david winter

I set up a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu Server using the Raspberry Pi Imager app, which lets you preconfigure the hostname, user account, and SSH keys before you even boot the thing.

I commit parts of my Claude Code setup to git so it follows me between machines and stays version controlled.

I keep a lot of tabs open.

I use RustDesk to help family with their computers from a distance.

For really simple projects, PaaS providers such as Fly.io and render.com offer a pain-free way to get an app or static site up and running in minutes.

For my note-taking application, nimblenote, I was looking for the simplest way to handle automatic updates for the user.

GPG is a tool used for encryption.

Visiting the house out in Spain is one of our favourite things to do in the off-peak seasons.

Tmux is a great tool for managing multiple terminal sessions and layouts.

WordPress doesn’t come with Github Gist oEmbed support out of the box, which is a shame because sometimes there is nothing quicker than creating a Gist to put in a new tech post by just pasting in the URL.

Well over two years have passed since my previous blog post on managing WordPress with git was written.

I’ve been using Ansible now for just under six months.

It was far too hot in the office the other week and I needed some place a little cooler to work so I could keep focused.

I’ve been using fish shell for the last year, and would never go back to using bash or zsh again.

This post is a little out of the ordinary for my blog - well, OK, quite a bit.

Now you’ve mastered how to use the EC2 command line tools (Ninja, right?)

I’ve been using EC2 a lot recently, probably creating and destroying around 20 instances trying out a project, today alone.

A few friends have asked me to talk through how to setup an Amazon EC2 server.

I’ve been a massive fan of the ‘Installing/Updating Wordpress with Subversion’ instructions on the WordPress codex for a good few years.

Have you ever had that déjà vu feeling when setting up a new server?

This is my third blog post on how to use Behat for your web application testing.

This is my second blog post on how to use Behat for your web application testing.

rbenv is a quick way to get different ruby versions installed on your OS, without interfering with any default installs it may provide.

Where PHPUnit is for testing the individual pieces of your code (unit testing), Behat is a great tool for testing that an application behaves as expected when following a series of steps (functional testing).

I’ve not had time recently to keep my copy of WordPress up-to-date (yes, even though it’s setup with SVN).

When you sit down and start work on a new project, what hoops do you have to jump through before you get your app running in your browser?

Not much more than a few hours have passed since I posted my APF setup howto, but I’ve found something even simpler. ufw - uncomplicated firewall.

I just setup a new Linode to host my new twitter app, lists dj and wanted to lock it down to basically Apache and SSH. iptables gives me a headache, and I don’t want to spend a day learning how to use it.

Having a reliable and easy to use developer environment on my Mac is essential for my work, and the odd project I work on.

mkvmerge -o merged_file.mkv file1.mkv + file2.mkv

Rewrite rules in an htaccess file don’t need to leading slash, otherwise they won’t work.

I’ve started using CodeIgniter again recently, and have noticed that my how-to on implementing basic authentication could do with an upgrade for version 2.0.

Sorry, I promised a blog post, but instead you get a link to bitbucket with the source of a basic chat app written using WebSockets. https://bitbucket.org/davidwinter/websockets-chat/src

We have a few production servers at work, and we have a central bitbucket repository to store our core code.

Fed up with having to type your password in each time you log into a server over SSH?

Here’s an example setup to create SSH host shortnames.

Our internet connection via our landline has been dead since Tuesday afternoon, so I’ve needed an alternative connection in the meantime to give me my twitter fix!

Here’s a simple solution to redirect users to a maintenance page in Apache.

We’ve finally moved to Mercurial at work (well, we didn’t exactly move from anywhere, but that’s another story…).

MongoDB (from “humongous”) is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database.

sudo update-rc.d -f script_name remove

Ensure that the mercurial convert extension is enabled: nano ~/.hgrc Inside that file add: [extensions] hgext.convert= Save.

In php.ini: display_errors = Off log_errors = On error_log = /var/log/php-errors.log Make the log file, and writable by www-data: sudo touch /var/log/php-errors.log sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/log/php-errors.log

I’ve now changed my slice from running lighttpd to nginx.

Here’s how I do some basic authentication for a controller in CodeIgniter.

You will probably want to ensure that curl supports https before getting underway: curl -V Check that the output contains https: >: curl -V curl 7.19.2 (i386-apple-darwin9.5.0) libcurl/7.19.2 OpenSSL/0.9.8i zlib/1.2.3 Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict http…

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It’s a little tricky getting a nice clean install of PHP5 for OS X 10.5.

Here’s a quick run down on getting lighttpd and php running on CentOS 5. yum install lighttpd lighttpd-fastcgi php mkdir /var/run/lighttpd touch /var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd /var/run/lighttpd/ vim /etc/php.ini Add in ph…

To merge video files together with mencoder is simple: mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy file1.avi file2.avi file3.avi -o full_movie.avi