So I finally got around to play with Jekyll, a static site generator for websites. I was initially sceptical whether a static site generator would be up for running a blog, but after playing with it for a bit, I’m in love with this concept. The ability to write my posts in vim (MacVim that is) and version them with Git makes me very happy. As much as I like Wordpress, it’s getting more and more sluggish (on my old server at least) and every time I’m logging in to it, I spend half an hour installing updates and patches. And with every upgrade I’m worried about the database – even though, in Wordpress’ defense, no upgrade ever broke the database. Also, I’m particularly impressed with support for syntax highlighting, which is absolutely essential for technical posts. I’m still digging through the documentation and learning how to use Jekyll, but I’m getting there.

I spent some time in India and at a few spots I took enough pictures to create panoramas. Make sure you click the links to the full version and zoom to the original size of the image. They’re huge and you can scroll around for a bit and discover nice details. Full version: India Gate Panorama! Full version: Delhi Rooftop Panorama!

Just figured out how SSH remote tunnels work and wanted to write it down.

Nomenclature:

• [Local] Client: your local computer. In fact, if I say local, I mean the client.
• [Remote] Server: the server you connect to. If I say remote, I mean server.

Forward Tunnels

Your standard tunnel, allows you to take a local port and redirect it to a remote port on the server:

$ ssh -L REMOTEPORT:client:CLIENTPORT user@server

Now, that by opening a tunnel in this way:

Recently at work I had to work on files in our legacy system. Those files, being part of a proprietary product, are unknown to any editor or pretty printer that you can find. And most of them are not formatted nicely, if at all. Being a lazy developer I really love eclipse’s code formatting features, because, hey, it takes away a lot of tedious and annoying formatting. Also, I think properly formatted files are easier to understand, maintain and fix. In fact, as I recently tweeted, I go as far as saying that I’m not particularly good in spotting problems, I just format everything which helps me to understand better.

Not so long ago a freelance client approached me with some updates for their website. The site has been growing organically since 2000 and therefore was a big mess. Several attempts to port the site to a CMS driven system failed largely because those CMS systems are usually to complex for our needs (Typo3) or not flexible enough (Joomla, WordPress). So as I was faced with updates to all the updates including image updates which in turn needed thumbnails to be generated. The same day I stumbled randomly over the xsl:result-document function in XSLT 2.0 which allows you to transform a single XML file into several output files. That sparked an idea with me: why not use that to build a CMS system using XML technologies? I’ve toyed around with Cocoon a couple of years ago but that was not what I was looking for. So I looked for other technologies…

This blog is served by hardware run and owned by me. The only information I see about you, the visitor is whatever your browser sends as part of the connection. That usually includes the IP address visible to my hardware, the user agent string which identifies your browser, and a few other HTTP headers. Log files are rotated frequently so nothing is stored for more than a few weeks.

I do parse the logs with goatcounter and send them to a self hosted instance because I like to see which pages and posts are popular and where my readers come from. All information is aggregated so nothing can be used to identify any specific users.