January, 2017

Crafting Beer

Crafting Beer

“It was a beer that just might have tipped me into taking that road less travelled, writing about beer,” Willie Simpson on Burragorang Bock. To say I enjoy a beer is something of an understatement – and I’ve always put flavour ahead of price. Enter craft brewing. Maybe that’s why I’m broke. I reckon I’ve spent half of what I’ve earned in my lifetime on beer – the rest I’ve wasted (*hat tip to WC Fields*) I’ve drunk my fair share of VB’s and Crown Lagers, but given the chance I prefer knocking back something a little higher up the…

Point and Shoot

Point and Shoot

I’ll never be the sort of person who spends thousands of dollars on a camera. Never going to happen. As much as I might covert my neighbors Nikon, I can’t see myself ever owning one. Having said that, I have reached the point where I am becoming more interested in photography, and I think the reason for that is this blog! Having an outlet for my photos has fostered something inside of me, wanting to learn more about photography in general and sparked a desire to take better photos. Interesting. Cannon IXUS 80 I figure that I’ve had my Canon…

Koh Samed revisited

Koh Samed revisited

Just got back from a few days away recharging the batteries at Koh Samed. As I mentioned before, it’s a great little getaway within reach from Bangkok. On previous visits I never gave the camera much of a workout, but this time the occasion was a good friends wedding so I had no excuse not to punish the pixels. We made an early start out of the capital and trod the well worn path to the Ekkamai bus station before purchasing return bus/ferry combo tickets and settling back for the trip down to Ban Phe pier. By early afternoon we…

All hail Linus Torvalds

All hail Linus Torvalds

I’m a big fan of Linux, so a shout out to Linus Torvalds is in order for throwing it together. Love his work, and to think that it all started for him with a VIC-20. Such pedigree. I use Ubuntu now but started out with Red Hat. I recall emailing some guy working at NASA for help with a network driver. That’s the sort of community that drives loyalty, folks. I also had a contracting position with IBM Global Services where I had to manage a bunch of Lotus Notes servers that were running on top of AIX. Ah, those…

Updating TTRSS feeds

Updating TTRSS feeds

The final step after getting ttrss1 up and running is to schedule a regular update of the feeds. It’s worth taking a look at the official documentation before proceeding. Trust Me. Updating Feeds 101 The procedure update.php handles the ttrss feed updates from the PHP CLI. It supports a number of options, most of which you are unlikely to ever need to use. Options: –feeds – update feeds –feedbrowser – update feedbrowser –daemon – start single-process update daemon –task N – create lockfile using this task id –cleanup-tags – perform tags table maintenance –quiet – don’t output messages to stdout…

Monday Mourning

Monday Mourning

Happy Monday bitchez! Surely you can here the Boomtown Rats song screaming their way out of the boombox? Productivity is a funny thing, especially as a coder or developer. The concept of ‘flow’ is being in this Utopian space where the work essentially just flows out of you and productivity soars. It’s a great place to be when you’ve got a lot on your plate, but somewhat paradoxically, the more you want it the harder it is to find. In that spirit, I’ve discovered over the years that Mondays are my least productive work days, so I either try and…

Tiny Tiny RSS Migration

Tiny Tiny RSS Migration

♦ Nothing is simple. You learn that after a few decades in IT. All you can see are the tops of icebergs. Tiny Tiny RSS Tiny Tiny RSS (ttrss) is a fantastic application and tends to work flawlessly, once installed. I’ll repeat that last part – once installed, as installation often comes with a few challenges. It has been embraced after the demise of Google Reader and has an extensive user base. Software Engineers oversee another Tiny-Tiny RSS installation ttrss is comprised of a php front-end and can connect to either a MySQL or PostgreSQL db backend. I favour the…

Wat Chao Arm

Wat Chao Arm

It was a rainy Sunday when we decided to head to Bangkok Noi to vist Wat Chao Arm. The sky was dark and the weather unseasonably cool. Bangkok on the whole felt a little angry. Hopefully the gods could be appeased with our visit. Were I catholic I would have to confess that it had been some time since my last confession, if you get my drift. First order of business was some fuel in the belly. Off to our favorite Dim Sum for a big feed that set us back a whopping 280 THB. Yum yum! The taxi ride…

Woeful Wifi

Woeful Wifi

The condo in which I live flogs wifi for THB 350 a month and has a few access points on every floor. Try as I might, however, I can not get a decent connection in terms of stability or signal strength. When I lived in Hua Hin, I had a cable modem attached to a wifi router that worked great and cost about 800 THB per month – just not possible to replicate that setup where I am now. Sigh. I wasted a few days last week trying to sort out my wifi issues. I have an old router lying…

SSH using WinPutty

SSH using WinPutty

I’m somewhere in the midst of a server migration for a project I’m working on, and it’s a Saturday 🙁 I really wish that I had documented this the first time round. Not doing so has left me with a sense of deja vu and frustration. If nothing else, this blog serves as a useful journal along the tech highway. Install WinPuTTY I have both WinPuTTY and Pageant.exe working under Wine. Here are some breadcrumbs: Download the Win32 apps and place them somewhere under your home folder Create new KDE icons: Run kmenuedit and copy/paste/modify an existing entry to point…