Alasdair Keyes' Blog
In recent years the PHP testing tool Pest has gained much traction. So much so, the Laravel testing documentation shows test suite examples in Pest as well as PHPUnit. On the whole I'm happy with PHPUnit, however when performing browser-based tests with Laravel I have had no end of problems with getting Laravel's Dusk to work within Docker. Pest has built-in browser support so I was interested in…
I've recently updated my dev laptop to Debian Trixie. I waited a while as Debian hadn't ported VirtualBox to their Backports repository and Oracle hadn't released a version that would install correctly on Trixie. Once Oracle finally released the .deb package for VirtualBox I rebuilt my machine only to get the following error upon starting a VM... VT-x is being used by another hypervisor…
It's Sysadmin day 2025. Give thanks to your sysadmin. If you are a sysadmin, have a beer. https://sysadminday.com/
Often, if I'm updating an old code base, or have installed a new instance of Laravel, I want to enable PHP's strict typing. This has to be enabled on each file and can be a bit of a pain so I knocked up a bash one-liner to do this quickly. It works recursively for any *.php file in a given directory. find codebase/ -name *.php \ | xargs -i grep -L…
I've been running a mail server for about 20 years. For years I was using Exim ( https://www.exim.org/ ) but due to one-too-many high security CVEs I decided to switch to Postfix ( https://www.postfix.org/ ) about 2 years ago. One thing that any mail server admin will attest to is that your server is constantly probed by bots trying to access mailboxes and send emails. I store mail logs for ten…
I've just found out that Diggnation has been relaunched after it ended back in 2011. It's twelve episodes in and feels much like it was before... albeit with more grey hair. Back in the mid-2000s when I first started working in tech, and browsing https://www.digg.com/ ; Diggnation was a regular watch on Saturday mornings with a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal. It was probably the first podcast I…
I've recently heard some good things about the PHP tool Rector ( https://getrector.com/ ). It provides automatic refactoring for your PHP code to increase code quality. This website ( https://www.akeyes.co.uk ) is running on PHP 8.x, previously 7.x and with a quick check of my composer.json in Git, I can see that it was even running on PHP 5.6 when the site was built using the Slim Framework (…
My most enjoyed albums of 2024... Smashing Pumpkins - Aghori Mhori Mei Sheryl Crow - Evolution KMFDM - Let Go Static X - Project Regeneration Vol. II The Cure - Songs of a Lost World Special mention to Squarepusher - Dostrotime.
After my blog post earlier this year about installing LineageOS onto an old OnePlus2 phone ( https://www.akeyes.co.uk/blog/installing_lineageos_on_ancient_device ); I've had some interest from people asking me to install LineageOS onto their older phones. Installation of LineageOS is quite a technical endeavour and can be quite difficult for some devices. It seems that regular phone stores on the…
Once again, it's Sysadmin day. Give thanks to your sysadmin. If you are a sysadmin, have a beer. https://sysadminday.com/