Author Archives: Dan

About Dan

danneh: pronounced dah-neh (if anyone knows how to do this in proper pronunciation letters, please tell me how!) Where to begin. Hmm.. Well, my name is Dan. I am a web developer and system administrator by trade, and an electronics enthusiast by night. I don't consider myself the best at what I do, but I consider myself to be pretty darn good. Development wise, I focus mostly on PHP and Perl and have been involved in the creation of some very well known brands developing sites using Magento e-Commerce and Wordpress (though I'm not at the liberty to name names, but if you look hard enough, you'll find them ;) ) As far as my electronics goes, I'm just starting to get into microcontrollers. My favoured MCU is the PIC, and my favoured MCU programming language is ASM. It might be less readable, it might be harder to learn, but you have much more control over the application in question, and not to mention it's memory footprint when you only have 2KBit of EEPROM to play with! I'm available for freelance work developing Magento themes and modules, custom Wordpress development, Zend Framework/Kohana applications, and System Administration work (designing, installation, configuration and maintenance of single server sites to full-sized multi-machine load-balanced solutions). Contact me with your requirements and I'll see what I can do :) Favourite quote: I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code. Find me on Google+, Facebook, and my rarely used Twitter.

Creating users in PostgreSQL

This one has thrown me one too many times, and short of a better place to note this sequence of commands down, I’m posting it here.

postgres=> CREATE USER new_user WITH PASSWORD 'SuperSecurePassword';
CREATE ROLE
postgres=> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO new_user;
GRANT
postgres=> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO new_user;
GRANT
postgres=> GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO new_user;
GRANT
postgres=> \q

Configuring pfSense to work with BT Infinity native IPv6

A quick post this one. I’ve been scouring the internet trying to find the right settings in order to connect up my pfSense to use BT Infinity’s native IPv6 implementation. Finally found the magic combination, which I’m sharing here for future reference, and hopefully help anyone else that might find this post.

Continue reading “Configuring pfSense to work with BT Infinity native IPv6” »

Sending Django’s WSGIRequest to a celery task

There may end up being an instance or 2 where you need access to the initial request object inside a celery task, for want of forming an absolute URL for an email template that you’re generating asynchronously, amongst many other reasons. However you’ll find that the WSGIRequest object can’t be pickled because of bound methods and lambda’s that exist on the object itself. So when you try to send the task, it’ll fall over raising an Exception stating that the WSGIRequest object can’t be pickled.

Continue reading “Sending Django’s WSGIRequest to a celery task” »

Dell Inspiron 5558 Review

I’ve never done a hardware review before (with the exception of the odd Amazon review), so bear with me.

For those who’ve been following my rarely updated blog, I’ve been plagued with laptop issues for a while (here, here, here and here – oddly enough all LCD related) so I figured it was about time I found some sort of reliable work horse that I can just *get stuff done* rather than having to faff around with hardware every handful of months (the last post about LVDS cables covers a significant period of time, and recently started playing up again). So it was about time for a change.

Continue reading “Dell Inspiron 5558 Review” »

Setting up WordPress behind Amazon Cloudfront

You all know that feeling (well, I hope you do!) that when a spike in traffic occurs on your WordPress site, that the miniature server you have it running on very quickly runs out of resources. Apache’s good like that. Taking up all the resources with its large number of processes consuming oodles of memory each. How on earth can you possibly fix it, especially when you’re running on a tight budget and upgrading the server for that once-in-a-blue-moon you get a spike in traffic? Well, Amazon Cloudfront to the rescue!

Continue reading “Setting up WordPress behind Amazon Cloudfront” »