You might have noticed the extra link in the menu point towards photography. The link is pointing towards my newly created photography gallery which I have decided to host and create on SmugMug. I’ve been thorn between creating a generator to host the photographies directly on this site and using a service. But as I have decided I though it might be a good idea to go through some of the reasons for my choice.
To be able to improve my productivity and reach the large goals I set for myself in My quest for productivity I need to formalise my target. I want to be able to continue to develop my skills while still being able to spend a lot of time with my family. Since I am a strong believer of the “practice makes perfect” idea I will target repetitions rather than specific accomplishments.
My struggle to implement a working productivity system is summarized by the following image. It shows my progress in David Allen’s “Getting things done” after several months. No matter how hard I try I have been unable to bring myself to any of the necessary habits. I believe that the system works. I have just been unable to motivate myself enough for the changes required. I believe that my failure to adhere to the “gospel” is caused by a lack of need.
After stumbling upon an interesting project to build a digital bookshelf using hugo I’ve decided to incorporate this to this page. The goal with this is to encourage me to both read and write more, I will therefore try to review the books I read during this year which hopefully will be a diverse collection of literature. I’ve kicked of the reading year with the great Gatsby. All the reviews will be written in the language of the book in question, however for non-english books I will include a short summary in english.
I currently try to write in two types of blogs, one (this) which mainly contains my thoughts on tech and what I do for work and one “personal” blog which mainly contains images. Both of these pages uses hugo and both of them requires some amount of extra tools and scripts to facilitate easy writing and publishing. This post will simply go through the workflow I use to create graphs and image galleries.
If you’ve passed through this site before you might notice that the page design have gone through a major redesign. Id like to take a minute to explain the reasoning behind this change, the main reasoning of course is the fact that I like to tinker with this page but apart from this there is a few technical reasons for the switch. Javascript This is the big issue for me, my previous theme hugo-uno is reasonably light on javascript dependencies, but the full blown version does still depend on jquery and most of the visuals depend on javascript to function optimally.
As you might have noticed this blog was previously generated using Jekyll but was migrated to hugo for performance reasons, for more about the performance differences read my previous post on the subject. Thankfully the migration process is rather straightforward, but I thought it might be a good idea to write a little about it. Since Hugo and jekyll both uses markdown the differences will be rather small but I will describe the process for both post as well as for the config files.
During an update to my previous post regarding performance in static site generators I discovered a major performance difference between Hugo v.0.11 and v.0.12 putting the latest Hugo version at the same build times as jekyll. This require further testing since one of the main reasons for me to use Hugo is build speed and since Hugo just released v.0.13 I decided it was a good time to do another performance test, this time HugoVHugoVHugo as odd as it sounds.
I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been told that for developers the tools don’t matter, just give us a prompt, a basic text editor and away we go. The idea that the tools you use is inconsequential is at least as I see it one of the worst misconceptions about development, especially since it’s spread by old developers and university teachers to fresh minds looking to write their first lines of code.
Since I like to keep my résumé up to date I have spent the last few days on updating both the format and the content of both the résumé and the template for a cover letter. This post will detail some of the changes I’ve made to the basics of the modernCV package, and if you still haven’t installed it I would recommend reading my previous post on the installation procedure.
Since this blog is hosted on a regular debian machine on digitalocean I am stuck with the task of deploying the site manualy on each update. To streamline this process I am using rsync and a small bash script to checkout the latest version of my theme, build the site and sync it to the server. It should be noted that I am using git submodules for the theme which is available at github.
I have recently switched over to a company that mainly works with C# and python. One of my first assignments have been to implement a minimal scheduler I have been trying to wrap my head around task based concurrency in C#. This was necessary since I decided upon a “worker – producer” setup with a producer that fetches “tasks” from a database, and a collection of workers that executes the tasks independently.
I thought I might follow up on my previous post about Windows 8.1 with some first impressions about the Windows 10 technical preview. It is an EARLY release, the final release date is said to be in late 2015 but the preview is available at from Microsoft for anyone to try. My installation Below follows a short listing of the hardware I will be running the tech preview on as well as some of the software I use in my daily routine.
As I have previously mentioned this site runs jekyll, which works with reasonable speed however my personal blog which contains a few more pictures creates a problem. The cause is mainly slow regeneration times, something that also affects this site. I believe that the main performance missuses stems from two main sources, mainly jekyll’s single threaded approach which does suffer on a laptop cpu like the one I use, another issue is with the image plugins used that offers nice features but also creates a performance loss.
Since the web-host I am currently using to host this page only supports basic ftp I ran in to some minor issues when trying to automate deployment of new content to the site. My initial approach utilized curlftps to mount a ftp folder locally, this local folder could then be synced using rsync. This solution did however have some limitations, mainly created by rsync’s lack of native support for ftp transfers which lead to missed files and permission errors.
Since I am currently in the process of moving both this and my personal blog to jekyll I have been noticing some minor drawbacks of jekyll. One of the main problems for my personal blog is the lack of a pretty image handling, there is some alternatives that sadly lacked some of my desired features. The features I lack for image handling is serving different sized images to different devices while still being able to serve the full size image Serving different images to different devices is possible through a plugin called jekyll-picture-tag sadly this plugin does not allow the user to see the un-scaled image if necessary.
I have decided to move this site from Wordpress to Jekyll, which hopefully will allow me to be a bit more active. My main problem with wordpress to this date have been both the complexity of posting as well as managing the site and comments. To simplify deployment and management I have decided to forgo comments entirely, if there is any specific comments or questions I am available on both mail and twitter.
ModernCV is a package for latex with the purpose of typesetting a modern curriculum vitae. Sadly the latest version of this package is not available in the standard Ubuntu 13.04 texlive package. To use this package you have to install the package separately from the apt install. This installation does not disrupt the original install of texlive in ubuntu 13.04. To install basic texlive and unzip in ubuntu use the following command from a terminal: sudo apt-get install texlive-common unzip texlive-binaries texlive-latex-recomended texlive-latex-extra Example Output After this installation finishes you should be able to use latex from command-line but now the installed version of modernCV is outdated to install the latest version of this package use the following commands.
Below I will go into some basics to get a quick and easy jenkins CI server running on your home NAS. This will of course help utilize all those extra clock cycles and also allow you to get started with using Continuous integration systems. To start the guide you will need root access to either a entire freebsd system or a jail in that system. For the purpose of this guide I will assume that you use a clean install of FreeNas 9 and are planning to use jails to separate the server from the rest of the system.
During the current Build Conference Microsoft released a preview of their first major update of Windows 8 an operating system that has received mixed reviews to say the least. This major update aims to please the doubters and to further develop the “Modern UI” concept that was released with Windows 8. I have been running Windows 8 since the first preview and have been rather satisfied with the operating system and the new features that were released with that version.