Recent content in Jason's Ramblings on cromedome.net - the ramblings of Jason A. Crome
Just over a decade ago, I walked away from the company I helped start. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already burned out, broken, and drifting away from the person I wanted to be. It’s taken time, space, and a lot of reflection to understand what happened — and what I’ve learned. Starting From Chaos In 1997, at the age of 21, my coworkers and I found ourselves caught in the crossfire of a…
I don’t often publish new Perl modules, but when I do, it’s typically with Dist::Zilla . Once configured, dzil allows me to focus on the development of my module, and not on how to release it. Like most, in the early days of using dzil , I cargo culted someone else’s working config. Nowadays, I still cargo cult working configs, but I understand better how and why they work. In…
On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, I am beyond excited to present you with Dancer2 1.0.0 . For those of you who aren’t a part of the Perl community, Dancer2 is a micro-framework for building web applications. Inspired by Ruby’s Sinatra , it focuses on minimalism; our goal is not to give you everything and the kitchen sink, but rather to serve you ala carte, letting you choose the components and…
While I unfortunately had to put Waltz aside for a short time, I got a great night of hacking in on it. And… great news… I am one really obnoxious bug away from it being self-hosting. Mind you, there are still some features it will need for it to be genuinely useful, but I will be able to publish this blog and match 100% of the existing functionality. I am absolutely beside myself…
After a weekend of intermittent hacking, I am getting close to being able to release a preview of Waltz, my Hugo/Middleman alternative written in Perl and Dancer2. I still have a few important milestones to cross, but I have almost got it to the point of hosting this blog. Almost. I have all of this site’s templates converted to Template::Toolkit now, and all of the content is rendering with…
It’s taken longer than I had planned on, but Dancer2 0.301003 was released today . It contains a few features I am happy to see but am embarrassed that it took me so long to implement: Git integration and Dockerfile generation for new applications. Now, my attention is shifting to other things for a bit: porting Dancer2’s features from our forked version of Template::Tiny into the core…
You would have thought that a global pandemic would have been the ideal time during which to expand my professional toolset, but no. Instead, I was lazy and complacent and did little else other than get soft and fat. I am already working on the physical issues, and now, it is about time to address the mental ones. I am setting out to evaluate several new languages, and for some languages I already…
It’s been a while since the last post, but sadly I don’t have a coherent theme for this one. So, dear readers, you get a random smattering of whatever is percolating in my mind. Upcoming Dancer2 Release Work is well underway for the next Dancer2 release. I am a bit torn as to when to cut the release though - there is one more PR that I definitely want to include that adds Git…
Problem Because it was stupidly easy to do so, I set up Nextcloud on my FreeBSD server using pkg install . This was wonderful, except Nextcloud is fast-moving, and before long, it wanted to install an update, which I did. So far, so good! The next morning I check my daily security report email from the FreeBSD host I installed Nextcloud on, and I was surprised to see Nextcloud show up on the list…
I turn 45 at the beginning December, and most recently, I find myself standing at the center of a number of different crossroads in my life, both personally and professionally. Despite being fairly social for a developer, over the last several months I found myself slipping back into my dark cave of despair, and before long I ended up in the throes of a depression the likes of which I have not…
I ran into an issue after installing Kubuntu 19.10 where the driver manager would no longer show me which hardware devices were awaiting configuration. This problem only occurred after changing the default font size across all of KDE. Some digging led to this StackOverflow post , where pubalapoub suggests running sudo update-apt-xapian-index . A mere 30 seconds later the driver manager was again…
Today I completed a longstanding project to move my blog entirely over to Hugo. Previously, I maintained a blog on my consulting site, crome-plated that was powered by Tumblr. I used Tumblr to easily create content, and then I would pull that content into my own site, transforming it to look like native content. The content would often grow stale though, and I felt like it was putting a bad foot…
I was experiencing an issue trying to install FreeBSD 12.1 under Parallels on my MacBook Air where the kernel would panic immediately upon boot. A quick search of the Parallels forums returned this helpful thread . TL;DR: The FreeBSD boot loaded needs to be told to expect an EFI BIOS, so set vm.bios.efi = 1 in the boot order settings. Thanks Kaoru!
I am doing as much as my development on Linux as macOS these days. As music is an important part of my development environment, I need a good place and player to get it from. Spotify is nice as it is cross-platform, and makes it so I have my music and playlists on either environment. But, as the Spotify client comes on Linux, it’s pretty unusable. It functions fine, but on a 4k display, the…
It is said in agile software development to release early, release often! I am going to follow that advice with regards to this blog. I have been sitting on deploying the blog while I get some things perfect. The longer this goes on, the more I become convinced that I will keep tinkering with layout and such and never actually launch this thing. So here it is, in all of its imperfect glory. The…
It’s been a while since I have had a site of my own (that is, of course, only if you don’t count a consulting site, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc.). According to the Internet Wayback Machine , the last time I had a site with any substantial content (and I use the term substantial very, very loosely) was in August of 2008 , and at that time, the content was already six years…
Welcome to 2018, everyone! Here’s hoping to a happier, healthier, less chaotic year, filled with more kindness, love, and understanding than the world saw in 2017. Airline flights are a good source of downtime, and have historically been a great time for me to brainstorm and reflect, and today’s flight from Chicago-Midway to Charlotte was no exception. I now have an ambitious and…
Did you know macOS High Sierra has a shortcut for locking your screen ? You can change the shortcut to something more agreeable to you. I used to use Padlock for this functionality, but now it is completely baked into the OS.
Happy Friday! Here’s a healthy dose of randomness to start your weekend: The iOS 11 update is pretty nice so far, especially for iPad users. However, the battery usage on my iPhone 6s seems to have increased significantly. Has anyone else noticed this? PostgreSQL 10.0 has been released! Check out the announcement . AOL Instant Messenger will be discontinued on December 15th . It’s the…
We are almost all universally guilty of it. Whether it’s that iOS update on your iPhone, or the Windows Updates you have been sitting on for two months, we are all guilty of not updating our computers and devices when we should. The problem is that we are every-increasingly becoming targets of cyber attacks and cyber fraud, and by not staying on top of our updates, we are unnecessarily…
It’s been a long and frustrating road, but I have finally resolved the touchpad issues that have plagued me for seemingly forever in Linux. By installing libinput and using it in favor of the Synaptics touchpad driver, the touchpad sensitivity issues that have often plagued my sessions of heads-down programming have come to an end. On the flip side, however, the latest kernel build for…
I opted to encrypt my home directory in Linux some time after setting up Ubuntu on my laptop. My home directory went flawlessly, however, it is also recommended that you encrypt your swap partition afterwards, and that did not go so swimmingly. Thankfully, this guide was able to help me out, and I was able to reboot with no further issues. Hopefully if you are unable to create an encrypted swap…
As always, I feel a little late to the party… here’s a couple of fun things I learned this week: tcptraceroute See what VirtualHosts Apache has configured I will not be late for any 4th of July parties though. Have fun, be safe!
This thread was a life-saver today! Thanks, Stack Overflow !
Both Debian and Ubuntu ship ancient versions of it out of the box. If you want to upgrade, the n package makes this pretty painless .
Old news for most of you, but since I got bitten by this again, I figured I’d share. On Debian-based Linux distributions, the NodeJS executable gets installed as nodejs, not node. As it turns out, this is an easy problem to fix . Happy Friday!
I am getting my first experience with the OpenVPN client on Linux at $new_job . As with most things Mac, I got pretty spoiled by the Viscosity VPN client on macOS, so having to manually configure things on Linux seemed a bit daunting at first (I had used the network configuration GUI in GNOME at first to try and set up my VPN connections, but it failed for both home and work connections), but with…
You get a lot of freedom with Linux: price and choice to name a few. But it comes at a cost. That cost is frustration. Lots of it. In my particular case, it started when a routine update of packages prevented me from having icons with text on the desktop. Compound that with a few other issues and you end up with an 11th hour reinstall. Not my idea of good time.
“Dude, you got a Dell.” Please, don’t snicker. No, I haven’t given up on Apple. I am still heavily entrenched in the Apple infrastructure, and have no intent of changing that. I still do lots of development on macOS, and will continue to do so for some time. But my next gig is heavily ops oriented, and I want to develop on something as close to what I will deploying on as…
When Thunderbird is the solution to my email woes. That being said, it’s pretty awesome on Linux. Less than impressed on Windows. Even less so on macOS.
My iPhone was having a problem charging recently, and as it would turn out, it was because the charging port was stuffed full of pocket lint. Thanks to this guide , cleaning it out was easy, and once again my phone charges as intended.
I am a vim user (neovim, actually, but that is a post for another day), and since it relies entirely on keymappings to perform specific editing functions, anything I can do to help my fingers travel a little less on the keyboard means huge productivity gains over time. While this is not a new hack, it is certainly my favorite. I don’t use the caps lock key for anything, so I have made it…
As it would turn out, the rsync that ships with macOS is ancient and slow. Thankfully, if you’re a homebrew user, this is easy to fix : brew tap homebrew/dupes brew install rsync (thanks, Bruce Gulke!)
So I admit, I am late to the party here. As my home/office infrastructure has grown, it has become necessary to easily replicate media between laptops, and to reliably make backups of content and data. After some evaluation, the tool that I think is going to best meet my needs is… rsync. Yes, that rsync. There are a number of helpful guides out there, but I opted for this one . It is not…
Since last I last posted something technical, I was between work opportunities and just getting involved with Dancer and the Perl community after a long time away. A lot has changed in that time, and I wanted to take a little time to share a bit about what I have been up to in that time. Joining the Dancer Core Team The thing that pleases me the most was having been invited to the Dancer Core…
It’s been 30 years in the making, but I finally got licensed to fly a plane! I’ve wanted to ever since seeing Top Gun all those years ago, and after the Navy told me I couldn’t fly jets because of my eyesight, it kind of fell by the wayside. Late last summer, I contacted an old friend at a flight club at DuPage Airport about getting some lessons, and it has been a long uphill…