Bash alias Magic Eight Ball
Recreating the Magic Eight Ball using the shuf command. Just what you needed to help answer the tough questions and when "yes" or "yes no" won't do.
The Accidental Developer
What if Gregor Samsa awoke a computer programmer?
Latest posts
JACODA – JAvascript COmpact DAta notation
A lot of JSON data is really just a glorified spreadsheet. Are we needlessly repeating field labels hundreds, thousands, millions of times? I created a new JavaScript-compatible data notation format for tabular data: JACODA, JAvascript COmpact DAta. After a few tests, did JACODA offer any significant advantages? This post looks at the details.
Default version of Python on Rocky Linux 8
Some questions came up at work today about the default version of Python on Rocky Linux 8. Someone said it was Python 3.6.8, others said it was Python 3.9. I decided to test this empirically and install Rocky Linux 8.10 from the minimal ISO. The answer is: You re all wrong. There is no default version Continue reading Default version of Python on Rocky Linux 8
icinga2 and http_expect_body_regex
While configuring an Icinga2 service to check the response body of a web page using http_expect_body_regex, I ran into a couple errors with characters that needed to be escaped: the backslash and the dollar sign. This post has the details on how to escape those characters, with references to the Icinga2 documentation.
Extracting links from Google Sheets
I was working with a shared Google Sheet at work and ran into this: I get it, URLs can be long and messy. We want narrow columns that look clean, not cluttered. But I wanted to analyze the URLs and search for certain content and patterns, which were hidden from me behind the link text. Continue reading Extracting links from Google Sheets
Hosting a static site on AWS using S3 and CloudFront
A few years ago, Michael Berkowski gently scolded me for hosting a site on HTTP not HTTPS. I decided that the easiest way to fix this (ignoring Let s Encrypt for now) was to instead host the site, a static site that hasn t been updated in years, on AWS. Specifically, to host the site using Continue reading Hosting a static site on AWS using S3 and CloudFront
DirectoryIndex on a static HTML site hosted by AWS
Static HTML sites hosted on AWS behind CloudFront return a 403 error when you attempt to access a subdirectory without specifying a file (https://www.example.com/dir/, for example). One method to address this is to used a pre-built Lamdba function and attach it to the associated CloudFront distribution.
Minor improvements to legacy Perl code
We re always working with code we didn t write. You ll spend far more time looking at code you didn t write (or don t remember writing) than you will spend writing new code. Today I looked at an example Perl script that used 45 lines of code to pull the company associated with an OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier) Continue reading Minor improvements to legacy Perl code
Renaming multiple files: replacing or truncating varied file extensions
After using Wget to mirror a WordPress site, I ended up with a bunch of files on disk that included question marks ("?") and various querystring parameters ("ver=3.7.1"). I examine several different ways to rename the files and drop the question mark and following text from each filename.
Converting a WordPress site to a static site using Wget
Wget can be used to mirror an entire website. In this post, I describe using Wget to create a static HTML mirror of a WordPress site and configuring the Apache web server to point to the static HTML site.