Recent content on Chanux
A small grocery list of good values 🔗 Write down a small check list of values, qualities or features that matter to
your project. The list can vary between projects because, the time, scope,
complexity, target audience and your own experience vary. 
 
 Do you want straightforward configuration for your project? Note it down as
a value. 
 Want to make the system friendly to…
In the pandemic days, the importance of handwashing was widely communicated.
There were videos showing how to carry out this supposedly simple task of
washing your hands. 
 One fine day, lazily scrolling as one bored ape does on good’ol twitter, I came
up on this small video clip that demonstrated what difference technique makes.
Two hands wearing light blue gloves using…
I always felt, and seriously believed that I have bad memory. Albeit, bad
memory when it’s convenient to me, as some have accused but I say those
accusations are baseless and defamative . Anyhow, I think I do not fall above
average when it’s about memory. I have probably never been the brightest
student in a class. 
 Ironically, one of my oldest memories is telling…
People who just want results 🔗 There are some people who just want to see results. They won’t take excuses why
the results cannot be achieved. They are prepared to go the distance and do the
hard work. They are hell bent on getting to the results. 
 People who just want results 🔗 There are some people who just want to see results. They would stoop any low
just to see the…
I have written a IP calculator for personal use. Yes, there is a command line
version of the great, web based ipcalc . I only
recently discovered that and been using it since. That probably only delayed
writing my own. 
 Why would you want to reinvent ipcalc, you may ask. Because there are few,
little features I need. 
 First, when I get a CIDR block and have to split it up…
Have you ever wanted to just make a static website and throw it behind an
authwall? Maybe to make your personal notes, playbooks that are too specific
and not very helpful to share publicly available to you over the interwebs. Or
else to use the static site system that you know works well to manage your
company knowledge base. 
 I have had both these problems and didn’t…
So, I finally gave in and bought a Mechanical Keyboard. Just to be upfront,
I never really liked the idea. I felt like the keys with a lot of travel just
trip me up a lot. This is probably because I was using a lot of bad/cheap
keyboards until got my hands on laptops. And then I just started liking the low
travel keyboards. 
 The first time I worked next to someone using a…
TLDR : Something I built had issues due to browser/platform quirks.
 keypress (deprecated), keydown , keyup are not supported on browsers on
Android. The next option input event behaves differently on mobile platforms.
Firefox on Android emits input event for soft edits too. 
 Sayura is a project I built to scratch my own itch which is not being able to
type Sinhala anywhere.…
I. Love. Material for MkDocs ! 
 I’ve been using the MkDocs - Material for MkDocs combination in every. single.
place. I worked in, to document things. And everyone loves it. Recently I had
to share some of my notes with my colleagues and realized we are oceans apart.
So I put it on a VM and shared. Nothing fancy. I had a shell script involving
a bit of rsync to deploy…
Once upon a time I wanted to keep track of foreign exchange rates and probably
do something useful with it. I looked for any APIs which would ideally present
data in JSON. Unsurprisingly I didn’t find any. So I had to build it myself. 
 Now, the only way to do this was scraping exchange rates pages of the banks
I am interested in. Even though I knew this scraping thing is an…
The adventures of Lee Kuan Yew was not a strange topic for me. We Sri Lankans
get to hear about him a lot. Mostly in the context how useless our politicians
are . Oh, and how Singapore was
built taking Sri Lanka as an example. We’d probably get to that later. 
 He was more or less the man who built an almost heaven, out of mostly thin air.
Or so the story goes. What I…
When I started at my current workplace my world was shattered (Obvious
exaggeration). I realized I had to work on windows day in day out. Of course
I would be logging in to Linux servers for most of the actual work but I really
missed the comfy and friendly unixy tools. Yes there were options but they did
not even come close to the user experience I were used to.
I have been working with Ansible for some time at work now. This new project
uses quite a bit of Ansible so I have been learning a lot. I had touched
Ansible before but that was just to put together something to help me with
copying stuff over and over to a bunch of servers. 
 The requirement of current project is to programmatically run an Ansible
playbook on a server newly…
I had used X-Accel-Redirect with Python/Flask and nginx at work. I wanted to do the same with lua for a hobby project.
So the title is what I Googled for when I wanted to serve files with nginx-lua. 
 I soon realized I was looking for the wrong thing. My search term was wrong. Hence the title is misleading too :D.
You can’t actually use X-Accel-Redirect meaningfully with…
Another superfluous achievement in the chase of new and shiny. Oh who am I kidding?.
Static sites have been here forever. Hugo has been here for so long. Heck this blog post itself has been on my machine since last year.
It’s just that I never put it online. Or write this text until now (2016-06-07) #YOLO. 
 Such is adult life. Well It’s nothing wrong about adult life…