Recent content on Joshua Rogers
Well, I've managed to go just under two years and a half years without posting a single thing to the blog. So, what have I been doing in that time? Time travel perchance? Or possibly something a bit more mundane like being frozen in carbonite or trapped in the Phantom Zone? While all very reasonable guesses, the answer is “no”. I've started several posts, but haven't liked any of them…
This year, despite generally taking precautions and having two shots of Moderna, Christmas found me in quarantine in my home office, hiding away from my family. As far as Christmas traditions go, “physical isolation” has to be one of the more unusual ways to celebrate a holiday whose traditions frequently involve getting together in larger groups. It was Christmas day and I was alone,…
Over the last two posts I explored the process of extracting a very large dataset (an XML export of Wikipedia) into various types of databases (an RDBMS1 and a Graph database) that I can run locally as a precaution against being marooned in the past should some portal, machine, or ancient artifact that send me careening backwards in history. While these two databases have satisfied my need to…
In April, I put together a Python script that would load an XML export from Wikipedia into a local SQLite database because, once again, you never know when you'll inadvertently become a time traveller who needs knowledge of future events to return home. (Look, it's more interesting than just saying “because I find it amusing”, so just roll with me here.) This script satisfied the…
The code for this post can be found on my GitLab While the last two years have realized a number of risks that we had all left unmitigated for far too long, one even greater risk has yet to be realized: the risk of unscheduled time travel. Yes, the grave concern that must be considered is that one moment you might be hanging out in the mall parking lot and the next you might find yourself…
In the previous post, I talked about much of the reason I quit writing posts was because of the painful workflow surrounding the whole deployment process. To top it all off, when I finally tried to automate it, I found out that the Jekyll theme that I was using had used had many unpinned dependencies: rather than specifying the version of each library that should be retrieved, the author of the…
Judging by my prolonged absence from posting new content, it could safely be assumed that I've spent the last two years encased in block of carbonite. If that idea doesn't resonate with you, you might simply assume that life got busy. While one of those options is statistically more likely than the other, neither will take home any points for correctness. The truth of the matter is that I've…
Just over two years ago, I wrote a little version of Snake for a 4x4x4 LED cube. Since then I've picked up several little Arduino devices, include a 6x6x6 LED cube, an Arduino Esplora, and the one I'm most excited about, an Arduboy. For every Arduino I bought, I had some grand plan. I never followed through on any of them though. It wasn't because of the technical challenge of writing an…
I have a love-hate relationship with the terrain from Minecraft. One the one hand, it's the terrain that makes every world kind of memorable in it's own way. It comes at cost though; the process of generating terrain can cripple a server. That's where Chunky comes in. Chunky lets you pregenerate a world so that our blocky wanderers don't cause the server logs to fill with “CAN'T KEEP…
I'm a guy from northern Alabama. I write software, and I've spoken at a conference or two. I wrote a package manager for Drupal 6 that was used on 3,300+ servers. There are a few other bits of code floating around out there as well. Most of it is open source. Below is a list of contributions I've made. Some of these patches are exclusively my code, but by nature open source is collaberative.
The Worst Thing Ever I know the worst code that I've ever professionally written. It was an overly generic UI component. It managed to combine a total misunderstanding of MVC, heavy constructors, an overly broad interface that leaked abstraction like a sieve, empty methods, liberal use of Object, and was driven by unexceptional-exceptions. Oh, and it couldn't be resized. Not that any of that…
Today I turn 31. Before the day is through, I'll have ended up celebrating with family and coworkers. And Bash, because as it turns out, Bash can be a bit festive. I find most default Bash prompts to be rather boring. Sure, they vary from platform to platform, but they all seem a little too lite on info that I care about. A few years ago I decided to liven it up a bit.
Lately I've been exploring the world of Clojure. I'm not sure whether it was the siren song of functional programming that started driving me, the simplicity of Lisp, or my curiosity about this language that was being promoted by the likes of Uncle Bob. Whatever the cause, I needed to explore this strange world head first. I needed to try out this language for myself. I spent much of time just…
I wrote a song this morning. I feel really good about it. I tend to record music, frown a little and then hide it far away from human ears. It isn't that I don't like it. I just don't want anyone else to realize how amateur it is and that I, by extension, must be an amateur. A fake. An imposter. So, I'm doing the imposter syndrome post? About time, I suppose.
My desk has a new ornament on it: an Arduino powered lamp. And why does that merit a blog post? Because I built it. After combining the Rainbowduino kit with some 600-ish points of solder, I found myself ruler of a 16MHz processor, 30Kb of instruction storage, 2Kb of data storage, and 64 tricolor pixels. And what does one do with 64 pixels, no inputs, and processing power reminiscent of a vintage…
Roughly a year ago I posted what I expected to be the last entry in my Fiddler series. Each of the seven entries had focused on various ways that Fiddler could help improve our development life cycle. They represented the highlight reel. All isn't perfect though, and where there is a highlight reel, there tends to be outtakes as well. So, here goes: here's a few ways you can use Fiddler to slow…
Just over a year ago we went over how to setup a reverse proxy that would require our users to authenticate. In our original proxy article, we generated some NGinx configuration that looked a bit like… location / { proxy_pass http://jira; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } And it worked. And…
A while back, I announced that I had moved my blog over to HTTPS. What about HTTP though? Do I serve content over HTTP still, or did I doom existing links to be forever broken? As you could guess by the title of this post, neither of those was satisfactory. Instead, I added four lines to our NGinx configuration telling it to listen on port 80 and respond to every request with a permanent redirect…
From time to time I hear a certain question floating around through the office, along the lines of “Why won't .NET let me pass my List<Thing> as a List<IThing>?” The tone of the question usually suggests that someone is annoyed that .NET isn't smart enough to make such a simple inference. The reality though is that the compiler is smart enough to know that it can't. You're kidding,…
Back in May we looked at how to setup Access Controls with NGinx. I didn't mention how I test it though. In order to test the different rules, the requests needed to originate from different IP ranges, which in turn meant that I would need to send the requests from different networks. As I find the idea of fidgeting with cables or hotspots to be more than slightly annoying, I opted to tunnel…
My server had an unauthorized login attempt today. Really, it was more along the lines of 2,000 login attempts. Why is my server under attack? Simply because it is on the internet. See, this is actually a normal day for a small server. Last week, there were just over 12,000 attempts. So, business as usual for a server looks something like walking through a zombie filled wasteland armed only with a…
One of the things that I love about living in a Unix environment is that 99% of the time, remote administration only means a quick trip to the console. That's 99% of the time where my desktop can look something like this: Of course, 99% doesn't quite make a whole. There's the matter of the other 1% of the time where a GUI is required. Earlier on in my journey with Linux, I would have tried to…
This weekend I spent some time migrating my Minecraft server a good 700 miles closer to my house. The new server is ~30 milliseconds closer. If you play games, you probably know how huge that can be. So, how did I move data to the new server? FTP, right? No. Definitely no. Why not FTP? FTP is plain-text Unless you're using something like FTPS, you'll be sending your server credentials across the…
A little while back I spent some time looking at an interesting issue with a colleage. He was trying to load a virtual machine from an .OVA but kept recieving error messages as he loaded it that the file was invalid. Somehow though, other people used the same file. This one could be fun to diagnose. To start with, the premise of our argument has a problem: it wasn't the same file but rather a copy…
In the first six parts of our series, we examined some of the power that Fiddler has to offer us: we covered remote debugging, composing requests, breakpoints, autoresponders, plugins, and a bit of FiddlerScript. So what's next? There's still an incredible amount that Fiddler can do, but despite the “Land Before Time”-esque post names, this was never meant to be a comprehensive Fiddler…
Our tour of Fiddler has covered a lot of ground so far, and while there's still more to cover, I'm going to have to let you in on a secret before we can continue. The UI is definitely powerful, but here's the thing: it's not the killer feature. The real killer feature is FiddlerScript. Getting Started Fiddler already detects invalid requests and broken responses. What more could we possibly add,…
The more time I spend examining Fiddler, the more and more impressed I am. Not only is it feature rich out of the box, but it includes a number of mechanism to easily extend it. This week we're going to focus on the easiest way to add new functionality: installing new plugins. All of the following plugins are available at Telerik.com. I highly recommend installing them. JavaScript Formatter The…
Over the last few years I've grown rather accustomed to listening to my Pandora while working, even upgrading to PandoraOne so that I can enjoy my music without interruptions 1. However, I found myself avoiding Pandora earlier this year. Why? Pandora uses Flash for the web and Air for the desktop, presumably in order to annihilate the battery on my laptop. 2 The problem isn't Pandora though, it's…
Guy at the far left barely gets wet. Oh, that's me. Well, that works.
Last week we figured out how to use Fiddler's breakpoints to let us edit traffic at will. While it is a powerful tool, if we are making the same edits each time, it can become as tedious as it is useful. And with that rather painful segue, we get to the AutoResponder. Fiddler's AutoResponder is represented by yet another tab hiding away in our detail view. When enabled, it can, among other things,…
One of the great things about using an API is that it implies that I can use functionality that I don't have to write myself. I can write an app that live tweets driving directions between two random Yelp reviews without ever having to directly know how the tweeting or directing is taking place. As long as I stick to the API, I can pretty much accept that the API's functionality should usually…
Build servers and source control are like the peanut-butter and jelly of devops; they just go together. That would make us suspect that it shouldn't be that big of a deal to setup push notifications to trigger builds, right? My GitLab instance shows that it will gladly trigger a build via web hook when it receives a new commit. My Bamboo shows that it will just as cheerfully scan for changes when…
It's not Monday, so why am I posting something new? Just a quick announcement: I've migrated joshuarogers.net from http to https. http://joshuarogers.net now just returns a 302 Redirect to the appropriate https page.
Last week we started looking at the web proxy Fiddler, or the “Fiddler Web Debugger” as it unfortunately bills itself. While the name is accurate, I can't help but feel that it is a bit of an understatement, much like calling the Hulk “somewhat tempermental”1, or MacGyver “good at assembling things”. Sure, Fiddler is a debugger, but it's less of a simple tool…
If you've done any amount of web development on Windows, you've probably used a program called “Fiddler” a few times. Fiddler is a small proxy server that allows you to see all of the requests made by your system. Sadly, for most people, I'd guess that that is all that Fiddler is. It's a shame because Fiddler offers up so much more power than that. So, let's fix this. For the next…
Introduction The concept of dependencies seems rather straight forward. If “Thing A” depends on “Thing B”, then we can understand that we can't possibly use “Thing A” until we have “Thing B”. It's not even a development principle really, it's more of an “even small kids realize this” kind of principle. It's sort of a universal given,…
If you've spent any time looking at the items that I post, you've probably gathered that I'm a developer, but that I have a rather strange habit of not talking about code. I talk about build automation, source control, compiler output, virtualization, proxy servers, and continuous integration, but I barely talk about matters of code. So if I love coding, why do I spend my time talking talking…
The drunken scribblings of a mad man. Possibly some kind of ancient cuneiform. A random page out of the Middle Earth phone directory. Whatever it was, it was the server password, not that it matters now: the little Post-It note reminder had long since thrown itself into the waste paper bin. Somewhere a landfill sat, knowing our password and chuckling away at our misfortune. It seems that our hero…
If you've spent any amount of time running a Linux machine on a Windows network, you've probably had the need to share files between the two. This seems like it should be a trivial matter, but as often as not, it seems to produce bouts of sheer insanity. The problem usually lies in the realization that Windows uses SMB and that Linux tends toward transit over SSH (rsync, scp, sftp.)
The universe is most surprisingly finite, it seems. Technology even more so. A few posts ago, I lamented that n IP addresses always need to be split n+1 ways. If it is true with IP addresses, it's twice as true with hardware. Given three servers, there will be demand for, at minimum, five. Certainly there must be a way for us to sneak out of this problem too, right? We could always just install…
Alright Internet, we need to talk. You've grown up quite a bit over the last several years, but I've never taken the time to have thetalk with you. You know the one. The safe passwords talk. Your requirements for a minimum length, and a diversity of characters in passwords made many classes of brute force attack more difficult. You've gotten a bit carried away though, it seems. You're actually…
In the last few posts we've gone over how to build and secure a reverse proxy. While this is a great option if you want to add extra access controls, rewrite urls, or hide multiple servers behind an IP, sometimes it is just a bit of overkill. Sometimes all that is needed is to change the port that a service listens on. Let's take Atlassian Confluence for example. By default it serves up pages on…
Last week, we went over how to quickly build a reverse proxy using NGinx. While this solved our immediate problem of hiding n+1 servers behind our n ip addresses, it could still stand a bit of work. As it stands right now, we don't have any access control capability. The Setup Let's assume we have two sites that need to be proxied: public.example.com and internal.example.com1 and 2. upstream…
Our universe is comprised of a seemingly infinite number of rules ranging from little tidbits like magnetism and inertia, to the unchangable truths of buyer's remorse and Steam downtime occurring on a weekend. Still, there is another rule that seems to be more faithful than gravity itself: given ‘n’ public facing IP addresses, you will receive ‘n+1’ requests for their…
If you've ever setup a web-app on a Linux server, chances are that you've setup a MySQL server at least once. On the off chance that you haven't, we'll do a quick crash course now: apt-get install mysql-server It might seem like I'm being a bit sarcastic. I am, though not by much. I suspect that most of the instances that I've seem running have had no configuration past what comes stock.
The Setup Thirty-eight megabytes. Over time our application had somehow grown to 38 megabytes. The road to that point made sense: features needed to be added, and with features came new libraries each with a few dependencies. Still, somehow the path of good intentions had led us to an application that weighed in at a colossal 38 megabytes. The would have actually been a reasonable size if it…
Just a bit of a fun puzzle today. Take a moment to look at the following two classes. Given an architecture where an int is four bytes and a character is one, what is the size of an instance of each class? struct Alpha { int x; char ch1; int y; char ch2; } a1; struct Beta { int x; int y; char ch_name[2]; } b2; The most obvious answer would be 4+1+4+1, giving us 10 bytes for the first class, and…
Had an interesting question posed to me the other day from David Ruttka: Did I have a favorite way to list all of the directories that have been deleted from a folder in git? Admittedly, this took a bit of thought. No arcane git command came to mind. Nothing did. Google wasn't that much help either. Not only did I not have a favorite way, I didn't have a way at all!
If you run a Linux server alongside Windows servers long enough, you'll eventually have the need (or request) to add that machine to a Windows domain. Thankfully, it's a rather easy process. Assuming you run Ubuntu, you can simply run the following commands, substituting the domain and a domain admin in place of EXAMPLE.COM and jsmith, respectively. sudo apt-get install likewise-open sudo…
Just wanted to share a quick MCEdit filter that I put together. Given a selection, this replaces the top layer of the perimeter circle with glowstone. On our server we use this to mark off private land borders so that people don't accidentally interfere with one another or set up camp on top of one another. Feel free to use it as you like. from pymclevel.materials import alphaMaterials import math…