Social links and a link to my CV.
Public datasets:
In the interests of full disclosure, I know very little (very little indeed!) about .NET. But I do enjoy figuring things out. In this post I’ve documented what I learned when trying to connect a simple .NET application to MySQL using Docker Compose.
We’re going to try to do this using Docker as far as possible, which will allow me to avoid having to set up .NET on my local machine.
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Not everybody is comfortable crafting web pages directly in JavaScript, HTML or even Markdown. Often content writers are more productive in an environment like WordPress. What if you want to develop your site using Gatsby but allow content writers to still craft their content in WordPress? No problem! You can use WordPress simply as a Content Management System (CMS), then pull the content through into your Gatsby site.
In this post we’ll look at how to set up a Headless WordPress CMS as a source of content for Gatsby.
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Populating the <head> tag might not be the most scintillating component of building a web site, but it’s an important one to get right. Gatsby’s Head API provides a flexible mechanism for doing this and supersedes the functionality from React Helmet.
It’d be cool to be able to voice chat to other players on the Minecraft server. There are a few ways to implement this, one of which involves setting up and connecting a Discord server.
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The original Java Edition of the Minecraft Server that we installed previously implements all of the basic server functionality required for multiplayer Minecraft. But perhaps this is not enough. What if you want to customise the server by installing plugins? In that case you need to install a more sophisticated server forked off the original. The PaperMC Minecraft Server provides a lot of bells and whistles not present in the original.
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A quick review of the year.
Now onto a few interesting articles from this week, mostly announcements of new versions.
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When I containerised Selenium crawlers in the past I normally used a remote driver connection from the crawler to Selenium, running a separate Docker image with Selenium and accessing it via port 4444. This has proven to be a robust design. However, it does mean two containers rather than just one, leading to a higher maintenance burden and elevated resource requirements.
What about simply embedding Chrome and ChromeDriver directly into the crawler image? It requires a bit more work, but it’s worth it. The critical point is ensuring compatible versions of Chrome and ChromeDriver.
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With a local or remote SSH tunnel the ports on both the local and remote machines must be specified at the time of creating the tunnel. But what if you need something more flexible? That’s where Dynamic Port Forwarding comes into play.
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Interesting articles from the week that was:
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Local and remote SSH tunnels serve the same fundamental purpose: they make it possible to securely send data across an unsecured network. The implementation details are subtly different though. A local SSH tunnel acts like a secure bridge from a local machine to a remote server. It’s ideal for accessing services on the remote server which aren’t publicly exposed. Conversely, a remote SSH tunnel reverses this direction, forwarding traffic from the remote server back to a local machine (or another machine).
The critical distinction between the two is the direction of the connection between the remote and local machines.
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In the previous post we looked at how to set up a collection of static redirects via the vercel.json configuration file. Now we’re going to explore a more flexible and dynamic alternative using Edge Middleware.
In the previous post we set up a Minecraft server on Ubuntu. Now we’re going to install the Minecraft client and connect to that server.
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I’m not a gamer, but I have an offspring who is deeply obsessed with Minecraft. I set up a Minecraft server for her so that she can play with her friends online in a safe environment.
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A few things that caught my attention this week:
SSH tunnels are a powerful and secure method for transmitting data over potentially unsecured networks. They allow users to establish an encrypted connection between their local machine and a remote server, providing a secure and private pathway for data. An SSH tunnel will allow a service running on a remote machine to appear as if it is running on a local machine. This is also known as port forwarding.
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A redirect is a rule which sends users to a different URL than the one they requested. They are most commonly used to ensure that browsers still get to the correct page after it has been moved to a new URL.
If you have a relatively small number of redirects and don’t need to do anything too fancy then static (or “configuration”) redirects are a good option. Static redirects are configured on Vercel by adding entries to the vercel.json configuration file. There’s just one major snag: you can only create 1024 redirects using this mechanism.
Sometimes when you run git merge you will be confronted with a huge load of merge conflicts. However, if you are lucky there might be a clear rule which you can apply to each of those conflicts, either
ours) ortheirs).In this case you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by specifying a particular merge strategy option.
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Some things that got my attention this week:
My information highlights for the week:
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By default Gatsby will embed CSS into the <head> of each HTML page. This is not ideal. In this post I take a look at how to move that CSS into an external file and how the contents of that file can be optimised to remove unused CSS.