I fancied a desktop clock for my elementary builds. I found cairo-clock, which has a bunch of default themes and a bunch of add-ons also. It can be obtained via the package managers; I found this, as the package documentation.
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Unicode in Python
It’s a very long time since I have had to deal with binary code translations, but when dealing with HTML and JSON with Python, I need to get to grips with it. The € symbol for instance requires the extended character set support and rss should be written in utf-8. This page collects the notes…
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Web Site Testing with MaxQ
MAXQ is a web proxy with recording and replay features. It is designed to capture and replay tests. They are quite keen that one understands the terms of use of target sites since many prohibit automated access and these days it would seem defend themselves against it. This article documents how to run MaxQ and…
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Data Flow Diagrams
How useful are the old fashioned data flow diagrams in today’s world, in particular how useful are they in demonstrating process flow? They showed the relationship between external entities (actors), functions/processes, data stores and data flows.
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Converting dates to strings using Python
While working on converting ello.json to rss, I needed to convert the date formats, I needed to do it in Python and found the following code worked, using strptime and strfmtime. I had to augment the date string with the name of the day of the week attribute, so felt it had to via a…
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RSS from JIRA
For those of us for whom email is a bit passé, we want to recieve our Jira updates using feeds, either because it allows us to choose our browser, or for other reasons. I hope the following links help.
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SPARQL on WordPress
For various reasons I needed to look at SPARQL again. What’s the easiest way to put it up?, Here! I’ve been working with LH-Tools which is commented on at its authors site, and LH-RDF. I did not get this to finish satisfactorily, mainly based on my lack of SPARQL skills. May 2015 I returned to…
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Date Differences in Excel
I was looking to calculate if someone was under 27 years old; this can Be quite tricky but excel has just the function, =DATEDIF().
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Disqus and Ghostery
Disqus needs to be whitelisted in Ghostery for it to work properly. (I have white listed the site rather than approved the specific cookies/trackers). It can stop you performing the login.
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VLOOKUP vs INDEX ( MATCH)
How awesome is this! Excel =INDEX, is a matrix retrieve i.e. =INDEX(array, row, col) retrieves an entry from the two dimensional array. If we combine this with MATCH which returns a row number we can use these functions instead of =VLOOKUP, its allegedly faster too. MATCH operates on a column or linguistically a list.
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notify-send
While installing docker, I decided I needed to write some notifications to ensure the configuration works. See Docker. I started with a TCL/TK script, which these days looks a bit old school, and writing the packer was (& remains) difficult. Virtualbox reports its status on Ubuntu via a very pretty interface, prettier than Apple script…
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My little mail server
What a pile of poo! I have access to four smtp servers and they all have limits on the distribution list size! (They are all about the same size of 100). Google will allow 2000 per list but only if you use one of their clients. Let’s try and bring up an SMTP server, connect…
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Planet, mingle & wordpress
While developing the new web site, I had a look at how my mingle was organised. The current regime has a conversion rules file for each output format and one for HTML. I need to incorporate the HTML output in a wordpress page and also apply the wordpress style rules to the HTML. I solved…
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Managing Docker with Panamax & Vagrant
I got distracted and was pointed at Kitematic, but it’s Mac only and so I moved on to Panamax. I am not sure this is for me, but we’ll see and I am still not clear that the answer isn’t shipyard.
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Docker
About Docker, looks awesome. Easy to create bootable, runnable images, easy to deploy because the global hub site is a crucial part of the proposition. The free usage of the hub, encourages the publication and sharing of images which are then imported over the internet. Originally written the summer of 2015, and revised in the…
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