Fiddling with code and stuffing bytes into pipes
Lately I have been pushing to a couple git repository over https instead of usual git+ssh and the workflow felt a little bit tedious because by default git asks for http auth credentials before every action.
Fortunately I stumbled upon gitcredentials which allows git to use gnome-keyring among other possible storages.
I decided to take Fish shell to the test drive after running into mentions of it in The Setup blog and IRC lately. It was really positive experience and it’s my default login shell now.
I have been experimenting with Middleman static site generator by runnning my Finnish hobby blog with it. Lately I stumbled upon WebP image format and because Middleman is quite delightfull to extend with own custom plugins, I wrote WebP converter extension to optimize site performance and bandwidth.
I’m using Disqus commenting service for both my blogs, which has been great. However the Finnish one lies under IDNA domain name (niemelä.fi) and that has been causing some problems. I noticed that some of the comments were missing and that seemed to depend on which web browser was used.
During this weekend I did a little application for Jolla phone, which displays free parking places in parking halls at Oulu using open data provided by the City of Oulu.
There weren’t too many UI widgets in the app, but it provided great opportinity to look into how localization is made in Sailfish apps. I refined my notes from going through Qt documentation to this post.
SSH is great tool for connecting your machines remotely, but the user experience suffers from high latency of cellular networks and IP address changes caused by unstable network or changing between cellular/Wifi will drop the connection and will require manual reconnecting.
Mosh is a SSH alternative which solves these issues in pursuit of developing ideal remote shell application for mobile use. It’s available for multiple Linux/Unix distributions in their repositories, OS X with Homebrew, Android and you can compile it for Jolla phone too.
Having test environment as similar as possible to your production setup is a must to prevent problems caused by different software versions or configuration. I also like the freedom to try out different web development frameworks, database servers, etc without cluttering up my actual desktop system.
It’s possible to achieve all these by running development environment in virtual machine and Vagrant is an application which makes setting up virtual machines and sharing them with coworkers easy. Additionally it will be simple to re-create your setup when re-installing or changing your OS or hardware with the help of Vagrant.
Enyo is Javascript frontend framework which we use at ZEF a lot. It emphasizes re-usable modular widgets named kinds for building the UI and its main targets are mobile platforms, however it is usable on conventional desktop web applications too.
There’s little information or examples about practices considering test driven development while using Enyo and I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the aproach which could be seen at the core Enyo repository, so I decided to create own setup using tools I like more and are quite popular with other open source projects.
I have been planning writing blog posts in English for quite a long time and I have dreamed on finding or building some kind of holy grail of multi-language blogging engine.
Now I finally decided to abandon that quest and launched separate site named “Byte Plumbing” for English content.
