PHP Design Pattern Code Implementations
Posted: 2019-03-15 22:06:15 by Alasdair Keyes
I was refreshing my memory on the Bridge pattern (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_pattern) for some code I was writing and I came across this Github repo https://github.com/domnikl/DesignPatternsPHP with PHP implementations of many common design patterns.
It's well worth bookmarking for when you need to brush up or even use as a framework for implementing them.
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Updating Skills
Posted: 2019-02-15 15:51:23 by Alasdair Keyes
Anyone who works in the modern corporate environment is well aware that the landscape changes quickly and that it's very easy to become complacent, resting on previous experience and not updating your skill-set for the future.
This is why I have undertaken the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear identification test to hone my ursine identification skills. With a quite staggering 86.7% accuracy, I am able to identify the difference between the types of bear found in Montana and surrounding states.
I have never been to Montana, I have no plans to visit Missoula or Great Falls. But I know that should I ever get caught in the North-Western wilderness of the United States I will be able to fall back on my above-par identification skills.
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Computerphile
Posted: 2019-01-19 16:01:55 by Alasdair Keyes
I think I've linked to Computerphile videos in the past, but they definitely deserve it's own post.
Computerphile is a Youtube channel created (I believe) some staff/faculty at Nottingham University.
They release regular videos for both beginners and experts, explaining everything from how recently announced vulnerabilities work, through to low-level assembly and CPU operations. It's taught me a lot e.g. how Face ID works and how double-ratchet message encryption is employed to keep tools like Whatsapp and Signal secure, to name just two.
If it's the kind of thing that tickles your fancy it's quite a rabbit hole so wait until you have a spare Sunday afternoon and get to it.
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RedirectToken for Laravel
Posted: 2019-01-17 17:01:47 by Alasdair Keyes
A while back I wrote a library to easily allow creation of redirect URLs on the fly called redirecttoken https://gitlab.com/alasdairkeyes/redirecttoken/.
It was a cleaner implementation of a setup I used on this site to see what links visotors are clicking.
After I migrated my site from Slim to Laravel about 2 months ago, I created a Laravel Service Provider to easily port this functionality into my new site. This has also just been released at https://gitlab.com/alasdairkeyes/redirecttoken-laravel/.
A basic config is configurable through the .env file so no need for any additional coding to add it to your Laravel install.
Both packages are on Packagist and can be installed using composer.
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Gitlab Private vs. Public Heatmaps
Posted: 2019-01-10 15:51:18 by Alasdair Keyes
My Gitlab public vs private heatmaps. It looks rather pitiful but I promise, I have been coding!
** Private Heatmap **
** Public Heatmap **
I've got a few more OS projects in the pipeline so this should look a bit healthier
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Fun Linux Videos
Posted: 2018-11-25 23:31:45 by Alasdair Keyes
I'm not quite sure how (I think it was probably via Hacker News) but I came across the Youtube channel of Bryan Lunduke. https://www.youtube.com/user/BryanLunduke/
I don't really have any idea who he is, but he apparently gives a lot of talks at Linux North West conferences in the US. They're mainly a lighthearted and humourous look at Linux/Operating Systems and software in general. This includes what appears to be a decade long series of talks entitled "Linux Sucks".
As this weekend was fairly slow I got through a few of his videos, some of which I've listed below. Well worth checking out.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVHcdgrqbHE - Linux Sucks Forever
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjDQtNYxtbU - The complete history of Linux (abridged)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e6BKJPnb5o - programmers_are_evil()
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tabVaoeNtdk - They're watching you
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPbAXKMCDkY - Linux is freaking weird
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The Future Is Bright
Posted: 2018-10-22 15:57:09 by Alasdair Keyes
Just what every right-minded developer has wanted. Perl in the browser!
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Advertising and Malware block list
Posted: 2018-09-28 08:59:15 by Alasdair Keyes
Via a Hacker News article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159 I came across a link to this git repo https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts .
It's a curated list of known advertising and malware hostnames that can be added to your system hosts file to protect your system from shady sites accessed by your browser as part of included javascript/tracking pixels etc. As long as your browser still uses your system resolver instead of being set to DNS over HTTPS it should provide a good degree of security for your browsing.
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Mojolicious v8 release
Posted: 2018-09-19 11:14:22 by Alasdair Keyes
Perl 5 is often seen as a dated, if not dead language, consigned to being hacked together by a sysad to keep some legacy platform from the 90s ticking over.
Sadly that part is true, but there is still life in the old dog yet, helped by the recent release of version 8 of the Mojolicious framework.
If you've not played with Perl but you have an interest, Mojolicious is a good entry point and I'd recommend it for any new projects. It's built in support for web-sockets makes it very suitable for modern back-end platforms.
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Github and Gitlab user public keys
Posted: 2018-09-02 11:18:15 by Alasdair Keyes
During installation of Ubuntu Server 18.04 today I noticed that the user creation section had an option for configuring SSH public keys from Github, this is a very useful feature but I was intrigued as to how these were exposed. It turns out that you can use the following URLs to get the keys for a given user for Github and Gitlab
https://gitlab.com/<username>.keys and https://github.com/<username>.keys
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