Moving House This year has been difficult so far, although arguably not as difficult as last year, as last year saw deaths in the family and still not knowing if I’d been cured from cancer. Almost all of the year we have been trying to sell the house and waiting until the house sale goes through. It is nearly there, but then.. it’s been nearly there for several months now. We just have to be patient. ...

FINALLY, with the help of fcron , judicious use of Bash debugging, and a lot of freaking around, I have managed to get scheduled cron jobs running the way I want to. For a supposedly lightweight process, there are actually a ton of ‘gotchas’ which will likely trip you up. Here are some tips: Ensure the right permissions for the cron job - cron will ignore scripts that have certain non-standard permissions, for security. Ensure the right filename for the cron job script - it will ignore certain extensions or variations on the end of the script file name! Ensure ALL symbolic links in your cron job scripts are resolved to actual paths - for some reason cron doesn’t like this, probably a security measure again. Use fcron with anacron syntax to ensure ‘intelligent’ scheduling - e.g. if the computer is turned off most of the week, when it is turned back on, it will still run the weekly job, instead of waiting a further 7 days! Make sure you ‘cd’ into the working directory AS PART of the cron job before you attempt to use any relative (non absolute) paths. And you should do this instead of specifying absolute paths for large scripts, because of the potential to make mistakes, which will take longer to test! Use nohup and a Bash ’trap’ error logger to log complete runs. Log the WHOLE output of the Bash cron’d script, using STDERR and STDOUT concatenation. Use screen to run jobs so you can inspect running jobs when you need to. Use ionice and nice liberally so that you can avoid system lockups due to multiple processing scheduled jobs hogging the system resources! Turn off ‘fcron’s ‘serial’ parameter so that multiple jobs can run at the same time - this is essential if one running job happens to overlap another. Fcron with anaocron syntax will usually figure out the rest. No wonder Jenkins is so popular!

It is true that employers these days are hiring for obedience and inexperience, as this ebook excerpt explains: – “We regret to inform you that we will not be moving forward with your application due to concerns that your qualifications exceed those required for the role. We feel it would not be a good fit. Thank you for applying.” Ouch, that’s part of a rejection email a very experienced job candidate sent me. ...

I have added ‘Mylar3 ’ the electronic comic book downloader and metadata organiser, to my self-hosted docker containers. It should do a better job than Calibre of going through my PDFs and CBR/CBZ files, as a lot of them are e-comic books. LazyLibrarian did a good job of dealing with the metadata of my epub collection, I hope that Mylar3 can do an equally good job, although the task is far harder as there is less metadata existing in a lot of my e-comic book PDF files. ...

We will, in a few months (fingers crossed) be moving home. We currently live in quite a large house, and it’s just the two of us. We should end up in a new build flat, with a lot smaller living space than I’m used to. To deal with that, I need to downsize my technical setup. I currently have a seperate ‘work from home’ desk and a seperate ‘gaming and media’ desk - there will be only one desk possible. ...

I’ve made a bunch of new updates to the server. The first was replacing the Readarr metadata and book downloader service, as it has stopped being supported. I have switched to LazyLibrarian, which I confess I don’t exactly understand very well yet, but has done an awesome job so far in updating the metadata of my 20,000 epub library. I hope to implement something similar for my PDF books/comics library, possibly with another instance of LazyLibrarian for it, working in tandem with a comic book metadata ‘fixer’. ...

Last year I was ‘banned’ from LinkedIn for calling three people ‘idiots’. I thought it a little unfair at the time, particularly because they WERE being idiots, but there didn’t seem to be any way to contest it, or even any way to get in contact with LinkedIn. I had over 10k followers and I put a lot of care and effort into my posts on the site, and they were often very popular with people. Mostly I tried to help people, giving mentoring advice and commenting about diversity in the software industry, which was well-received. ...

There has been numerous problems with the server that hosts all my domains, which resulted often in my websites becoming unavailable. I traced the problem down to the scheduled tasks that I was regularly running which were blocking on I/O on my old enterprise storage drives, and causing problems. With judicious use of ‘ionice’ I was able to address the problem, and now it seems things are running much better. ...

I first started programming in 1998. I have over 20 years commercial experience in industry. To be honest, I’ve been out of full-time work for the majority of the past 4 years, with the exception of last year where I worked for the majority of it as a top-tier Principal Consulting Engineer. A lot of time in the past 4 years has been taken up with treatment for health problems, from which I am now fully recovered from. During this time I worked extensively on my own personal projects and upskilled myself in my spare time simply because I found it fun. ...

Introduction I have been working on perfecting a data-cleansing and import process for my Plex Server’s Music library for several years now, on and off. What started as a process to acquire, sanitise and prepare music for DJing, has grown primarily into a process to acquire, clean and prepare music for streaming via PlexAmp from all my devices, including outside my home network, from my Plex server. ...