April, 2017

Blog Brownout – Now back to full power

Blog Brownout – Now back to full power

Lately, visitors to this site were greeted with Cloudflare’s colorful little screen (see right) and the HTTP 502 error – Bad Gateway. Is there a harder error to debug? Maybe, but this one is up there, that’s for sure. It sent me into a minor panic as I didn’t have any site backups (plumbers pipes are always leaky!) and I could see a years worth of work quickly spiraling down the drain. I ascertained that some of the site was still working, especially the post URLs themselves which led me to roll out the old wget and create a script…

RIP – Farewell to a gentle giant

RIP – Farewell to a gentle giant

I was saddened to hear the news yesterday that my friend and old neighbor, David, had passed away after a long illness. I didn’t know him for a long time yet he had a positive impact on my life. When we moved into the housing estate in Hua Hin I spotted him in the garden one day and said hello (OK, so maybe it took a week or so after I heard that iconic Aussie accent.) My wife and I became friends with David and Shannon, his wife, who were our neighbors across the way and enjoyed some good times…

Phichit and Kanchanaburi

Phichit and Kanchanaburi

A busy Songkran this year – that time of the year when Thais like to splash water everywhere. While I did get a chance to unload a few rounds (ok, so it was just a water gun but who cares?) it was a wedding that took centre stage this year. Two of our good friends were getting married and we wanted to be there to share in their happy day, so made the trek north from Bangkok to Tapan Hin in Pichit province. After piling on to a bus at 11 AM we arrived around 4 PM, including a 20…

Arise Erebus

Arise Erebus

Remember how I said I’d never build another PC. Well, I lied. This may well be the last one though 😉 Hopefully. I need to build a new server, as running everything on the laptop is getting out of hand, and I’ve started to experience some kernel panics in the last month or so – not a good sign 🙁 Other than purchasing a new mid-tower case, I’m using parts I already have to look after the environment (just kidding – I’m broke!) I reckon it will take a few days, and it’s a project I’m attacking while the Mrs…

MySQL + utf-8 = A drama filled weekend

MySQL + utf-8 = A drama filled weekend

Exciting stuff for a Saturday, eh? The boss has been cracking the whip so have to put in some extra hours wherever I can If you’re working on the weekend you actually want it to be something interesting! There were a few things on the docket left over from the week – As I mentioned in a recent post, if you haven’t stumbled across utf-8 already, you soon will. I’ve come across two issues recently whereby chars weren’t rendering correctly an I needed to look under the hood. The more you delve into CS the greater the likelihood that you…

Debugging in WordPress

Debugging in WordPress

While working through a recent utf8 issue, I realised that I can’t stumble around in the dark anymore when it comes to debugging. Since I left the Window$ world I’ve been sans debugger and poorly written code has just cost me wasted time. Here’s what I’ve settled on using going forward. Your requirements may vary. WordPress debug settings and logging When the crap hits the fan, the first thing that you need is a log file. Without some type of an error message you are nowhere, believe me. I’m currently playing around with Papertrail as traversing mulitple files within the…