Adventures in IT

I've recently been playing with Docker on Windows in conjunction with Linux on Windows .  I'm really amazed at how cool the stuff coming out of Microsoft is under Satya Nadella.   When I was using Docker Toolbox on Windows my Dockerfiles would build correctly but as soon as I tried to run them in a Virtualbox host they would fail with the error " Something wicked happened resolving 'archive.ubuntu.com:http' (-5 - No address associated with hostname) " Of course this error wasn't distribution specific and none of the distros I tried were working. The stack that I am using is Windows Home hosting Ubuntu on VirtualBox which is running Docker.  I'm using bash on Linux for Windows because it's easier to do stuff like ssh but it's not relevant to this setup. I tried setting the DNS in the Docker setup by using RUN steps to update /etc/resolv.  This felt a bit hacky and didn't work anyway. In the end the fix was to go to my Window...

Image: Pixabay If integration tests take too long to run then we stop running them because they're just an annoyance.  This is obviously not ideal and so getting my tests to run quickly is important. I'm busy writing a test suite for Laravel and wanted more flexibility than the built-in options that Laravel offers for working with databases between tests. Using the DataMigrations trait meant that my seed data would be lost after every test.  Migrating and seeding my entire database for every test in my suite is very time consuming. Even when using an in-memory sqlite database doing a complete migration and seed was taking several seconds on my dev box. If I used the DataTransactions trait then my migrations and seeds would never run and so my tests would fail because the fixture data is missing. My solution was to use a static variable in the base TestCase class that Laravel supplies.  It has to be static so that it retains its values between tests by the wa...

Image: Pixabay Implementing a checkbox that lets the user "select all of the above" is trivial with jQuery. The idea is that when the user selects the "all" checkbox then all of the other checkboxes are set to the same value. Similarly if they deselect any of the other options we need to turn off the "all" checkbox.

Image: Pixabay I've been somewhat of a Bitcoin sceptic for quite some time.  When it first became a thing I was worried that governments would legislate it out of existence. It has had a pretty bad rap of being associated with the dark web and it is definitely the choice of currency for malware authors. In its normal usage Bitcoin is more transparent than cash.  If I give you a cash note there is no permanent record of the transaction and the tax man can't get a sniff into our business. Governments hate transactions they can't tax or police and so in the beginning there was a concern that Bitcoin would be outlawed. In contrast to cash, if I transfer you Bitcoin then there is a record of the transaction that anybody in the world can inspect.  It's possible to trace the coins in your Bitcoin wallet back through the various people who owned them.  Anybody in the world can watch the contents of your wallet and see where you spend your money. This is exactly...

Image: https://boinc.berkeley.edu, fair use BOINC is a program curated by the University of Berkeley that allows people around the world to contribute to science projects.   It works by using spare cycles from your computer to perform calculations that help do things like folding proteins to find candidates for cancer treatment, mapping the milky way galaxy, searching for pulsar stars, and improving our understanding of climate change and its effects. It runs as a background process and is easily configured to only run in certain conditions - like when you haven't used your computer for 10 minutes for example. It comes with a nifty GUI manager and for most people using it on their desktop this post is not going to be at all relevant.  This post deals with the case where a person is running it on a server without the GUI manager. Anyway, the easiest solution I found to restarting BOINC on a headless server was to use supervisord .  It's pretty muc...

My Vagrant 1.7.2 machine bugged out and when I tried to `vagrant up` it spawned a new box instead of bringing up my existing machine. Naturally this was a problem because I had made some manual changes to the config that I hadn't had a chance to persist to my puppet config files yet. To fix the problem I found used the command ` VBoxManage list vms ` in the directory where my Vagrantfile is.  This provided me a list of the machine images it could find. I then went and edited the file at .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id and replaced the UUID that was in there with the one that the VBoxManage command had output. Now when I run 'vagrant up' it spins up the correct VM.  Happy days.

Image: Pixabay Although I'm currently playing with Elixir and its HTTP servers like Cowboy at the moment Nginx is still my go-to server for production PHP. If you haven't already swapped your web-server from Apache then you really should consider installing Nginx on a test server and running some stress tests on it.  I wrote about stress testing in my book on scaling PHP . Redirecting non-www traffic to www in nginx is best accomplished by using the "return" verb.  You could use a rewrite but the Nginx manual suggests that a return is better in the section on " Taxing Rewrites ". Server blocks are cheap in Nginx and I find it's simplest to have two redirects for the person who arrives on the non-secure non-canonical form of my link.  I wouldn't expect many people to reach this link because obviously every link that I create will be properly formatted so being redirected twice will only affect a small minority of people. Anyway, here's...