Category: Uncategorized

  • Manually running Github actions (workflow_dispatch)

    In my research on the simplest way to implement CI/CD deployment rollback using Github Actions, I decided the simplest-but-not-too-simple solution would be to run a workflow manually. But I could not find a satisfying answer to one key question: If I run a workflow with “Use workflow from [select a branch]” then1) does it use…

  • Discover the public IP address of an AWS Fargate container in a Docker entrypoint script

    tl;dr: you must use the +tcp option with dig We needed the public IP address to configure PASV_ADDRESS for a vsftpd service we’re running under AWS Fargate. Unfortunately, there’s no direct way for a Docker entrypoint script to get the current public IP address. There are some annoyingly-complicated ways using AWS api’s, etc, but the…

  • New theme :-(

    Today I upgraded a raft of things on this WordPress site, one of them my base theme.  And the site looked like crap-o-la. Apparently, creating a child theme to avoid losing custom styling when upgrading the base theme… is virtually no help at all. So it goes.  Spending the afternoon fiddling with CSS seemed like…

  • Announcing encoding-inspector

    First there was the encoding_sampler Gem Last November, I created the encoding_sampler Gem (RubyGems, github) to help find the desired encoding for a particular text file. From the Gem description: EncodingSampler helps solve the problem of what to do when the character encoding is unknown, for example when a user is uploading a file but has…

  • Fear and loathing with Chef and nginx

    I always hate having to explain why I spent 4 hours on one line of code: override[‘nginx’][‘pid’] = ‘/run/nginx.pid’ It’s not really even code, it’s just a configuration setting.  I ran into the problem using Chef, the opscode nginx cookbook, and the very-new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.  Not sure if this applies to other configurations but debugging this sort…