Daniel Wehner's blog

Tatort: Nachtsicht

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 17:48:05 +0000

Mir gefällt die Bildsprache. Hier wird klar die Familie hat etwas zu verbergen.

Port Royal

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 22:15:31 +0000

Port royal is a deck building game, meets pirate theme. You buy cards over time which either bring you more capabilities, or what you are really aiming for, give you victory points.

As its more on the easier side of things, this is a great game to explain someone to get started. One nice aspect is that its not necessarily obvious early in the game you will win. Unlike other deck building games, it has a bit of randomness involved. The game also comes with a taking the chance effect, which make the group by excited.

Terraforming mars

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 09:08:31 +0000

Terraforming mars is an excellent game, but it takes a bunch of effort to learn. It is not a beginner game, but its very rewarding, once you get going.

One nice aspect: it is actually a nice single player game as well.

My translation workflow

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 11:45:14 +0000

Coming from my native language german, I got used to speak, write and think in English all day long. Still from time to time I have both english and german terms I want to get translated. At the same time I want to track my progress of terms over time.

Therefore I’m using Alfred and a custom workflow. Let’s have a look what it does:

Convert html files to markdown using pandoc

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 10:32:30 +0000

You can convert html files to markdown files using a various set of tools.

Pandoc can be really useful, as its a tool being able to handle all kind of markup language and converting between them.

Here is an example converting HTML files to markdown files.

nix-shell -p pandoc
pandoc input.html -t markdown -f html -s -o output.md

Good bash error handling

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It follows a small bunch of

The wind of change

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 15:50:40 +0000

The podcast “the wind of change” is a story about a song changing the history.

Listen to an exciting season of investigative journalism packed up in a good story:

https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/

TheirTube: Filter bubble for the rest of us

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 14:25:45 +0000

Mozilla released a small project which allows anyone to see the homepage of youtube through the eye of a climate change denier or similar kind.

2020 Circles

Sun, 03 May 2020 23:46:48 +0100

Pink floyd

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 09:08:31 +0000

Spinning wheel

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 09:08:31 +0000

Convert openssh key to RSA PEM

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

# Generate the ssh key
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f /tmp/key
# Convert it to a PEM file
ssh-keygen -p -m PEM -f /tmp/key

Hook

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:48:05 +0000

IMDB

Mooncop (Tom Gauld)

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 17:48:05 +0000

Good Reads

Profiling PHP in ddev using tideways locally

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

From time to time one runs into some performance problems, for example in PHP applications. The request might be slow or a batch process is leaking memory.

Here I will describe some setup used with ddev but the general setup can be adopted to any other PHP setup.

Note: There are at least two cloud services out there providing profiling for PHP

Both are great and I recommend using them, this blog post though describes a setup which runs all locally.

Permanent record

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 17:48:05 +0000

Snown explained his reasoning behind revealing the world the state of surveilance.

Wikipedia link of the book

Find out that an application is listen on a given port

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Choose one of those:

sudo lsof -i :3030
lsof -i | grep LISTEN | grep 3030
netstat -ltnp | grep -w ':3030'
fuser 3030

Show largest mysql tables

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a small sql commando to show the largest mysql tables on your system.

SELECT 
 table_schema as `Database`, 
 table_name AS `Table`, 
 round(((data_length + index_length) / 1024 / 1024), 2) `Size in MB` 
FROM information_schema.TABLES 
ORDER BY (data_length + index_length) DESC
LIMIT 10;

Thank you http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/02/04/finding-out-largest-tables-on-mysql-server/ for the code.

Seeing the screen in black and white

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what matters to me. As many people I struggle with spending too much time on the internet. Content consumable in small little pieces like tweets, titles on hackernews or simply images on reddit let’s you feel good temporarily, but as long you don’t consume it purposefully, it didn’t really give me anything longterm.

End of October I stumbled upon digital wellbeing on Android: It allows you to set a certain time of the night, at which notifications gets disabled and your screen becomes black and white. This seems to be quite a nice solution in the late evening. I stopped reading my phone in the late evening. While this is a solution for the night, there are still like 16 hours I have my computer/phone reachable.

Quickstarting Drupal 8

Thu, 03 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Before and around Drupalcon Nashville there was a lot of discussion around improving the first time experience. Things we achieved for example is a new Drupal.org homepage with a clear focus on 3 different userstories.

One small work we have been doing can be seen in the following video:

Drupal quickstart from daniel wehner on Vimeo.

To summarize this video: It should be possible to start Drupal as quickly as possible:

Download Drupal
Execute a single command: php core/scripts/drupal quick-start
Have a working Drupal opened upon a web browser automatically.

Having such a command is a big step forward.

Live 3.0

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 17:48:05 +0000

wikipedia link

About

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Wehner (he / him / his)

Engineer, runner, climber, rower in London

A lists of podcasts I enjoy listening to can be found here

Realtime watchdog powered by PHP, Drupal and Elm

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation

For my own interest, so mostly for the sake of learning new things, I try to implement some classical Drupal UIs in ELM.

One of them is the dblog UI.

The classical dblog UI allows you to see the latest log entries, filter and sort by them. On top of that I wanted to actually make use of the capabilities of a modern UI:

Let’s stream log entries to the browser:

Emoji code review

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Problem

From my personal experience the hardest part of projects isn’t the technical side nor the project managment side or anything like this, its communication. Communication problems leads to demotivation, hours of lost work etc.

A small subset of this space is communicating clearly in code reviews. Many people use tools like github to basically comment on bits of code, but there is no semantic meaning attached to each comment. Given that people need to extract exactly what each comment might mean. Just an example:

Access inaccessible git commits

Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This is mostly a personal note, but maybe helpful for others

I accidentally removed a local branch using git branch -D local-branch, but I forgot to push the last commit.

I found this on the interwebs.

git log -reflog

which gets all the logs and I was able to cherry-pick from there on.

Retry HTTP requests

Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Problem

As a matter of life we all learn stuff fails. This might be frame with our favourite picture, the street in front of our house, or more likely requests to APIs.

A call to a 3rd/2nd party API can fail due to various reasons:

The client / server is under high load, which results into a timeout potentially
The internet routes packages weird
Currently something along the stack is deployed
The universe just doesn’t like you for a second.

When you detect a failing request you can do many things

Automatically clear the render cache when templates change

Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently someone asked whether we can disable CSS/JS aggregation and render cache on local development sites. It is totally easy to do that, but we realized that keeping render cache enabled is important to not miss caching issues during development and then have issues once the site is deployed.

On the other hand its quite annoying to have to clear the render cache manually, everytime you touch any template.

As solution we have written a script which invalidates the render cache when someone touches a template.

Clone a non composer repo with composer

Wed, 10 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

There are some usecases where you want to integrate arbitrary libraries into your system. One example I stumbled upon was some NPM library which stored some general taxonomy mappings in json files. In Drupal we wanted to synchronize these information.

Therefore we are using this small little bit in composer.json:

{
 "repositories": [
 {
 "type": "package",
 "package": {
 "name": "namespace/name",
 "version": "dev-master",
 "source": {
 "url": "https://github.com/example/example-repo.git",
 "type": "git",
 "reference": "master"
 }
 }
 }
 ]
}

Once this is done you can use:

Using tar the easy way

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 09:08:31 +0000

[Tar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing) (originally coming from Tape ARchive) is a common tool in the belt of both system adminstrators and users of unix like systems. It allows you to create archives of files and extract them later.

Traditionally people learn it by copying examples:

# Create / extract tar file
tar cf example.tar file folder file2
tar xf example.tar file
# Create / extract tar.gz file
tar zcf example.tar.gz file folder file2
tar zxf example.tar.gz
# Create / extract tar.bz2 file
tar jcf example.tar.bz2 file folder file2
tar jxf example.tar.bz2
# Create / extract tar.xz file
tar Jxf example.tar.xf file folder file2
tar Jcf example.tar.xf

The parameters contains three different bits:

APCU and some ramblings

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to APCU

One integral part of Drupal 8 is its quite aggressive caching. One subpart is the usage of APC(u) for caching things in the critical path of the system. Let’s first see what APC(u) is and then see some potential problems with it.

Since PHP 5.6 we have an opcode cache built into PHP, so the previous package APC is not longer needed. There was a small component of APCU, which is basically a key value store shared between all instances of PHP on a single node. This shared memory model allowed really fast retrieval of information for common data of PHP applications. The problem is called APCU.

Extract a folder from a git repo into its own repo

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s assume you work on some client project. After a while you realize that the nice small tool you wrote is actually reusable and can/should be shared as opensource.

Now there are a two of possiblities:

Copy the files and give a shit about the history
Extract the history from an existing repo.

But how would you extract a history from an existing repo?

Extract history from existing repo.

Step 1: Clone the existing repo into a new one:

Create a PDF from a couple of images

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you just want to create a PDF from a couple of scanned document papers. One solution could be of course to embed these pages into LibreOffice / Word and then use a PDF printer to get it. Some people though like tools on the shell.

Therefore we can use imagemagick, which is probably already installed on your system. It provides a command line util called convert.

convert first-image.png second-image.png image.png result.pdf

Make sense of your watchdog entries

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Websites have errors, which are ideally logged. Logging though is one thing, you also need to make some sense out of them.

In an ideal world you would have some logging server like graylog or similar. Sadly this is not avaiable on every site.

Here is an example of just looking at error messages stored in the database, but the general toolsuite could be applied to everything.

Get the data

We use drush to fetch the error messages from drupal:

Remove all merged local branches

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When you use git you often create a hell lot of custom branches. This is annoying.

With using a PR based workflow this results into proper merges, so we can truncate those branches.

git checkout master
git branch --merged | grep -v "\*" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d

Lua for all the things on your mac v1

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

One thing people really like about OSX is that everything works and is easy to use, but what is easy is not necessarily the best for your particular usecase.

This especially becomes important when it comes down to configurability / scriptablity. For my own purposes I use Hammerspoon which provides Lua wrappers for quite a lot of lower level APIs, so its easy to setup things a specific way.

Just a quick list of what you can do with it:

Get notified on slow commands

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We are all lazy and we get distracted. One thing happens often… You run some slow command in your shell, switch to the browser, and bam… you are distracted.

What about sending an OS notification? Every time any command needs longer to run than let’s say 10 seconds then there is some notification to show so you can get right back to work each time.

Note: This is for Fish shell, which is a modern shell and really nice to use.

Pretty print your json

Sun, 18 Oct 2015 09:08:31 +0000

Due to its simplicity compared to other formats like XML, JSON these days is completly ruling the marking of remote APIs, like REST.

Let’s have a look at one small problem which occurs quite often:

curl "https://www.openthesaurus.de/synonyme/search?q=test&format=application/json"

{"metaData":{"apiVersion":"0.2","warning":"ACHTUNG: Bitte vor ernsthafter Nutzung feedback@openthesaurus.de kontaktieren, um bei API-Änderungen informiert zu werden","copyright":"Copyright (C) 2014 Daniel Naber (www.danielnaber.de)","license":"GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2.1","source":"http://www.openthesaurus.de","date":"Sun Oct 18 09:20:29 CEST 2015"},"synsets":[{"id":292,"categories":[],"terms":[{"term":"Erprobung"},{"term":"Probe"},{"term":"Prüfung"},{"term":"Test"},{"term":"Versuch"}]},{"id":4398,"categories":[],"terms":[{"term":"Kontrolle"},{"term":"Leistungsnachweis"},{"term":"Prüfung"},{"term":"Test"}]},{"id":5752,"categories":[],"terms":[{"term":"Klassenarbeit"},{"term":"Klausur"},{"term":"Lernerfolgskontrolle"},{"term":"Prüfung"},{"term":"Schularbeit"},{"term":"Schulaufgabe"},{"term":"Test"},{"term":"Arbeit","level":"umgangssprachlich"}]},{"id":9138,"categories":[],"terms":[{"term":"Experiment"},{"term":"Probelauf"},{"term":"Studie"},{"term":"Test"},{"term":"Testballon"},{"term":"Testlauf"},{"term":"Trockenlauf"},{"term":"Trockentest"},{"term":"Versuch"}]}]}⏎

Pretty print

So you are either a guru or extremly motivated to remember the open braces for your own, otherwise you need help to read the JSON properly. One small trick which is pretty useful with the following helper tool:

Projects

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page links and describes some of my personal projects.

A list of GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) experiments
A simple electron based UI for tinypng to make it easy to compress images: tiny-UI
An vocabulary trainer app written in elm to procrastinate from learning vocabularies: elm-vocab
Tool to automatically notify finished longruning process: Done
Slack PHP Bot: slack-phpeval
Jupyer/Ipython kernel for PHP: jupyter-php
A lot of Drupal specific code, see drupal.org and Github