Categories
tech

Online Education

I was researching how to automatically backup my computers online… and was looking for info on how to backup directories using ftp when I got “schooled”.

1: I learned I can’t recursively ftp directories.

2: I learned that there’s a better way to do what I need.

Alrighty then! How sweet online education can be.

Categories
tech

Somedays I end up behind where I started…

Started out today trying to figure out why my startup script wasn’t running on client’s digital signage display… and ended up overwriting my server sd-card because I have 2 raspberry pi’s and forgot midstream which one I was working on, doh!

Luckily I have a backup routine that the server runs everyday so I didn’t lose any data, just the config settings and wiki setup and ftp script.

After spending most of the day working on the script problem, the solution was very similar to what I had previous to the client sd-card failing… I think the problem may have been that I re-installed a noob version instead of the raspian version and the noob version wasn’t running lxde as a window manager. So at least I wrote down the session test in the project pi docs. And I put a piece of duct tape over the raspberry pi wiki server sd-card so it won’t be so easy to pull it out next time without realizing there’s a reason that piece of tape is there!

Categories
tech

Automate Everything!

I was reading an article on rsync in order to save my webserver wiki files remotely because!–and I came across the sentence:

I automated my backups because – “automate everything.”
–from “Using rsync to back up your Linux system

Delightful.

Categories
Education tech

Fast Learning Book: Badass: Making Users Awesome

Experts are not what they know but what they do.
Repeatedly.–page 81

OK then, I want to learn Laravel the O’Reilly “Head First” way. Kathy Sierra came up with the idea when she started writing books on Java around 2003: Kathy says: you don’t focus on the tool, you focus on making the user of the tool awesome.

So how does one make the user awesome? One breaks the subject matter down into small lessons, and repeats them alot, to achieve a fast learning flow.

Also using whole-body techniques– Splash! Wake me up with a tiger to get my attention.

Categories
tech

How to Avoid Adding Passwords to Git

I was working on figuring out how to log ftp scripts, and discovered how to use a remote file: .netrc to store usernames and passwords. So I’m going to have to apply that to a number of scripts in the DigitalSignage program I’m working on. Hmmm, which makes me realize I’m doing the same for the main RETS library I’m accessing!

Then I randomly clicked on a YouTube “Tech Code” channel and watched a guy describing how he accidentally hard-coded a password into his program, and saved it to git–thereby uploading it to anyone who has access to the source code. Yikes!

The solution to hard-coding usernames and passwords into programs that get moved about is to use an environmental file: .env (for python or laravel for instance) that stores the either local or remote (test / production) settings. Of course!