Blog
VPS Showdown - August 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr
It's that time again! Been extremely busy on my end, so it's more of the same at the moment in terms of what's covered. Something notable that I had missed last month is that UpCloud is now offering managed database [...]
How to kill a query on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Coming from MySQL / MariaDB, I was surprised that I couldn't kill a query on an Amazon's Relational Database Service or Amazon Aurora with the kill command. Fortunately, the functionality isn't omitted, it' just buried under some AWS RDS specific [...]
Setting an authorization header when using file_get_contents with PHP
Going through some of my old lists of blog post ideas this weekend. While it's not something I've needed for a minute, it's still something worth taking about. How to set an authorization header when using PHP's wonderful file_get_contents() method [...]
How to push an empty git commit
We've all been there. We need to trigger something from a commit to a git repository, and instead of triggering the build directly, we end up tweaking something in a file, committing it, and pushing it. It's usually just adding [...]
VPS Showdown - July 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr
I got a few bits of feedback recently that I took into consideration before doing this month's benchmarks. The first bit was to include some additional price points and plan types instead of just the $5 plan. The other (opposing) [...]
Migrating from aws ecr get-login to aws ecr get-login-password
I'm not entirely sure when the change happens, but recently as I was upgrading AWS CodeBuilds to use a newer version of Ubuntu, I ran into some problems with aws ecr get-login. Without making any code changes, my build started [...]
Get original URL from Bitly link
It's been a while since I've actively engaged with a URL shortener, but recently I started to receive some text messages that contained Bitly links. The messages were phishing scams related to Coinbase, with a Bitly URL attached. Presumably, the [...]
Using find with symbolic links
Symbolic links, or symlinks come in handy when you need to share directories with multiple directories and not have to worry about keeping each linked instance in sync. The problem with symlinks is that not every command-line utility supports them [...]
yay: error while loading shared libraries: libalpm.so.12
One of my favorite things about Arch Linux is the Arch User Repository (AUR). It's a community maintained collection of packages for just about every damn thing you may want or need. One of my least favorite things about Arch [...]
VPS Showdown - June 2021 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr
Have had some requests for some comparisons of different plans (like the dedicated CPU offerings) and different price points, but considering it's the last month of the quarter, I figured I would just stay the course and stick to the [...]