Michael Maclean

Modernising my NixOS configuration a bit

New ways to talk to people about the weather

I wrote an extension for SQLite to let you use JQ queries along with SQL.

Using zvols to work around an issue when trying to run Firecracker and Ignite

A tool I wrote a couple of years ago has attracted some attention

I've been writing a lot about Nix and NixOS recently. What's it good for?

My quest to throw Nix at every piece of hardware I own continues apace

Fun things to do on a machine hundreds of miles away with no lights-out management

A dive into how systemd socket activation works

Using systemd to avoid having to write some risky code

A story of trying to be clever and how it can bite you back years down the line

Options for working around one class of problems when your ISP lets you down

A note to myself to avoid me having to search my history every time I want to do this.

Using a built-in nginx feature to log CSP and other reports from browsers

Working around a problem with Flask in development mode on NixOS

I wrote a new tool to do basic parsing of HTML pages.

Using nettop to find out what network connections a program is trying to make.

Some notes about things to watch out for when installing NixOS.

An experiment in allowing PHP to interoperate with C-based shared libraries

Using new tools including HHVM and Recki-CT to speed up PHP applications

A quick way to allow per-machine customisations in Vagrant setups.

I've found a better way to set up zsh.

I'm helping run the PHP room at FOSDEM 2013.

Why I think the trend for one-line software installers is a bad idea.

The next iteration of mgdm.net has appeared.

As I'm sure you've all been longing to hear, we've finally got around to releasing a new version of PECL/Cairo!

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that I'll be giving two talks at this year's FrOSCon conference in St Augustin near Bonn in Germany, on the 20th and 21st of August.

It occurs to me that though I wrote an introduction post about Pango for PHP, I forgot to mention that it's actually installable using the PECL installer.

Just making a quick note in case anyone else is searching for the same problem.

A few months ago I got a pair of 4x20 LCD displays from Sure Electronics, via eBay.

My previous post was typed in a bit of a hurry (was it that obvious?) and could probably have done with a few more sarcasm tags, though I think I still have a valid, if small, point.

I've been recently asked to check out some CMSes for someone, and try to find a recommendation.

I've just committed two new plugins to the habari-extras Subversion.

I think I'm just about keeping to this one-post-a-week thing, almost.

It's my intention this year to at write at least one post on here per week, ideally with some substance to it, rather than just recording what I had for breakfast (that being Twitter's job, after all).

I noted a couple of comments after my talk on Cairo at DPC 10 yesterday, so I thought I'd respond to them here to clear up what's going on.

Recently I've become involved in a move to resurrect the Ubuntu Accessibility team, which seemed to have stagnated until quite recently when Penelope Stowe got involved and suggested I joined too.

This year I've decided to enter the EuroWinPHP contest, as I figured it might be interesting to learn a bit more about how PHP works on Windows.

Currently, in PECL/Cairo the only way to draw text is the referred to as the toy text API, which is a very basic way of handling text compared to the facilities available in the Cairo library itself.

I'm happy to say that I'll be speaking at the Dutch PHP Conference in June in Amsterdam, on the subject of the PECL/Cairo extension I've been helping out by working on for the past few months.

The first beta version of the PECL/Cairo extension has just been released.

I've got 3 posts or so queued up in my mind to write out, but some of them rather depend on doing other things first, so this will just be a quick note to say I have an article in the most recent php|architect magazine on the subject of Vector Graphics with Cairo.

Last weekend I spent a couple of days on the yacht Hebridean as part of an RYA sail cruising day skipper course.

I saw this article on the BBC, where a man who bought a packet of cigarettes from a petrol station in the US ended up being charged $23,148,855,308,184,500 instead.

The first alpha of the PECL Cairo extension I've been helping out with has been released.

I finally decided to get around to doing something about my site, so I've made a front page for it which is better than a straight redirect onto the blog.

PHP 5.3.0RC2 has been released, which means that the next version of PHP is just around the corner.

I saw this on TheDailyWTF recently, and decided I had to try it for myself, and it works!

This is a camera-geek post, so if you're not one of those, feel free to skip.

In other news, I've been spending far too much time recently with my camera.

LugRadio Live 2008 is happening on the 19th and 20th of July at The Lighthouse Media Center, Chubb Buildings, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton.

I've spent some time recently playing with a couple of Linksys NSLU2s.