25 Aug
2016

Vagrant and Ansible for Dev Machines

With my new job came, of course, lots of new projects. They cover quite a wide range of system requirements and so I’ve been creating ansible-provisioned vagrant machines for each one to make it easy to set up on other platforms. I thought I’d share some examples of my setup, in case anyone is interested, but more importantly so I can swiftly look this up when I start the next new project! Continue reading →
17 Aug
2016

Use Ngrok Dashboard from VM

I’m a huge fan of ngrok, a tool that allows you to open a secure tunnel from your machine to the outside world to enable testing APIs and things. Mostly I use virtual machines for development, but by default the ngrok dashboard is only available when requested from the machine that ngrok is running on … and I want to be able to see the web interface from my host machine.

This is a config setting but it can’t be supplied on the command line, instead create a file called ~/.ngrok2/ngrok.yml and add the following line:

web_addr: 0.0.0.0:4040

This will enable you to then reach the web interface at [VM IP or hostname]:4040.

14 Aug
2016

Joind.In Needs Help

This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I’ve been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it’s time to step aside and let others take up the baton. Continue reading →
Posted in php
11 Aug
2016

Connect to RabbitMQ from PHP over AMQPS

I work a lot with data these days and queues are a common addition to my applications to move data between applications. At the moment I’m working with RabbitMQ (and loving it!) but I wanted to deploy to a hosted RabbitMQ service and struggled to find examples of doing this over SSL so I thought I’d share what worked for me. Disclaimer: I work for IBM and they own Compose.com, which means I have a “do anything you like!” account there :) Continue reading →
21 Jul
2016

Zap to Schedule Adding Todo List Items

I won’t admit to being a productivity nut but I am a pretty busy person :) I manage my tasks with the excellent TodoTxt system which is a simple line-per-task textfile that lives in dropbox and can be accessed by all my various devices (I’m usually a linux/android user). One use case that I’ve never really had a solution for is when I need to do something, but not now. Continue reading →
15 Jul
2016

Vagrant Box With This Name Already Exists

Due to the unique approach of Canonical to packaging vagrant boxes, the current ubuntu/xenial box has a hardcoded machine name which causes an error when you try to bring up a second VM using the same base box:

A VirtualBox machine with the name 'ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg' already exists.
Please use another name or delete the machine with the existing name, and try again.

There’s a stackoverflow question about this and a good answer (not the accepted one, the highest-voted one) which helped me a bit but it still wasn’t completely clear to me how to fix my problem and I had to dig about a bit. Continue reading →

04 Jul
2016

Using OS X From The Keyboard

I have a new job (Developer Advocate with IBM Cloud Data Services) and subsequently a new work laptop. It’s a mac and after almost 10 years as a linux-only user, that’s rather a shock! Due to some nasty RSI issues, I don’t use a mouse or any other pointing device*, so as well as learning a whole new operating system I also needed to learn its accessibility tools. I’m still at the swearing stage but mostly past the tears so I thought I would share what I’ve found – using a computer from the keyboard is fast and productive for everyone as well as less painful for me, so you may find some tools in here that you want to try yourself.

I collected all my tools, my own notes and scribbled cheatsheets and put them into this gist so that I could refer to them later; I also intend to keep updating this as a reference. Continue reading →

09 Jun
2016

Find Mongo Document By ID Using The PHP Library

My new job as a Developer Advocate with IBM means I get to play with databases for a living (this is the most awesome thing ever invented, seriously). On my travels, I spent some time with MongoDB which is a document database – but I ran into an issue with fetching a record by ID so here’s the code I eventually arrived at, so I can refer to it later and if anyone else needs it hopefully they will find it too. Continue reading →
31 May
2016

Heroku “No app specified”

I’ve been having a maddening problem where one (but only one) of my heroku apps doesn’t know which heroku app it is, which means I need to append --app app-name to every single command. It seemed to happen when I moved my app to an organisation rather than having it on my personal account, but in fact the problem was that at the same time I did that, I set up the build server to deploy it – and so I removed the old heroku git remote and then never added the new one because I exactly shouldn’t be pushing to heroku from my laptop as we now deploy via Jenkins.

I was looking for some config file or something that heroku would read but what it actually does is look at whether any of your git remotes are heroku and if so, assume by default that you mean that project! The git URL is on the “Settings” screen from the Heroku web interface, and you just need to add it as a remote to your local project:

git remote add heroku [paste git url from settings screen]

Hopefully this helps someone else stop having to type --app app-name every time they need to do something with their app, it was a tiny problem but quite an annoying one!

21 Apr
2016

MySQL 5.7 Introduces a JSON Data Type

There’s a new JSON data type available in MySQL 5.7 that I’ve been playing with. I wanted to share some examples of when it’s useful to have JSON data in your MySQL database and how to work with the new data types (not least so I can refer back to them later!)

MySQL isn’t the first database to offer JSON storage; the document databases (such as MongoDB, CouchDB) work on a JSON or JSON-ish basis by design, and other platforms including PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server also have varying degress of JSON support. With such wide adoption as MySQL has, the JSON features are now reaching a new tribe of developers. Continue reading →