Talking about our favourite topic – ourselves.
We have a number of sites that use webhooks, which were having trouble connecting to our back-end services. This problem only occurred recently as everything was working in the past. Searching for the specific error message, “cURL error 60: SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate” gave a Read more…
I have discovered this useful tool for web-server log analysis – GoAccess. It is a pretty nifty tool and shows various information collated from a typical NCSA log file produced by most web-servers. This tool came in handy recently, particularly when trouble-shooting specific customer complaints about a service that we Read more…
We have been running a thin-client setup in the office for a number of years now as we’ve found them to be easier to maintain, and it allowed everyone to login on any PC and access their work. Our thin-clients were all desktop PC-based machines with Gigabit Ethernet and no Read more…
I generally receive a stunned look when I tell people that we build everything with C++ where possible, including web applications. It happened again recently and they will usually ask me – Why?!!! I’d like to document some reasons why we chose to use C++ to build web applications here. Read more…
We had a file server in the office set up to grab data from our remote server daily – for off-site backup purposes. This essentially uses RSYNC over SSH with certificate authentication. The entire process is run as a cron-job daily. However, recently the backups started to fail mysteriously. It Read more…
We’ve recently updated our office computers to the new Ubuntu Xenial LTS. This came with a newer version of KiCad that requires OpenGL 2.1 minimum to run. Unfortunately, we run a bunch of LTSP thin-clients in the office with a beefier server for work and a bunch of old PCs Read more…
There are so many problems when running Gitlab behind a reverse proxy. However, the Error 422 one is the most common. The only way to fix this problem is by supplying X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-Ssl request headers to the reverse proxy as indicated here. How to do that depends on each Read more…
Just to do a quick and dirty comparison of several popular ISAs, I compiled a simple C application that calculates primes using the Sieve of Eratosthenes using the following command: gcc -O2 -c -o prime.o prime.c Then, I compared the output binaries just on memory size using the ELF size Read more…
While work has been under way on our new processor core, which shall remain multi-threaded using interleaved multi-threading in hardware, we have been searching for a free ISA to use as the base instruction set. Our previous microprocessor was based on the Microblaze instruction set (ISA). While there is nothing Read more…
Well, there is a first time for everything. In my many years of dabbling with Linux, this is the first time I had experience a 1-minute kernel build. I achieved it by using a compilation cluster using distcc. As the image shows, nearly the entire kernel compilation was distributed over Read more…