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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.

Home Networking

Network routing

  1. Router - Router is the device at home that connects all devices in your house to the internet.

    1. It does so by assigning IP address to each of your device but this IP address is only relevant for devices connected to this router. What this means is that if you use an IP address allocated by this router from a coffee shop and you are not connected to your home router then you will not be able to reach the device that IP address belonged to. For this reason these IP addresses are called internal IP addresses.

MySQL Function to calculate closing WorkDay date given elapsed working time

On my post MySQL function to calculate elapsed working time I was asked in comments if the assumptions can be reversed such that given start date, starting time and closing time of site and the elapsed working hours, function should return the closed date. I was convinced that it will be possible to achieve this with minor tweaks to original logic and so I only concentrated on original code and how to tweak it to achieve the result. It is very likely that there might exist a more elegant solution but frankly I did not have a usecase I did find a usecase afterall - Clue was in redefining the problem description for this. Presented below is the function that with my minimal testing seems to give correct results. Feel free to try it and as always any feedback is welcome. 😄

Problem Description:

Find out the WorkDay date by when a ticket must be closed given:

  1. Country of site for which incident was logged.
  2. Time and Date when Incident was logged.
  3. Elapsed working hours in decimal. (Ten and a half hours as 10.5 and so on)
  4. Opening time of the site for which the incident was logged.
  5. Closing Time of the site for which incident was logged.
  6. SLA Type - Is the output date to be based purely on number of hours or based on SLA in days (eg: Next Business Day).

Assumption

It is assumed that opening and closing times are same on all working days and that all the sites are closed on holidays and weekends.

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.

Markdown and Gantt Charts

For a fairly long time, I have been looking for a simple markdown type of solution to be able to quickly draw Gantt charts but never came across what one would call a quick option. It has always been an involved process.

To my simplistic mind, a simple solution would just be an option where I can type the action, a start date and an end date for the action line after line and it get's displayed in the Gantt chart.

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.