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Solving Docker’s ‘wait for database’ problem - 22 Nov 2019 Cloud  Docker 

One of the problems very familar to anyone doing anything with Docker is that of knowing when a service has become available. If you’re working with Kubernetes, then there are various probes that solve the problem there, but for some reason this has never been solved fully in Docker as such. They are aware it’s…

Hacktoberfest 2019 - 23 Oct 2019

It’s October, so once again it’s Hacktoberfest! This is an annual Open Source event, held since 2014 in the month of October. For the first one, it was just Digitalocean saying ‘do 50 commits on public repositories in October and we’ll send you a t-shirt‘. 676 people signed up, and 505 achied the goal. After…

Wasted potential of The Turing Test - 13 Oct 2019 Gaming  Pontification 

I’ve been playing the Turing Test recently. No, not the test of machine intelligence, the game named after it

Parochial: working around limits on DLNA players - 30 Sep 2019 Python  Tools 

A little while ago we acquired a internet-connected radio for our kitchen. We intended on using it for a variety of it’s capabilities, and my particular interest was it’s DLNA support. I figured I’d just be able to point it at my music collection and it would all be fine right? laughs  As I’m writing…

Strife: Using OAuth to make a Discord profile page - 30 Aug 2019 Howto  Python 

I’ve written an app (Strife) to provide Discord profile pages, but I’m surprised no-one had already done so, so I’m going to show you how I did it. I’ve started using Discord recently, and I was surprised that there was no way to link to a users profile. You can search for profiles inside the…

Building a GuixSD Vagrant box - 20 Jul 2019 DevOps  Tools 

I’ve been curious about the use of declarative mechanisms for creating operating systems for some time. In contrast to most configuration management tools which say certain things that will be true and let everything else do what it likes (particular packages will be installed, particular services in a named state, etc), declarative mechanisms declare the…

Lego Telepresence bot: how not to try and build one - 26 Jun 2019

Four years ago, I built a Dalek-based telepresence bot (part 1, part 2), and I’d been idly thinking for some time that what I really needed to do was make a better follow-up, as a much better one could probably be done with Lego Mindstorms especially given the existence of the BrickPi board for interfacing…

Vellere: exposing Github vulnerability notifications to Slack - 24 May 2019 Python  Tools 

A few years ago, Github introduced vulnerability alerts on repositories and although it was initially just for Javascript and Ruby, they’ve since expanded it to Python, Java and .Net and I’m guessing more languages are also on their roadmap. It’s a useful feature, except for one problem: it’s notifications are poorly implemented. They appear to…

AWS Lambda and Actix: easy conversion of small web apps into serverless - 23 Apr 2019 Cloud  Rust  Tools 

I’ve been idly considering the uses of serverless computing, and I’m still not convinced it’s worth it. I’ve used it before, mostly as a means to make things happen in response to AWS events, but the pattern everyone talks about is using them to run web apps, and I’m not fully convinced about that. However,…

On the value of maintenance - 13 Mar 2019

Most of our posts here talk about new software, but there’s also a lot of value in the longer-term maintenance of code and given I’ve done some of that recently, I thought it worth revisiting various earlier projects in that light. None of these are really large enough to have their own post, but collectively…

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