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Note 7 to OnePlus 3

I was a super excited owner of Note 7 in September this year and then in few days the happiness started disappearing as the news of exploding Note 7 started appearing all over the internet.

Then came the notice to exchange the Note 7 which I dutifully did and assured that nothing will now go wrong I started enjoying that gem of a device. Alas, it was not to be and the device was recalled for good. Being a user of Note devices for so long and yet unable to continue with my old Note 3, I decided to go for some interim device - you know until Samsung decides to get the act right and bring the next Note device to the market.

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:

Ethercalc

Ethercalc is good tool which can be selfhosted. It is fairly simple to do so. Though it will be available for anyone who has the URL because there is no inbuilt login mechanism.

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:

Tomcat 8.5.4 on Fedora behind Nginx

Install Oracle Java

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#install jdk
wget --no-cookies --no-check-certificate --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oracle.com%2F; oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u102-b14/jdk-8u102-linux-i586.rpm"
#install jre
wget --no-cookies --no-check-certificate --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http://www.oracle.com/ oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u102-b14/jre-8u102-linux-i586.rpm"
#enable firefox plugin
alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_102/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so 20000

Tip

URL for JDK and JRE is best obtained directly from oracle website

MySQL function to calculate elapsed working time

I wrote this function to cater for a specific requirement and I don't know if there are better ways of doing it but this saved tremendous amount of time and might have real time application elsewhere.

Problem Statement:

Find out the age of an incident in working minutes, given the following:

  1. Time and Date of when an incident was logged
  2. Time and date of when the same incident was closed
  3. Opening time of the site for which the incident was logged
  4. Closing Time of the site for which incident was logged
  5. Country of the site for which incident has been logged

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

Function should take all the above five "given" as parameter and then calculate age of the incident.

The complete walkthrough of my blogger to ghost migration

The 7 Year Itch

It can't possibly be a coincidence that this is the 7th year since I started blogging on blogger and therefore it is very likely to be a strong case of the 7 year itch syndrome but whichever way you look at it, divorce was inevitable given blogger had just stopped inspiring me.

I have been fiddling with different blogging platforms while getting accused of neglecting my sweet and loving family...😢. Ghost caught my fancy three weeks back. The last post was the beginning of our courtship and this post tells the tale of how a casual fling turned into marital commitment. 😂

To start a fresh blog, choosing any platform is easy and straight forward but to move from one platform to another is - umm... lets just say a very involved process - rewarding but involved.

Love can move mountains!!!

A complete migration from blogger to WordPress would have been way simpler. I know this as I have done it in past and it appeared like moving to Ghost would require migrating to a WordPress instance anyway. There was - I must admit - a temptation to call WordPress the home but that wouldn't have made a great love-story now - would it?

However, the much publicised WordPress route to Ghost migration did not work for me and eventually after a lot of manual copying, pasting, cleaning, pruning, hiding, reading and learning later, the self-hosted blog is all complete.