Recent Posts
A selection of recent articles that cover technical topics, book reviews and projects that I am working on or have worked on. Use the menu to explore sections that you are interested in or try using the Search feature |
A selection of recent articles that cover technical topics, book reviews and projects that I am working on or have worked on. Use the menu to explore sections that you are interested in or try using the Search feature |
They say that fashion trends come and go in cycles before returning again at some point in the future. You could argue that the same is also true for websites and the technology used to build them. In the 1990’s, websites were created using offline applications that generated all the site’s HTML pages which were then uploaded to a webserver to be served to users' browsers. Later this model evolved to one in which the website pages were generated “on the fly” using server side technologies like Microsoft’s ASP Pages, PHP or Java’s Servlet/JSP frameworks....
Everyone needs email… itʼs what enables us to receive communications from e-commerce sites and other internet services. So when faced with the challenge of creating a personal email address, where do most people turn? Invariably, they choose GMail. On the surface GMail presents a very attractive solution for email. Itʼs pretty feature rich, it works reliably (except in China!) and itʼs normally free for personal use. This is fine as long as you realise that you are the commodity when using free services like this....
This post is about working with multiple Github repos from different Github accounts on the same local machine. The easiest way to authenticate yourself when you pull from or push changes to Github is using SSH. To do so, you need to generate an SSH keypair on your local machine and add the public part of the keypair to your Github account as a new SSH key. Once this is done, you will be able to pull and push to your repo(s) using SSH automagically and without being continually prompted to authenticate....
When you provision a new server or VPS, there are a few steps you should take to make access to the server both secure and less painful. 1. Update the server Update the server using the latest packages. On Ubuntu execute the following commands (as root): apt-get update 2. Don’t login as root The first time you login into your (new) server, you should use the root account for updating the server and creating a new user....
Rating: 5/5 History Our Man In New York The British Plot to Bring America into the Second World War by Henry Hemming It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that manipulating the public on a mass scale to deliver a desired outcome are recent developments exemplified by the UK Brexit vote or Donald Trump’s win of the US Presidency in 2016; and that these results were only possible thanks to the influence and manipulation by hidden actors using modern technologies like social media....
Rating: 4/5 Politics Diary Of An MP’s Wife Inside and Outside of Power by Sasha Swire I had reasonably low expectations for this book despite the generally positive reviews elsewhere because most political memoirs and exposés tend to be a bit dry and dull. Not so with this book which details Hugo Swire’s entry into and career in politics in which he was supported by his wife, the author in question....
Rating: 5/5 Health Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor While it’s pretty obvious that we need oxygen to survive, who knew that the way we breathe can have such an enormous positive or negative impact on our health. Nestor is a science writer who came to the topic of breathing after researching free diving; the practice of holding breath for minutes at a time and diving tens of metres below the surface of the sea....
Rating: 5/5 Finance The Art of Execution by Lee Freeman-Shor As a casual investor that wants to take a long term view in terms of stock and share investments, I assumed that books like this one would be more suited to serious money managers and day traders rather than someone like me. However the information in this book would be hugely beneficial to anyone that wants to invest in stocks and shares; regardless of their level of experience and knowledge....