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Troubleshooting

Logseq Customisations for Project Management Template

Background

While the overall planning of project timeline gets lot of attention in the world of software, the most important aspect of project management in my experience is maintaining and tracking Issues and Actions. This in normal project management practice is carried out through the use of an Actions Log and an Issues Log. In addition any medium complexity project invariably will have internal and external dependencies / constraints, risks which I tend to track on Constraints Log and Risks Log. Finally, every project has decisions that I track on a Decisions Log.

Additionally, any opportunities that I identify during the course of project that are not in the scope of my project I capture those too in an Opportunities Log

Now all these logs have fairly standard fields so I created and started using an excel template and began calling it CARDIO Log short for log of Constraints, Actions, Risks, Decisions, Issues, Opportunities for a given project. This has worked well for me over the past 15 years or so but there are times where in order to maintain it meant cross linking an action to an issue or a risk and so on and more often than not it would become easier to just track actions in one of the other logs and that would make it a bit chaotic.

That problem, however, is what I thought, can be resolved using Logseq especially after starting with the template by the Logseq community user Luhman and starting with his template and explanation provided here.

Metabase - A BI solution that just works

I like exploring new solutions and anything to do with data always piques my interest. I came across this nice tool through the list of free self hosted software.

UPDATE

I am still getting introduced to the world of docker and while most of it just works few things confuse the hell out of me.

Anyway what happened is there was an update for Metabase and I wanted to apply it on my container and in doing so I realised that some of this post can be changed to make it a better experience from get go because after update all my config and dashboards were gone and I had to reconfigure everything.

It could be that my lack of knowledge meant I did something wrong and faced the issue but irrespective doing it as per updated post below will ensure you dont face the issue at all because I have now tested it twice to ensure it works well.

Unprotect Sheets in Libre Calc, Excel

A friend of mine today had an issue. He had created a template for some really complex calculations and to ensure he does not mess up with the forumlae by mistake he had password protected sheets and cells. He had done this back in 2012 and now he wanted change something in there but he had forgotten the password so he asked me if I can help.

Now, I do not know much about how it could be done on windows or on excel but I knew a small trick on LibreOffice so I asked him to send me that excel file by email. I then took following steps:

Right then, the Ghost V1.0 was out a while back and they made Ghost 0.11.x an LTS so I was not in any rush to upgrade too. I have not had much time to sort this out for a while and two days back when I finally came around to check how to upgrade, my first moment of concern was that officially supported stack is for NGINX.

I have moved my blog to the Apache Stack on DigitalOcean and while on my sandbox environment I still have NGINX, that is not a place I want to host my blog from. Anyhoo, I realised soon enough that while not officially supported it s easy to bypass the restrictions so I went ahead.

The upgrade itself couldn't have been simpler considering the major version bump. The answer to the question 'Was it worth it?' is something we will have to wait and see although I am liking what I see except for the initial hiccups.

Success

EDITED AFTER THE POST: Boy oh boy - just after I finished this post I saw the latest version of Ghost V1.12 is out and it was such a painless process compared to past. Just a simple command 'ghost update' and job done. That itself makes this whole pain kind of worth it.

OK so the steps I took are as presented below.

Background

I have been with PlusNet for over two years now and am a happy camper as far as fiber optic broadband is concerned but as I am no longer on a broadband contract with PlusNet and had no intention of going on one, so the only way I could get a change to my ageing router was by purchasing a new one.

Hence I started reading about my options and soon enough realised that an old router can be given new lease of life using DD-WRT. Equally soon-ish I also realised that the router from PlusNet - TG582n - is quite rubbish and does not play nice with any of the open source firmwares.

So I figured that if I have to just play around a bit, I might as well start with something cheaper and cheaper is what I found in the TP-Link router TL-WR841n at just £16.00. You can't get any cheaper than that in my opinion. OK, so now that we have established that I am cheap and my new router is cheap, let's move on to interesting stuff.

I had read that TP-Link router and specifically TL-WR841n plays nicely with DD-WRT but it was only after I had my new toy did I realise that these things also come in hardware version and while interwebs is filled with instructions on installing DD-WRT for upto v9, when it comes to v11 in Europe, it can be a bit tricky to proceed. There are some instructions in forums1 but nothing that walks one end to end hence this post.

Swap File to create extra memory

While renewing my LetsEncrypt certificate, I found myself in a strange situation where the certbot won't run asking me to update pip and then each time I tried updating pip it failed with the error error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 4.

It turns out that this happens due to low memory and with my digitalocean droplet being the cheapest one this was bound to happen sooner rather than later. Fortunately there is a way around it as explained below.

Use of following commands will ensure that the swap file is created which in turn will help avoid the 'error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 4'.

Following commands will create a swap file:

Grav - CMS with a difference

While I love Ghost as a blogging platform, it is not best placed for things other than blogs - after all that is the basic idea behind creation of this wonderful tool.

As I wanted to host a static website using tools that don't require a database or rely on php, I went searching on interwebs. I came across a lot of options and the most popular one appears to be Jekyll and it's variants (Nikola and such) but they require a lot of terminal activity which won't go well for regular end user responsible for maintaining content of the static website in question.So I continued looking and came across this wonderful project called Grav.

Grav is super fast, very pretty and extremely easy to deploy and maintain. Additionally, it has very good documentation.

The key features that I absolutely loved are as below:

Fix for PHP Issues after upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04.1 (Xenial)

After updating from Ubuntu 14.04, the php and Apache stopped being friends and one of the WordPress site I maintain went all white and admin page was just showing php code. This is apparently because of a known issue in 16.04 with upgrade to php7 as shown on the ubuntu forum here.

Using the guidance from this link and with some more of duckduckgo search later, I managed to resolve the problem thus: