I, accidentally, noticed that my WordPress instance was compromised. Of course, I would be the person to blame for this. It’s not a commercial thing, so I don’t nearly spend enough time looking under the hood. This cost me a couple of hours yesterday fixing and cleaning up the mess. I’ve taken some precautions to ensure I won’t need to look under the hood too frequently but also ensure I don’t sponsor some botnet or click-fraud elsewhere on the tubes....
I had a #showerthought idea yesterday. I am just logging this one here as I don’t have the time to build this one. I hope to get to it if I can get some validation. TL;DR: The idea is a virtual open-mic platform where a comic can share his set as a video and people can react to specific jokes by clicking on emojis throughout the delivery. The comic can choose how long they want to get this feedback and get information on what works and what doesn’t....
I briefly lost the site to a sysadmin disaster. Although I didn’t quite create the disaster on my own, I had to clean up after a failed upgrade script. Anyway, the site is back up and even if I don’t have much to say in it. It took me about 15 minutes to fix it. The exact 15 minutes I didn’t feel like spending for over two weeks when the disaster first occurred....
I have been writing web applications for quite a while now. For a more significant part of this experience, I had been developing on top of an existing CMS type environment; moodle, drupal, WordPress, or the like. Very few of these are web applications written from scratch. I typically used PHP when I write for the web because it has the lowest barrier of entry. You can write HTML and then insert your PHP wherever you need dynamic content....
I am largely techie guy. In the sense, I can rarely understand what it is to be a non-technical person. Let me explain that a bit. I cannot fathom why some people cannot see how a certain idea or logic could be written as software. While here I am, trying to see the world around me as though someone wrote down code to make it work the way it does. I guess people are just wired differently....
It was a lunch time discussion between me and the wife. We were wandering multiple topics, as usual, and suddenly came to a point where we thought, there should be a coupon code to goto a specific place. And then I remembered my Dad was cribbing the other day about attending a wedding at some place so far away from the city, it almost felt like a picnic across the city....
For a while, I believed that jQuery and bootstrap are the best tools out there for getting a frontend working the way you want. I am sure there are jQuery pundits who still stand by this. But I am not a jQuery pundit. In fact, I am quite bad with javascript – for whatever reason, I never managed to master this one skill. I have been using javascript from 2005 but I still have to look up every now and then for some super basic operations....
For a couple of months, we decided to start tracking where our money got spent. We felt the need to see if we could do a little better each month. And maybe if we collected this data for a few months, we may see a spending pattern emerge that would help us budget our expenses way better going forward. There is just one hiccup: data entry. I still went ahead and did this for two months....
I have fancied publish-subscribe middleware(pubsub) architectures for quite sometime. When we were still very new in CTS, I came up with a wild suggestion to try this for getting a data dump from a legacy system into our moodle instance. I was quite clueless about what this would entail in terms of development effort, but I could create a PoC setup within a few days which made me quite confident of being able to pull this off....
So I got about 60% of one app working on my iPhone to a satisfactory extent. I still need to add a couple of features before it can used as an app. I thought this is perhaps a good time to think about and generally fix the horrible UI that I have created so far. Thinking about it, I suck so bad at UI that I have never written a GUI application all my life....