include a decent amount of source code in my articles and sometimes the syntax collides with Liquid’s own syntax. Then this happens: Liquid Warning: Liquid syntax error (line 34): Expected end_of_string but found comparison When that, happens,
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With my recent exploration of GitHub Actions, I’ve had to figure out things that I’ve already figured out with other systems like GitLab Runners and Travis CI. One such thing is conditionally running steps. For things like code coverage, I’m only interested in sending off the coverage report to the
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