2021 review of the year
2021 has been another year of general chaos, but fortunately my business hasn't been too badly affected. I've also spent some time improving my business, which I think will stand…
Using Office 365 as a mail relay with Exim on Debian
Recently I had to setup a web server to relay all outbound email (e.g. password resets) through Office 365. The options are listed in How to set up a multifunction…
IPv6 adoption for web applications
Over the past decade, ISPs and hosting companies have been gradually rolling out IPv6, the headline benefit of which is to extend the number of available IP addresses (IPv4 allows…
View a single column definition in MySQL
Most MySQL developers will be familiar with the DESCRIBE statements, which shows the definition of all the columns in a table: > DESCRIBE contacts; +------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type |…
Set JavaScript variables based on hostname
Most of the websites I work on have at least two environments: staging (for testing) and production (the live site). Each environment has a different configuration, e.g. staging will typically…
2020 review of the year
Despite the general chaos, I've been luckier than most in that my business hasn't been badly affected in 2020. I've had chance to learn some new skills, improve my admin,…
Sympl migration and management services
This year I've been paying close attention to Sympl, a project which makes it easier to manage website and email hosting by providing sensible default configurations and automating some of…
Advent of Code: 2015 – Day 02
Part 1 Problem: Calculate the surface area of a list of boxes, including slack (the area of the smallest side). Solution: Read in each line of the input file and…
Advent of Code: 2015 – Day 01
Part 1 Problem: Starting at zero, move up one floor for every '(' and down one floor for every ')'. Solution: Read in the input one character at a time…
Changing the timezone in Debian Buster
I recently spun up a couple of virtual servers with the Mythic Beasts provisioner, which didn't give me the option of selecting my timezone. As a result the servers were…