Tools and Utilities

What’s the latest version as of writing this post With version 0.146.0, the Hugo template system was re-architected for very good reasons. This simplifies a lot of things for template lookups. However, there are breaking changes despite the best efforts of the authors. Not all websites and themes that use Hugo, keep up with the pace of Hugo’s development. Many of these projects are open source like Hugo, furthermore many of the maintainers have more than 1 job and aren’t paid to keep their source code up to date. ...

Did you know Hugo has this feature called Modules? Apparently built on the same concepts of Go Modules, which shouldn’t be a surprise. So having used all my hugo themes so far as Git Submodules, I wanted to switch over to this method. Hugo modules are considered to be the building blocks of Hugo. It is the Hugo way of modularising your static website. Apparently you can create a theme as a module and content as another module and use them together in a third module to serve as your static website. I didn’t go that far just yet. ...

This post is more of a note to self. PaperMod Update So last week, after a very long time, I actually spent some time doing some housekeeping on this blog. I decided to check Hugo versions and what’s new on paperMod. Found that there were many new things. Pulled in the latest and built the site only to realize it broke! How did you get the latest version? git submodule update --recursive --remote So some of the features introduced in the latest version of PaperMod weren’t supported in the version of Hugo that I had running, which was v0.109.0. I am not aware of what features exactly, so can’t really tell you. I didn’t have the time to explore. ...

This is a long read and I spent a pretty long time going through videos and articles compiling this into one post. Not something I would have done usually. But I do think that sometimes having it all in one place is easier to access than splitting into multiple articles. I hope the TOC helps group things. Azure AD is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. Lots of words. But do they make sense? ...

Background I have been using Logic Apps to transfer data from one database to another. Of course, there is business logic in the queries run on the source database. And in such a case, maybe Azure Data Factory might have been a better choice. It very well could be. But for now I have been using a logic app, that simply runs a pretty big query, fetches the results and inserts into my destination database after some checks on the data present in the destination database. It works. However, using your Logic App to do some data related operations, especially to a SQL database, requires some wisdom. ...

What are Azure Logic Apps? Azure Logic Apps are an Azure service that lets you visually build integrated solutions to connect several different apps and services together, and comes with a click and select interface. It enables you automate business processes without writing any code at all! What is business process? A business process or workflow is a sequence of tasks that produce some sort of outcome, which may be some data, decision, notification. ...

I began my software development career on Linux. I am and have always been very comfortable with the command line and do not really care if I have to open up the command line on Windows. However, in the Windows world, command line used to suck. I think that is a polite way to put it. It truly sucked so bad that developers from a Linux background, often wondered how windows even got this far. It had a weird window size limitation and used to open only halfway through your wide screen! ...

Hey folks, So I’ve seen a lot of people open putty and then select their host and finally enter a user name and password. I don’t do that. I don’t want to either. Why would I? I’m a computer scientist/programmer/whatever. I should not do repetitive tasks. I should automate it. Password free SSH login is just that: Automation. How do you do it? This isn’t rocket science. Let us start with what SSH is Secure Shell. OMG! That didn’t help. It is a protocol that helps you to connect to remote machines securely over unsecured networks. Over use of secure you might say. You generally need an SSH server and an SSH client for this purpose. Generally most of your enterprise linux hosts would be configured to allow your personal workstation to connect to it using an SSH client like Putty. There are several different versions of this protocol too. But I’m not a networking protocol geek. So enough said. Let us go right into what you have to do to setup your computer to log in. ...

Over the past few years, the only text editor I’ve been using on Linux is emacs. Not because I wanted to. But after I joined the firm that I currently work for, I was trained in emacs. And I found it difficult to use initially. But then I decided that if every one else in the firm could use it and become an expert, then so can I. So I spend some time with the built-in emacs tutorial and I just learned it really quick. ...

So in one of my previous posts I told you about terminal multiplexing and also mentioned how cool it was. Now is the time to introduce you to GNU Screen. The wikipedia page is a good introduction already. But I should talk about it from my point of view, about how I use it. To be honest, if I knew of the abilities of tmux at the time I got to know about screen, I would have just started using tmux. It isn’t too hard to switch though. It would just take a day or two of getting used to the new short cuts. Or you could go ahead and manually configure your shortcuts to keep you happy. ...