As much a note to self as anything else. Adding setting Jenkins up to be build checkins from BitBucket is pretty easy. Not as easy as it would be with GitHub but that’s a function of the relative mindshare. The documentation describes setting up a web hook as you’d expect nowadays and so forth. Until you realise that this only applies to the BitBucket Cloud service and not the self-hosted BitBucket Server. ... Read more

Sometimes when rebasing changes for gerrit you’ll make a mistake and Gerrit will reject the change ID, for example if it’s picking up an old change ID that it recognises, so you’ll need to change it. It’s actually relatively simple if you are using the commit-messge hook. Just use git commit -amend, delete all the old Change-Id lines and save. The hook will then generate a new Change-Id line.

I happen to use Evernote for a bunch of my day to day tasks. Recently, Jason Kincaid wrote a blog post detailing his frustrations with it. I’ve not used Evernote long enough to hit any of the bugs described but I’ve certainly encountered my own crop of frustrations. What’s heartening is the response from Evernote. Firstly, they admit that getting a thoughtfully written demolition of your product is valuable but unpleasant. ... Read more

I’ve tried to get into blogging several times before with uniformly disapointing results. Hopefully, this time I’ve eliminated enough of the pain points to produce something useful.

I use a OS X quite a bit. I also like to maximise, or zoom, my browser window. Happily, it’s possible to bind the zoom command to a hot key in OS X which adds the zoom command to the window menu along with your chosen hot key, Ctrl F12 in my case. This arrangement works well for almost every application I use on a regular basis apart from Firefox and Chrome. ... Read more

It looks like I had my first spoofed spam today. I got a very informative delivery failed mail from Google Groups telling me that mail sent from 77.35.63.35, somewhere in Russia, to a non-existent account @baylisscg.org couldn’t be delivered. Of particular interest was [SPF](“http://www.openspf.org/") report which indicated the address was considered suspicious but not banned. A visit to OpenSPF revealed an answer, it looked like my SPF was malformed. Fortunately a quick trip to website’s tools section and I had a correct SPF record in my DNS. ... Read more

My MacBook Pro has headphone and line in ports, as do most laptops produced ever, however don’t plug a microphone into the line in port and expect it to work. It turns out Apple decided that the line in port would be line level only. This means it lacks the amplifier required to handle un-powered audio sources, like a headset with a microphone. OS X will happily attempt to use anything you plug-in to this port but it won’t be loud enough to use. ... Read more

Having set up PHP5 based sites behind Nginx on Ubuntu systems a few times I thought I’d copy out some notes. Unlike Apache Nginx does not have a mod_php equivalent. This is good and bad. Bad as mod_php is regularly packaged and should be available for $your_distro or $os and will likely be well documented. Good as mod_php, or more accurately php, can have threading issues so you should be running apache with prefork, see here, which is bad if you want to use a threaded or event based web server. ... Read more

I’ve updates the site so use HTTPS by default and switched to WordPress so I can easily host both my blog and personal pages from a single location. The basic stack is Nginx with PHP-FPM managing the PHP for WordPress with SSL certificates from StartCOM. I’ve also added Disquis plugin to take over commenting. I’ll be adding the posts from blogger, such as they are, later.