Blog

Here you will find an assortment of posts, tips, brain dumps and my personal reference materials. Some of the posts such as Unix tools are a collection of mini-posts which will keep growing over time.

Upgrading an unsupported Ubuntu

Upgrading Natty (11.04) the same should apply to other upgrades. I use Rackspace which replaces the default apt repositories with its own mirrors. Once a Ubuntu becomes unsupported Rackspace removes the repository and installing any software results in 404 errors. First backup the entire server as an image. $ cp /etc/apt/sources.list ~/sources.list.backu

19/06/2013

Remote secure storage

Two methods of creating remote secure storage which you control.

14/02/2013

Increase shell startup time dramatically when using rbenv

My shell was taking 2 seconds to start, after a bit of commenting out in .zshrc I narrowed it down to the `rbenv init -`. Some Google time later I found that rbenv rehashes all gem during the init process and this can be stopped by changing it to `rbenv init - --no-rehash`. I also took the time to remove oh-my-zsh plugins I didn't use very often and change my theme to `miloshad

04/02/2013

Running specs using an in memory database in Rails 3

This is a simple way to run specs using an in-memory SQLite3 database in Rails 3. After doing this the time to run our specs reduced, however a couple of specs are failing when using an in memory database. I'm not sure why yet, hence I'm using a ENV var to switch between file and memory SQLite database.

29/01/2013

Coding "home away from home" on MacOS

How to SSH in to your office machine from a remote location using DDNS, Port forwarding and Wake on LAN.

02/01/2013

Using a PS3 controller to play Super MeatBoy on MacOS

Using a PS3 controller to play Super MeatBoy on MacOS using GamePad Companion.

02/12/2012

Getting Alfresco Share working in an iframe in IE7

Solving "Cookie Disabled" error in IE7 when using Alfresco share in an iframe. Using P3P headers.

30/11/2012

Accessing Piratebay on Virgin Media

Virgin Media now blocks access to Piratebay, but if you have a server (e.g Rackspace/EC2 etc.) then you can create a SSH tunnel to that server and use it to proxy your HTTP traffic.

23/11/2012

Protecting non-HTTPS connections on a public network

If you are using a public network, e.g a cafe, then you can listen to everyones HTTP traffic quite easily and snoop passwords and usernames from logins to non-SSL websites. Just fire up Wireshark in promiscuous mode to find out.

11/11/2012

Fresh Mac Install

Installing a development environment of MacOS

20/08/2012