Skip to content

All Articles

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.

Ghost on Fedora 24

To install Ghost as my blogging platform, I had to go through a number of hoops and one of them was to get the nodejs working and what not. I figured this might as well be worth documenting in case I have to do this all over again. It might also be helpful for some other inquisitive minds. 😄

The most useful reference I found was the post on rosehosting website specific to CentOS 7.

It would have all gone well too; had it not been for the nodejs related issues which resulted in me finding the other helpful pointers from various forums.

Anyway, the steps I took to get this all working are detailed in my notes below - keeping it, where I can, true to the post I have referred above:

Seafile Server behind nginx on Fedora 24 Security Lab Spin

I have recently been intrigued by the idea of replacing the likes of “Dropbox” and “Google Drive” with a cloud set-up of my own. I had "Owncloud" set-up for nearly a year but was not happy with it. There were minor niggles aside form speed and thumbnails and then “Owncloud” had a recent split leading to creation of “Nextcloud”.

While “Nextcloud” is the one that is more aligned to the general principles of community driven software, it is new and is still plagued with owncloud issues as it is essentially same stuff in new packaging at the moment.

In the meantime, every now and then I was reading all the good stuff people had to say about "Seafile" and so I wanted to give it a try. Now for the past year and a half I have also been using Fedora Security Lab spin on my home server and I just wanted to get the Seafile set-up on it so I did a few “duckduckgo” searches on the net and finally had the steps to achieve the objective. Obviously it all worked and my Seafile server is live and kicking, hence the post. 😄

So in nutshell my objective was to:

Install seafile-server-5 behind nginx on Fedora 24 Security Lab spin all on a 32 bit 12 year old laptop.

The steps I followed are listed below with detailed notes of what I did. I do not claim these to be perfect but this is what worked for me. If you know that something can be done better, please do let me know in the comments.

Crossover

There are technologies that I can use in my personal life, that I am proud of and those that I play around with but reality is that as a Senior Project Manager, there aren't very many times when I get the opportunity to influence the choice of software to be used.

As a principle, my personal choices are driven by opensource and professional choices are driven by client needs. However, listed below are opensource technologies that crossed over from my personal to professional realm.

Three open-source technologies that jumped from my hobbyist curiosity to my professional life

  • in Linux
  • 5 min read

Arch Linux - nearly a year on....

I have been dwelling in the world of Arch Linux for just under a year now and must admit the experience is nothing less than liberating. Granted that the barrier to entry was big when I dived in, as a pure Arch install takes some reading and learning but the rewards are worth the pain.