Simon Facciol

Squarespace to Ghost

I finally decided to take the leap and move from Squarespace.com to Ghost. It wasn't easy and I had to create a node.js script to import my posts in Ghost.

blockchain

Understanding Blockchain Technology: 3. Characteristics of a blockchain

1. Data is always available as long as any of the nodes are online since the full copy of the data is stored on all the full nodes causing minimal disruption 2. Data is highly secure and immutable because the data is encrypted with strong cryptographic algorithms 3. Location of

blockchain

Understanding Blockchain Technology: 2. Why was blockchain created?

Why was blockchain created? What is blockchain trying to achieve? As previous breakthroughs filled significant gaps to free civilisations from manipulations and dictatorships such as knowledge, power and distance, blockchain is going to increase the value of trust in data, as the history of that data will be proved and

blockchain

Understanding Blockchain Technology: 1. What is Blockchain?

A blockchain is a decentralised network of peer to peer nodes that replicate a digital transaction ledger and is made up of blocks of securely encrypted data which are chained together and dependent on each other. This means that there are several exact copies of the same data stored in

ie11

IE11 SVG background images not displaying correctly

The Problem There is an issue with IE11 when rendering some types of SVG files the styles are embedded as a element inside the SVG file. Because IE11 uses a different rendering engine for CSS images and HTML images the images differ from when including the SVG file inside compared

Understrap

I have recently (2 weeks) started to use Understrap as starter theme kit for Wordpress. There is a lot of pre-developed functionality to make it easier to override or add additional features to a Wordpress website. The kit uses Underscores starter theme and Bootstrap 4 which have both matured in

github

Github : Changelog.md bash script

Recently I have been tagging my releases with the following tag format "release/0.2.10" and I felt the need to generate a changelog that would then be visible on github and in case I needed to recount the changes that were done per release.ermissions First thing I

python

Python: Rename files using a csv map

This script is written in Python and makes use of a 2 column .csv file to find and rename files by mapping their existing name and rename it to the new one.

code

Python: Check the resolution of images in a directory

Check the resolution of images in a directory and output the filename of the incorrect images. I had to check over 200 images and there was no better way than using Ruby or Python on OSX to go through all those image files and check their proper dimensions, and I

mysql

MySQL Trigger to generate a slug on before insert a new row

This week I needed to write a trigger for MySQL to generate automatically the slug from a string column whenever a new game is added. What this trigger does is to get the game name column and replace some characters to generate a proper slug. Watch out for the escaped

amazon

Jaybird X2 FIRE

I just got my Jaybird X2 FIRE (red colour) today after deliberating through a dozen reviews and various other wireless in-ear headphones. I went for the Jaybird X2 mainly because of the battery life which is stated to be around 8 (eight) hours thanks to the 100 mAh Lithium Polymer.

ssh

Server ssh key login setup [OSX]

Do you ever get fed up of having to enter the ssh password every time you need to access a server from the terminal. Setting up ssh-copy-id is easy and will make your life lazier, oops, easier. 1. Download and install ssh-copy-id using OSX homebrew or via git if you

virtualbox

VirtualBox - Failed to create the host-only adapter [OSX]

This morning I went to fire up my local vagrant machine on OSX and I got the following error: Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider... ==> default: Checking if box 'laravel/homestead' is up to date... ==> default: Clearing any previously set network interfaces... There was an error while executing `VBoxManage`

api

Wordpress - Send post data to external (3rd party) service

Did you ever want to send Wordpress post data as soon as a post is created, or published, or updated? Maybe even when the post is trashed or deleted? Using Wordpress hooks it's very easy to create a custom wordpress plugin, activate it from the administration area and immediately start

ookla

Ookla - Could not connect to test server issue

Recently I had to debug and issue with our hosted Ookla speed test application. To cut it short the flash application was loading fine, license key was correct too but when running the speed test it was showing a latency error like the one below. First we thought the issue

htaccess

Setting environment variables in Magento using .htaccess or httpd.conf

.htaccess OR httpd.conf

drupal

Drupal 7 – Enable a theme from a custom module via code

Sometimes you are required to enable a theme programmatically from a module without needing to do it manually all the time, so to do this I have used the hook_init() function to get a list of all the themes in Drupal which contains all the themes info. Then I

code

How to stop a youtube iframe video after closing a popup

If you ever embed a youtube video in a popup window, unless you use a third-party modal plugin, you would need to stop the video when the popup is closed so that it does not keep playing in the background. To do this I found the code below on StackOverflow