Times displayed on this blog are in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time)
In fact I am quite interested in what I am working on, and am happy to be learning new things. Unfortunately, not sleeping well, and other frustrations, have marred my enjoyment of my current circumstances. Still, I will prevail.
While it once might have been said that I had a few screws loose, nowadays I am not only getting things done, I am thinking clearly and coherently (except when exhausted of course, but that is to be expected). I’ve also been too busy to spend too much time on politics or news and all the things that I cannot change.
For Power BI, if your data source does not already have a date dimension table, Microsoft strongly recommends adding one in Power Query M-code. Here we show how to do that for a fiscal year date table.
There can be only one!
Dropped one site and merged the other two.
A little personal creativity diversion from the technical/professional content of this blog.
I finished the second week of my new job! Though I did contract work for the same company a week before the holidays, at a very needed moment. So, I will have worked with them for three weeks, now.
As planned, this site’s theme has been updated. There remains a proper landing page to add and re-branding to do.
My personal reset has been a success. I’m back on track with my training, my contract is going well, and my web presence refresh is making good progress.
Main content restructuring is now complete. To do is changing the theme, and later branding.
In the first step in getting this website into more professional shape, several articles have been pruned.
Got a bit off track, so resetting and in the process doing a web presence refresh. That includes removing some cruft from this site.
I have achieved CompTIA A+ · ce certification, which is step one of my return-to-work plan. I’ve also been making progress on other fronts.
Bing chat fails to reason about who owns Princes and Madmen blog (me) and outright lies and claims that “Princes and Madmen” is a book written by Matthew Weiner.
Since I forgot to mention it before: I am a recipient of a 2023 O’Reilly DEIJ scholarship. I am also very close to official tests of my knowledge. And no, technology really doesn’t change that much.
Both this site’s homes have been moved to different hosting. That is both the code and web hosting have changed. OVH is the new CDN and web host and GitHub stores the source code.
A quick change of the contact form backend turns into learning more about Markdown and Hugo, not to mention using a new provider.
Some updates on my training and paid work opportunities. (They’ve come through!). Maybe even a little bit too much at once.
When using markdownlint-cli/markdownlint-cli2 or the vscode-markdownlint extension for VSCode, one may wish to ignore a particular line. Here is a cheap way to do that using a shortcode.
markdownlint-cli/markdownlint-cli2
vscode-markdownlint
I’ve made yet more improvements to this website, but you should check out a high quality site built using Hugo,by an extremely helpful web professional.
A recent storm in which lightning struck rather close to my residence, and fried various bits of networking equipment, caused a whole different type of migratory nerding.
Having a demo/test site embedded in a Hugo module causes large bandwidth consumption during its normal use as a module. We split the site and module into separate git repos, but keep a deploy as part of the CI process.
While all my websites now look very different than a month or two ago, the content hasn’t changed very much. On the flip side, I’ve moved my hosting back to Netlify and MS365, and my professional life is on the move.
About a month ago I replaced the theme of this site. Over the course of the past two weeks I have taken that a step further and greatly enhanced the base Zen theme for Hugo. I have named the result the DFD-Zen theme.
This ‘migratory nerd’ has moved back to OVH for hosting. [2023-07-11: And recently, have done so yet again, after visiting Netlify for a while]
In code, choosing spaces over tabs creates accessibility barriers. The developer ‘Holy Wars’ ignore this, so this article explains the issue.
Besides removing all the cover images on the site, you may have noticed the change in logos, colours, and various other details. Here’s what that is all about.
“… each of my posts has usually sported a big ol’ hero image as the background… That, too, has been limiting and even delaying, even if only as a lame excuse on my part.
This site now lives on an Alpine instance via Vultr.com public cloud. No more Azure Storage Blob web hosting (Microsoft) for me. And though it wasn’t a financial decision, I save money! [2023-07-11] I went all purist open source, for a few months.
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted in a long time: “I have been up to tech!” I’ve created and updated quite a few projects.
When using Docker to containerize internal services like Samba, LLMNR, or mDNS a.k.a Bonjour one may find that the standard Docker model of using specific unicast ports forwards, is insufficient.
With browsers having built-in “Open link in new tab” functionality, it doesn’t make sense to break a basic web idiom (the back button) on a whim. Auto-opening link in a new tab/window breaks the back button and is unnecessary (because users have the ability to make that choice for themselves).
How Artificial Intelligence can win at board games.
Setting up an email relay that aliases addresses in various domains to a specific offsite user doesn’t have to mean backscatter. Here is one solution.
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the last few years is to relax and let others do what they do better than I.
About a member of the Mancala family of games known as Oware or Wari, with a look at an old Commodore 64 version as well as modern versions.
This is true despite the fact that I am moving my websites (including this one) away from OVHcloud and/or self-hosting, and am making a shift to using Microsoft 365. Some will never believe that nor accept what I have to say about it, but for me it’s the right decision.
While our internal tests (using private data that would need to be replaced with dummy data) of a full config were successful, frustrations with ‘our’ OpenStack hosting provider has led to the conclusion that it’s not a viable cloud alternative for us.
At some point you may need to upsize your PostgreSQL server, particular if you have implemented one on a old Raspberry Pi.
You may realize that you really wish you could start the Nextcloud instance from scratch without the hassle of a reinstall.
Setting up your own local Nextcloud can be useful for a number of reasons.
The Intel NUC (and boards based on the same SoC) are quite powerful for their price point, and use less electricity than even a mini tower.
This article describes setting up a Raspberry Pi Model B+ as a private Gitea (lightweight Git hosting) server.
Raspberry Pi Model B+ as a PostgreSQL server with external storage.
I was tired excessive bot traffic spamming my logs, so I learned how to reduce the noise in my logs.
So far the upshot of this is to not expect a simple Export/Import process with WordPress, especially when it comes to the Media Library, if one wants to rebuild a site at the same domain, rather than a domain move, with the previous domain still active.
… that got me interested in the question, “How long before one reaches the break even point on the purchase of a residence compared to a lease?”
Linux LVM thin pools and volumes initially seem to be a great way maximize the use of hard drive space by using only the space that is actually allocated to files. There is a major fly in the ointment though. Thin pools cannot be reduced in size.
Uses the basic principles of radioactive dating and combines them with advanced isotope measurements to obtain very precise results from small samples.
If my feed was showing me what ’engaged’ me why did I get fed up and leave? There are several parts to the answer, but an important piece is that Facebook’s algorithm is largely an uncontrolled ‘positive feedback loop’.
Public git self hosting can be desirable. Here we discuss a very lightweight alternative.
We need mandatory third party security and privacy audits to matter as much to directors and shareholders as financial audits.
You may find yourself in need of a ‘bare metal’ server. If the workload is not too demanding, a Raspberry Pi can be a good choice.
… was an interesting exercise as the original report was written in DocBook, but an older version (3.x; the SGML variant) than is readily available nowadays.
For small deployments the Raspberry Pi is for servers.
A guide to configuring a static web server using Lighttpd on CentOS 7
CentOS 7 has been a stable and reliable choice for VPS servers. This guide shows how to install it on an OVH VPS (Virtual Private Server)
For your self-hosted systems there are likely hosts you don’t want internet-connected, but you still want to be able to do package installs and updates.
Often you don’t need a full mirror of CentOS and/or EPEL, so we give a working example of a partial mirror and custom repository setup.
A strange idea came to me in conversation the other day, namely that my schizophrenia helps me understand what it must be like to be Prince William.