Author Archives: Leigh

CloudFormation 2 – importing resources into a CDK stack

In my previous post I mentioned that I was starting to migrate some existing CloudFormation templates to be generated using TypeScript and Amazon’s Cloud Development Kit. I started with some simple static websites that are hosted from S3 buckets, and for these simple sites found it easiest to completely tear down the old infrastructure and […]

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Chiming at St Paul’s

The COVID pandemic has affected the life of almost everybody on earth in innumerable ways. One of its lesser-known effects has been the near-total suspension of the ringing of church bells in the English style (change ringing). This is certainly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but the cancellation of my favourite hobby has […]

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CloudFormation

I’ve been using AWS CloudFormation for many years to manage infrastructure created on the Amazon Web Services platform. Trying to configure such an environment manually is tedious and error-prone. It’s more efficient and reliable to do so automatically – managing infrastructure as code. It’s actually a few years since I last used CloudFormation professionally, and […]

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Service testing redux

My previous post on Service Testing has become a favourite of mine. I often find myself looking up details of how to check a particular service (and particularly how to use OpenSSL’s s_client). That post is now 7½ years old and I thought it due for a refresh. HTTP It’s still possible to type raw […]

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Saving space in large git repositories

In mid-2017 I set up an automated scrape of a frequently-updated website. Every day my script would crawl the website, download its contents, and commit these to GitHub. This allowed me to back up not just the site contents but the complete history of changes. This scrape did its thing for nearly 4 years until […]

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Mail blacklists and third-party dependencies

Mail blacklists are a sad fact of life. They exist because of spam and work like this: I send an email from my computer my computer connects to the server that hosts my email my server connects to the server that hosts the recipient’s mail the recipient server looks up my server’s details in some […]

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Why I’m leaving WhatsApp

TLDR: privacy. I’m on Signal now. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Facebook for many years. I still have an account but rarely log in. It sometimes sends me emails and occasionally I open up a private browser window to take a look. I don’t want them following me around the Internet (their tracking tags […]

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New year, new blog

I know it doesn’t look very new, but this blog is now running on brand new hosting with brand new PHP. Hurrah! I might even update it occasionally…

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Some handy Eclipse plugins (2)

This is an updated version of http://blog.simpleigh.com/2013/06/some-handy-eclipse-plugins/ for Eclipse Mars. One of the most exciting features of Eclipse is the plugin ecosystem. Eclipse has been around for ages, and there are plenty of fantastic plugins adding additional programming languages and features. Here’s a list of some I’ve found useful: Geppetto Puppet is a great way […]

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Myjson Crawler

What is myjson.com Myjson describes itself as “a simple JSON store for your web or mobile app”. You can save JSON data using an interface on the site itself  (example) or programmatically via an API  (example). Each saved piece of JSON can be accessed via a randomly-generated URL, but unfortunately the random part of the URL is […]

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AWS CloudFront via CloudFormation

Amazon Web Services‘ CloudFormation is a great way to define stacks of related resources. I don’t tend to find myself making more than one version of each stack, but have still seen some big advantages: I no longer have to configure resources through the AWS management console, saving a heap of time. Stack configuration is […]

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Downgrading VMWare Tools

I’ve run into an amusing issue with the tools that come packaged with VMware Player. If I removed content from the middle of a file on the host, this change wasn’t replicated on the guest. Here the file would be reduced in size, but by removing bytes from the end rather than the middle, which […]

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AWS Architecture Diagrams

AWS release amazing architecture diagrams. The best of these must surely be the diagram of the architecture used to host the Obama for America campaign. The diagrams look great, but aren’t accessible to others as there’s no publicly downloadable set of icons… until now. Someone has created their own for download: http://blog.domenech.org/2013/04/aws-diagrams-adobe-illustrator-object-collection-first-release.html.

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Eclipse Memory Limits

Update: I’ve had some instability issues since installing this fix, and have now reverted. As I use Eclipse more and more, I’ve occasionally run into memory and garbage-collector limits when working on large projects or files. This page provides the solution: bump up the limits in eclipse.ini (found in the Eclipse programme directory): Apart from […]

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Service Testing

Here’s a collection of services, and ways to go about testing them: 25: SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Test with telnet: Check it responds: Try sending a message to a local user: Try logging in: Exit: You can test STARTTLS (where a secure channel is negotiated for an existing connection) functionality using OpenSSL‘s s_client: 80: […]

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Undocumented Features

I was amused to discover grumbling around the Internet about Google’s weather API, and their decision to remove it. This describes what happened: Last month, Google announced plans to shutter iGoogle, among a bunch of other services. Many developers and users were (and still are) outraged, but at least they have some time to breathe: […]

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Some handy eclipse plugins

Update: this is currently tested for Eclipse Juno, although I hope to update this for Kepler in the near future. I’ve been making more use of Eclipse recently as an IDE. I’ve been using Aptana (which is based on Eclipse) for a few years now, but I’m spending less time coding in PHP so it […]

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ReST Syntax Highlighting

I’ve talked before about writing documentation using Sphinx. Sphinx uses ReST (ReStructured Text) which is great, but sometimes a pain to edit without any form of syntax highlighting. Luckily it was pretty easy to track down an Eclipse plugin to do this. First add a new software source URL like this: Then tick the box […]

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MongoDB

I’ve recently started working with MongoDB at work: it forms a core part of our tracking and reporting infrastructure, and all events that we track are slotted tidily into a Mongo database. Mongo has been getting some criticism of late, and while most of this has been largely misdirected (not using the right tool for […]

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AWS Summit

I’ve just been to this year’s AWS Summit in London. I arrived at the event to find a suspiciously large density of suit-wearing managers. After shaking off the initial fear that I might be at the wrong event, I forged on… The Business Design Centre is an agreeable sort of place for a conference. There’s […]

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