With apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche.1 The title of one of Nietsche's early essays is On the use and abuse of history for life As an occasional developer, generally just scripting, hacks, and sysadmin stuff, and of course troubleshooting WordPress js/css/php, Node has entered my daily life in the form of the Atom editor, and now ... Read more
Release Cycles and Lifecycles of software (and hardware) are interesting. How these releases are structured, who does them, and the planning and development process is fascinating from a rollout-of-features perspective. Development release cycles can also be applied to services. Operating System Release Cycles Of course we know how Microsoft is getting into trouble with their ... Read more
This page is for ongoing issues and awesomeness that is ImageMagick As of early May 2016, there is a big exploit out there called ImageTragick, but a recent patched version should help. The main fix is to edit the /etc/ImageMagick/policy.xml to include: ## Installing ImageMagick on CentOS sudo yum install -y gcc php-devel php-pear sudo ... Read more
Looking at recent data, what I see is the death of Firefox and Internet Explorer. Too bad for the former (you had your chance), and expected for the latter (and no, Edge isn't showing any real adoption rate). One surprise is how Safari is showing uptake on the Mac platform. I find this browser basically ... Read more
My air conditioner died a few days ago and while it is a bit uncomfortable (I’m in Thailand and it is the hot season, so it gets up to around 34c in the office), it is insufferable to work when a 90 thread kernel process has 90% of the processor. It is really hard to ... Read more
For when your wifi breaks down and all you have is an ethernet port on your DSL, and a Mac Mini. Not so bad, but it does keep the fan running and eat up the processor. Good for short term (ship out the broken wifi router, get replacement). Limitations of Internet Sharing on OSX Only ... Read more
See also discussion of WebP Note I no longer use OSX but instead Debian 9 Linux, and therefore have switched to the Trimage image compressor GUI which works well much of the time. When it doesn't I resort to ImageMagick. A recent post from one of my favorite blogs, the Tips-and-Tricks-HQ people spurred this response. ... Read more
Email signatures are those bits of text below the closing of a message and the name of the sender. They can be pretty crazy, or non-existent (which is worse). I've seen misspellings and other indicators of ineptitude. One of the worst types of infractions is when lawyers are involved, and legal disclaimers are appended to ... Read more
There is quite a bit of functionality that a bot can provide these days, as a first class account on various communication tools. It is time to seriously consider the value that a bot can provide for learning and tutoring. In particular, while things like Ok Google, Hey Siri and Microsoft's Hey Cortana. These are ... Read more
The great work of so many organizations are directing consumers and devops to weave crypto through everything: every communication, transaction, and interaction in the digital, as well as offline world. Why? Well because there are no functional legal rights currently present in all countries regarding the search and seizure of devices and the hacking and ... Read more