Development

One of my projects during my vacation has been to take back control of my data. The question of online privacy is a difficult one, because while there’s some things you can do to improve your privacy, to really own your data takes a lot of effort and learning. For most people, hosting their own services is more headache than it’s worth. There’s a lot of good privacy-conscious services out there if you’re willing to pay, but most people are not willing to pay. The convenience trumps the privacy concerns, and for me it has been that way for a long time as well. ...

I’ve been on a serious docker/aws kick recently. I’ve learned just enough that it drives me to play with it. I spent a lot of my free time on it this week, and didn’t spend as much as I’d like on learning Albanian… This could be a problem… Anyways I might as well post more about what I’ve learned. I’ve been wanting to make my web server more robust, to where if it dies for whatever reason I don’t have to do anything, it’ll come back on a new instance all on its own. Unfortunately that’s a bit more difficult than you’d expect. Lots of moving parts. ...

I had some time off today so I decided to revisit how I’m hosting all my stuff. One of my issues with using Amazon’s container service is that they make you assign resource values to each container, and those are not flexible. So, I have to give each container high enough memory that it won’t die, but then I run out of space on my server real quick. Since most of the stuff I want to host just sits idle the majority of the time, this wasn’t ideal for me. ...

Here’s another technical post for y’all! I had some time this past weekend, so I took a look into the website I made a year ago for Reclaimed. The old version was made with Locomotive CMS, and hosted on Locomotive hosting. It was a good choice at the time, because we needed something fast. We wanted to deploy it before the 2015 super bowl. I’d previously looked into moving it to Wordpress or Drupal, but that would basically require redoing the whole site. More work than I’m willing to put in. But, just this past weekend, Locomotive v3 came out. I decided to try hosting it myself, because $20/mo is just a bit too much to be paying for a simple website like this. Plus, it would be fun! (or so I thought.) ...

Locked out! I managed to lock myself out of my EC2 instance when I was managing my keys. So in order to update my blog, I had to deploy it to a new EC2 instance. I decided to take the opportunity to improve the way I’m deploying new versions of my site. Note: This will be a technical post. If you’re following along with my adventure in Albania, you can skip this one. ...

So I wanted an app server. How hard could it be right? Well, not really that hard at all. I was tired of having a static site served by apache. I want to do some cool stuff with the google APIs, like maybe a form submit where the results end up in a google doc for me. To do that I need more than hugo’s static site generation. But I didn’t want to get rid of hugo because I like a lot of it’s features, so I added nodejs on top of it as the application server. ...

I’m using locomotivecms for a project I’m working on, and it uses ImageMagick for resizing pictures on the fly. The standard instructions say to use the bitnami Ruby stack installer to get everything you need in a nice neat bundle. That worked for me for a while, until I needed to update the version of ruby I’m using. So, I went through the long and painful process of uninstalling the ruby stack, installing each component individually, identifying and correcting a ton of minor problems, and finally squashed the last bug by writing this program. ...

I decided to use Amazon EC2 to host the blog, because they give you 1 year free on a micro instance. Plus I’ve always wanted to learn how to host something on Amazon’s cloud. I’ll get a linux instance and put an Apache HTTP server on it. Should be easy enough to do. Here’s my EC2 management console after signing up for an Amazon account and creating a linux micro instance:  ...

Well, here it is. I’ve been wanting to create a blog for a while. I don’t know what it will look like in the future, or how often I’ll update it, but as I sit here writing it it’s kind of cathartic. It would be good to get some thoughts out there, and if anybody reads it that’s a bonus. I want to talk about anything and everything on this blog. I’ll delve into my work, hopefully some of these pages will be useful when another developer types some obscure error code into google. I’ll discuss my faith, hopefully that could spark some interesting discussion. I’ll discuss the important stuff that happens in my life, hopefully someone might find it interesting. ...