Security is important. Bastion hosts (or jump servers) are an easy way to wall off your private servers from the outside world. Improved security is always a good thing, but it isn’t always convenient. With a bastion host in place, you shouldn’t be able to connect directly to a private
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By default, new columns are added to the end of a table in MySQL. This works well most of the time, but sometimes when you’re retrofitting a column into a table, you may want it to be adjacent columns closer to the start of the table. The ALTER statement makes
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After months of waiting, I finally received the MacBook Pro that I had ordered back in February. Thus far, it’s been a solid machine with crazy battery life, but not without it’s quirks. One recent quirk was with Docker Desktop. I had the app open and I quit it instead
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It’s been a long time since I wrote my original Linode vs. DigitalOcean post. The year was 2013 and it was a simpler time. Over the last [nearly] ten years, the humble post grew from being the output of my own gross curiosity about the performance of a couple of
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After yet another bout of operating system soul searching, I’ve landed back on both iOS and macOS. With this transition from Android and Linux, my software needs have changed. Also the Googs has been barking about my needing to upgrade if I want to continue to store my mountain of
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Last week we discussed converting CSV to JSON in JavaScript. This week, we’re going to talk about going in the opposite direction, converting JSON back to CSV. Similar to last week, we’re going to use the immensely popular papaparse library. As it turns out, even though it’s touted as the
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Parsing CSV data isn’t as easy as splitting the string up into individual lines, then splitting it by the delimited (in this case commas). Some of the values may have quotes around them, sometimes the values themselves have line breaks. Then there’s the potential that the data itself is malformed.
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Switching back to an iPhone eventually led to enabling Family Sharing so that we could all use the Pro Apps I had purchased last year. The Pro Apps are quite pricey (even the Education Bundle) so it’s not something I’d want to buy and re-buy. My wife’s recent endeavor into
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The big news for this month would be DigitalOcean’s announcement of their “serverless functions” product being beta released. Said functionality is the equivalent of AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions and Azure Function. While not the most exciting news, as I don’t include any additional benchmarks, it did lead to me
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It’s that time of year again, for not just a new version of Node.js, but for a new version of Ubuntu as well! Sadly though, my preferred method of installing Node.js on Ubuntu isn’t quite ready for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. That’s okay though, I don’t like to upgrade to a
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Running a command (script, program, et cetera) on a regularly timed interval can be accomplished a few different ways. One way, is to leverage the crontab utility, which schedules runs to run one or more times per day. While a fantastic utility, crontab can be a bit heavy at times,
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Docker containers are easily one of my favorite pieces of new technology of the last decade. They’ve immensely simplified how I work locally, no more virtual machines, no more trying to keep my local development environment and production servers in parity, and no need for command-line sloths like nvm. They’ve
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The landscape of Virtual Private Servers is ever changing and evolving. Gone are the days of providers offering just servers. Many providers offer a wide range of managed services in addition to traditional VPS offerings. Maybe I’m too much of an old dog, but I’m finding the more recent trend
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While I compare VPS hosting providers every month, I actually don’t my personal blog (this site) on a VPS anymore. Come to think of it, I don’t even remember if this particular iteration of my own private slice of the Internet has ever been on a VPS instance. I’ve definitely
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Admittedly, I rarely ever need to change the hostname of a system. I have my own standard naming convention that I use, and will set things up at the time of installation, never to be touched again. Recently with a new work machine, I deviated from said convention, and after
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Daily active users, also known as DAU, is the number of unique users that have interacted with a website or application in a given day. We’re going to discuss how to track this metric, in a language agnostic fashion. The concepts discussed and Redis commands utilized can be implemented in
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The biggest news this month is that Linode was recently acquired by Akamai Technologies for a whopping $900M. What that will do to the VPS landscape is yet to be seen. The most immediate impact I’ve noticed is that Linode is going to start charging sales tax in May. I
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About once a year or so, I go through my dotfiles and do some clean up. Usually around spring time, but also, usually after I discover some new hotness that I had not known about that I want to leverage. This year, it’s both. Spring is nearly in the air,
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From time to time, I see a search query that made it to my blog that piques my interest and inspires a post. This is one such post. How does one take an array (presumably in JavaScript) and display it in HTML? Now in this day in age, I would
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My continued love/hate relationship with Arch Linux continually yields topics to blog about. This week’s topic reared it’s head while attempting to perform an update after waiting a bit longer than I usually do, which yielded an error about one or more of the keys being “of unknown trust”. Like
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Around this time last year, we were dealing with one of the worst winter storms in Texas history. While it’s still pretty cold, we’ve been extremely fortunate this year. Hopefully everybody reading this is staying warm (or cool, if you’re south of the equator), safe and healthy! Similar to previous
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I’ve been attempting to move to a more regimented weekly to every other week update of my Arch Linux systems. In doing so, I’ve stopped blocking Kernel updates and rebooting a bit more frequently. Of course, due to the nature of Arch Linux, less frequent updates means more packages to
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While tmux is my daily driver for local terminal multiplexing, I still use GNU screen when I’m working on remote servers. The primary reason for this is to avoid nesting tmux sessions. I can use tmux locally, ssh to a remote server, start up a screen session and I’m off
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More and more services are adopting a “can’t scan the QR code” option that reveals the secret token. Some even go as far as offering up the secret token along side of the QR code. Others present you with the QR code and nothing more. Fortunately, those services seem to
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When splitting strings, the majority of the time, I don’t care about the separator (or delimiter), just the strings that exist between it. In JavaScript, that’s very simply with .split(): 'one,two,three,four,five'.split(','); Which will yield an array of strings like this: ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five'] Great! But if we want
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