37 posts tagged with "tech"

We move a lot and so does our Synology NAS DS215j. When we move to a new home, there will be a new router, and Synology DSM needs to be mapped on this new network. It's not always a straightforward transition process though, depending on the difference between the old and the new router. Sometimes it works like a charm without any additional work, and sometimes it feels like moving mountains to do something as basic as finding the IP for the Synology device.

My own quick reference guide for MySQL database.

I get rusty from time to time and need a quick tutorial to get myself back into the tech game. This reference doc is fairly basic but saves me the trouble of having to google (which doesn't work in China) other reference websites or Stackoverflow.

A lot of manga series found online are in image format, like JPG or PNG and it's one image for one page. Mac's Preview app can read them if needed, but that's not very convenient. It would be nice to convert them into one single PDF file so that it can be read in any device and easily shared with others. This can be accomplished with a command-line tool ImageMagick on Mac.

We use MySQL for Linkqlo app as that was part of the good old stack of PHP-MySQL chosen by the IT vendor we worked with. In 2015~2016 as we gradually refactored PHP endpoints into Haskell, we started running into various issues of MySQL since some of its libraries didn't work well with Haskell or our deployment script. Eventually they were all fixed, but it was a big hassle. For our new Mirror Mirror app, since it was built from scratch, we chose a stack that would fully leverage our technical capability - Haskell for endpoints, React-Native for front-end, PostgreSQL for database, and Nix for deployment.

Making an app submission to Apple's App Store is like configuring Amazon's AWS service. From a technical standpoint it's not scientifically difficult, nor an engineering feat worth bragging about, but it's complicated and often confusing because we have to play by the rules set by Apple and Amazon and that introduce a whole world of pains on its own. It's a muddy water where if you have been there, done that, you know what to do, sort of, through a series of trials and errors. If you are new to this process or haven't done this in a few months, you just have to man up and read through some notes from the past in order to stay on the right path.

I've come to really enjoy Pelican since moving my personal blog from wordpress to static site generator Pelican on a Github Page in 2014. It's not the easiest thing to set up in the beginning and it took me months in countless iterations to settle down a well-tuned configuration that met my needs. The end-game is very satisfying though.

Tagging helps to keep track of key versions of a codebase. During the last few frenzy days toward submission of a new app to iTunes Connect, I sometimes make 10~20 commits a day to clean up various small patches here and there. One month from now when memory becomes hazy, it's important to be able to identify exactly which version of the binary on the git server corresponds to the one that is currently available in App Store. I follow the below workflow to tag a particular commit.

Here's the git flow I use while working on our latest iOS app Mirror Mirror:

Wordpress by default is installed in the root directory var/www/abc.com/public_html. This causes a lot of inconvenience as often we need to install other files into separate subdirectories under root directory. A good installation practice should keep every project in its own subdirectory.