BigSmoke

Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

Page 7 of 52

The terrible state of my tech

July 18, 2017 /

It’s a bit pathethic how well I have been taking care of my own tech. ever since I started studying. What’s worse: this haven’t improved when I stopped my studies for other ventures. I think the reason for this is exceedingly simple: I don’t like to do work-like things I don’t write about; luckily, I love to structure my goals in writing, and this blog still hasn’t completely collapsed under my neglect.

If I love writing about stuff I do, have I simply not done anything in the past few years? Well, I’ve done things. I’ve even written about them too, in other places, mostly on paper. It’s just that, dispite working for a tech company for the last couple of years, I have done hardly a thing about ridding myself of my private technical debt. Or is it because of working at a tech company, where I’m hard at work fighting technical debts in Python/Django projects and documenting the progress in Redmine?

I won’t mention the reasons why I want to spend time on this weird, hodgy-podgy blog again. Let me just say that the main motivation is not guilt for having created a technical debt. And the actual reasons are better suited for other posts at another time.

Domain Problem Short-term fix Mid-term fix Long-term fix
blog.bigsmoke.us Spam ✔ 2017-07-18 Disable comments and ping/trackbacks on new posts.
✔ 2017-07-18 Disable comments and ping/trackbacks on old posts.
✔ 2017-07-19 Remove spam.
Security Upgrade WordPress svn:external Automatically upgrade WordPress
www.bigsmoke.us Non-responsive Make responsive
Outdated ✔ 2018-10-28 Reduce and update content
* Huge hosting costs Find sinkhole between my NFSN accounts ✔ 2019-01-26Move to cheapsolid VM host (TransIP? Tilaa)
blog.omega-research.org Security Move personal posts to blog.bigsmoke.us and replace with redirects
Replace blog with static rendering of blog
opschoot Wheezy fan Replace or re-attach fan.
Neglected backups Backup monitoring: opschoot should register itself when online and I should then be nagged if I don’t backup.
butler Legacy Move files somewhere else (public?)

Fixing the Firefox file dialogs in Linux Mint (17)

February 23, 2017 /

For a few months now, the file dialogs (open, save, etc) in Firefox on Linux Mint 17 KDE malfunctioned. Clicks didn’t go through and/or were interpreted as drags. I finally figured out that it was caused by the Oxygen KDE theme.

So, I installed mint-themes-gtk3 and chose Mint-X as my theme.

It is now fixed.

Fixing hanging and slow Windows Update on Windows 7

November 17, 2016 /

Windows 7 update service is slow to begin with, but trying it on a computer that has been off for a while is damn near impossible. This is a known issue, apparently.

You need KB3172605 to fix it.

Then supposedly, to make Windows Update faster, you can install KB2852386 to be able to remove old updates with the cleanup wizard. But, the option to remove unneeded Windows Update files never appeared for me.

Sources:

Recent posts on the YTEC blog

June 27, 2016 /

Ytec, where I work since July 31 2015, is an IT company specializing in customer-specific custom software (“klantspecifieke maatwerk software“). Somewhere in late 2015, YTEC deployed a fancy new website based on React, which, to my surprise, is actually indexed somewhat decently by Google. Still, I want to be able to find my own posts on the YTEC blog when I filter by “site:blog.bigsmoke.us”, which is why I’m listing my posts there here:

  1. I contributed on a post about developing apps with React Native. Later, I might post some more about the pros and cons of using regular React in combination with Django.
  2. I wrote a post about the advantages of snapshot isolation, which was prompted by my being annoyed with all the problems caused by the Exact Globe ERP not supporting snapshot isolation for MS SQL Server.

Sending mail from a NATed host with Postfix

June 3, 2016 /

When sending mail from a host behind NAT, you will run into trouble when the “From” says “root@host.localdomain”, because receiving servers will refuse that domain.

I’m not quite sure why, but setting myorigin used to be enough. Now I need to do this in main.cf:

# For when you have a host behind NAT that is refusing to 
# use hostname.realdomain.net as specified as origin.
# You can test with: 
# postmap -q "fubar@hostname.somelocaldomain" regexp:/etc/postfix/sender_canonical
sender_canonical_maps = regexp:/etc/postfix/sender_canonical

And in sender_canonical:

/^(.*@)host.*$/     ${1}hostname.realdomain.net

Or more generic:

/^(.*@.*\.)company$/     ${1}company.nl

And as usual, I use a relay host.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 BigSmoke

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑