I wanted to do some GPU processing using a virtual machine running inside unRAID. First I tried Windows and it worked, but I read that running the code inside Ubuntu 16.04 would be more efficient.

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So while I was writing my previous post I realized that Google Analytics was being called from the localhost server. I also had lots of grief with Disqus back when I migrated to Hexo; It filled my account with posts related to localhost. I wonder why Disqus built it this way.

I hard-coded the Disqus URL in my theme (Both Hexo and Hugo) but then realized I can’t do the same for Google Analytics. I needed a way to disable it altogether. The fix turned out to be quite simple.

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I’ve been recently asked to enable a web server running to PHP to connect to an Oracle database for a client. Sadly this doesn’t work natively on FreeBSD so I’m documenting how I managed to do it on Ubuntu Xenial. This was inspired by this post and this post.

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I’ve been building trivial web pages for automating tasks for years, but one of things that bothered me the most was having to manually order the OPTIONSs inside SELECTs. I don’t remember where I got the code from but just wanted to share

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If you know me, you’ll know I’m obsessed with speed. I like websites that are light and load quickly. At first I used WordPress because I knew how to optimize it and make it load quickly. I also used the GeneratePress theme because I loved how quickly it loaded. You can read this post to see why I migrated away.

Ghost introduced me to Markdown and I could never look back, but since I didn’t find any themes that I liked and the fact that Ghost looked as if it hadn’t been maintained in a while lead me to look for alternatives.

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I’m currently in the middle of migrating my blog (yet again) from Hexo to Hugo. Hexo is nice but I’m learning some HTML/CSS and decided to give Hugo a try and I liked the following about it

• Setting it up is just a matter of downloading a single EXE file and adding it to PATH, as opposed to having to install NodeJS, then Hexo

• Shortcodes are part of the theme, not a plugin

• Go themes are close enough to Jinja2 which I have been using for a couple of years now with Salt and Ansible

• In general, Hugo is easier to maintain in git as the whole folder can be tracked, whereas with Hexo, the node_modules folder needs to be in .gitignore

• Hugo supports multiple categories per post, whereas Hexo doesn’t

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Today I thought about a way to easily distribute an Ansible playbook. I thought about having a tgz file somewhere but I wanted read only access through HTTP in case I wanted to update clients that have already downloaded the content.

The easiest solution I have found was using cgit. Simply run it with nginx and fcgiwrap.

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I have recently switched to Babun. It’s, IMHO, the best Windows shell so far. Combine it with TidyTabs and you have a very nice solution. But I was unable to get hexo deployment to work well with it so I had to use git bash. git bash would show a popup asking for my SSH key password while Babun wouldn’t.

I found the solution here, just enable the SSH-agent plugin in zsh

# ~/.zshrc
plugins=(git, ssh-agent)

You will just be prompted for the password of your SSH key when you start Babun.

A while back Drush stopped working on my servers and it would just return without doing anything. Today I decided to finally debug the issue. Turns out the FreeBSD port just fetches the Phar archive and installs it.

After digging around I found the following post which says that Suhosin blocks Phar file execution. The fix turned out to be quite simple; Just edit the Suhosin ini file (in FreeBSD it’s /usr/local/etc/php/ext-30-suhosin.ini) and add the following after the “extension” line:

suhosin.executor.include.whitelist = phar

And you’re back in business :)

I’ve been wanting to get shami.blog ever since the generic TLDs have been introduced.

Now I finally have it, welcome to the new domain :).