This is my blog. A knob log. Knob blog has been around since 2006. It used to be mostly about running, then it was dead, then some lame technobabble stuff, and now we’ll see where it goes.
Start at the beginning with the first post, about God and this blog, or read the latest posts below.
Or go to my “personal home page” with more interesting content.
Laravel: Simple Method for Modules March 1, 2017 - In my day job, I maintain a fairly large-ish Laravel application. It started out as a few separate vanilla PHP web apps, which I consolidated onto Laravel 4, then upgraded to Laravel 5. I’ve added a few new apps to the suite as business needs arose. In the Laravel 4 version, I used creolab/laravel-modules to, […]
Install Ubuntu on HP Laptop with UEFI and new SSD Hard Drive November 22, 2016 - It shouldn’t be this hard. I must have installed and re-installed Ubuntu 16.04 twenty times before I found the magic combination to allow my old-ish HP laptop to boot straight into Ubuntu (or boot at all). My son got a new laptop and discarded the beast that was his HP Pavilion. The thing must weigh […]
Westminster Neighborhood 5K Race Report: It’s Been a Long Time March 7, 2016 - It’s been more than five years since my last race (the 2011 Houston Marathon which I never wrote about). As soon as I crossed the finish line of that marathon five years ago I swore I was done racing. I was burnt out, I was physically hurt, I knew I didn’t want to keep pushing […]
Laravel, Composer and Optimize February 18, 2016 - So I write these little tech snippets mostly as a personal journal for my future self. Anyway, got caught again at work by a weird situation where dev and test/prod environments differed. Well, not really, but kind of. What? I deployed our main app last month after upgrading it to Laravel 5 and all seemed […]
More Janky Snowboarding Video February 18, 2016 - I went to Eldora Ski Resort recently for a little solo snowboarding, and the weather was a blizzard. It was still an awesome day though, mostly because there was a surfeit of powder and a deficit of people on the slopes. But man was it windy. Also, it’s weird how silent it gets when you’re […]
Automated Testing with Codeception February 12, 2016 - I gave a little presentation at work the other day on using automated testing in my Laravel project using Codeception. Here’s a screencast. The audio is a little low, so there’s a basic transcript below the video. Enjoy. ========================================== Transcript… ========================================== [chrome: show feature request in jira] so here’s a little example of writing an […]
PHP, JSON, Strings, Integers, Mysqlnd and Matching Environments January 29, 2016 - Here’s another instance of being wary when your development environment does not exactly match your production environment. In PHP, for the longest time, when you fetched records from a MySql database, every column, no matter the column type, would be returned as a string. Primary key “id” of 42, type integer? String. Column “pi” of […]
Block Website Visitors by Country using GeoIP on Nginx January 4, 2016 - These tech posts on how I did something are mostly just a diary of my own server maintenance, so that in 11 months, when the website I googled is no longer found, I can remember what I did, why, where and how. Familyvance.com was getting slammed by Russian bots with the former Soviets comprising more […]
Come Ski With Me December 28, 2015 - My sister and her family came for a visit over the Christmas Holidays and we spent a couple of days skiing up at Eldora Mountain Resort. Eldora is a small ski area (not really anything “resort” about it), about 50 minutes drive from our house. I took some shaky video of the trip which you […]
Come Run With Me December 21, 2015 - I went for a snowy run the other day on the trails behind our house and created a video to share the beauty. Video is taken along the East Boulder Trail at the Gunbarrel Farms trailhead, behind our house. Maybe the videos are a little too much sharing, a little too much self-promotion, but that’s […]
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