smackeyacky

No, I didn't install it We use Office365 for email and for sharing and keeping documents. Having access to the desktop versions of Excel, Word and Powerpoint was an important consideration. Integration with Windows 10/11 is obviously a breeze but what about Debian? Having shifted over to Debian for where I do most of my day to day stuff (development, admin, communications) there were a few little wrinkles to sort out. All the development environments I use are fine, sometimes better than Windows. Android Studio in particular is much better on Debian. VSCode is just as good. All the command line environments for AWS and dotnet are indistinguishable. I did miss a couple of things though: Outlook and OneDrive Outlook I wrote about the best solution I had for Outlook in an earlier post: tomlm/electron-outlook . It's a really nifty little wrapper around the web based Outlook that makes it feel like a local app. I've been quite happy using that for all email tasks o...

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home" - Ken Olsen, DEC, 1977 We get the general impression these days that things are moving at a whirlwind pace: web frameworks are released and abandoned in 18 months; cloud services expand in scope daily; languages change and evolve so fast that I seem to spend half my time updating software and weeding out the deprecated libraries. It was pretty much always this way, although I think the changes to the way we used computers seemed more dramatic in the 1980s and early 1990s. Big companies rose and fell in record time. Alliances formed between companies to push their mode of technology. The massive, established players like Digital Equipment Corp were gutted like fish. There was a mad rush, a panic even, to capture that space on every users desktop where they interacted with technology. All because the PC had started eating the world and was destroying the minicomputer business. Unmanaged and out of c...

Hiding behind seven proxies This sponsored article over at The Register is actually a pretty good overview of why Aurora is great if you aren't interested in doing a lot of database maintenance and need something that will scale. I've been using Aurora for a few years now because I'm one of those guys who just isn't super enthusiastic about server maintenance tasks. I do them, but I just can't get excited about it. My setup includes keeping 30 days of daily snapshots, which is OK for my risk management plans but occasionally I like to have a fallback that isn't in the cloud. In the unlikely event that somebody hacked into your AWS account and started wreaking havoc, you need some way of making sure your data can be recovered. If, like most of us, you are trying to keep a lid on your cloud costs, you need to minimise the amount of data that is transferred out of AWS. Overkill? Sure, it's overkill, but I also like to have a copy of the production dat...

Good old fashioned book learning I don't know what happened to my original copies of the two books we use to use as Unix bibles: Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" and Kernighan and Pike's "The Unix Programming Environment" . Lost in a house move maybe. We often talk of one mythical box that contains everything we can no longer find but disappeared during a move, and they are probably in that box. I did buy a copy of "The Unix Programming Environment" from a local second hand bookstore some time ago, it's entertaining, informative and has a brief overview of everything from file system fun to C programming and troff. It even has a section on using the "ed" editor, which isn't installed by default on anything anymore ( sudo apt-get install ed fixes that). Mostly I use it to refresh those shell scripting skills I used to have but have atrophied over years of using Windows. However it seems some of the ...

The Great Escape This probably hasn't got a huge amount to do with Debian directly, more remembering how automation works in your favour once you break out of the jail that is Windows. I was trying to cut my way through your wire because I want to get out. I've been developing in Visual Studio for a long time. In some ways, moving to Visual Studio from Unix systems was quite painful back in the 2000s, I often hankered after the simplicity of grep when looking for something in the source code. The search tools are very good in Visual Studio, but they are slow. This is largely so VS can give you some context for the string you're looking for, load up the file, move the cursor to where the string is and generally give you an all-encompassing environment that you never have to leave. Similarly, you rarely (if ever) have to manual build a Make file, or edit the project or solution files directly. Adding a project does all that for you. After a while you kind of forget y...

Weird Science Not sure why I did this to myself - perhaps it was the little reminder from apt that told me Buster was now "oldstable" and I needed to think about upgrading. There are quite a few machines to do so it was mostly a background task while I was trying to replace our kitchen benchtops. I should perhaps have picked one job because neither went very well So, what would you little maniacs like to do first? First machine out of the gate: a Mac Mini, early 2009 version that I use largely to verify builds of systems off my main development machine. This little box with a scant 160Gb disk and 4Gb of memory is useless with the Apple supplied operating systems but runs surprisingly well with Debian Buster. The upgrade went very smoothly ( instructions here ). It took a while to download all the packages but it rebooted into Bullseye with no trouble and no extra configuring required. All of the SmartShepherd software compiles and runs, no problems with VSCode or .N...

Hand rolled CMS system gets a previewer The ongoing process of updating the help system on the SmartShepherd inspired two new features: editing of the html in a temporary location and a small web server to check your work before pushing it to production. The surprise? That GitHub desktop will show you a side-by-side view if you change an image file. Can't believe I didn't notice that before. Can you hold my camel for me? Sometimes I get so far down a dead end I don't realise how many issues could be sorted simply by re-thinking something. The initial deployment of the SmartShepherd web server was to an Elastic Beanstalk setup on AWS, mostly because I had no idea what I was doing. Elastic Beanstalk isn't really one product, it's more of an elaborate script that creates systems for you. In my case, it was spinning up a small Windows EC2 instance, installing the .NET Core website and auto-configuring a load balancer to point to that instance. I mean, it's...