Not so long ago, at the turn of last century, if you wanted to shop for something, you had to go down the local market or annual fair. Shopping was the act of physically going somewhere, a decision that was accompanied by a decent walk or horse ride. Those who were rural were known to … Continue reading We cant stop shopping, we are being shopped too
Author: Nick Mason
This brave new world of digital marketing
Long gone are the days where a business has the upper hand over the customer. Never has it been so easy to research and compare the product or service you the customer require. Think to the times you recently have required a product or service, where did you first look? I know that I start … Continue reading This brave new world of digital marketing
It’s been a while
It's been a while hasn't it... blogging takes work, and is something that is great in principle, yeah, I think... I can write content every week. It doesn't take long for life and work to get in the way and before you know it, it's been over a year since your last post. Whoops... that … Continue reading It’s been a while
One of my most Challenging Projects
I come across multiple challenges every week that need solutions. Even though I don't necessarily know how to solve the problem initially, i'm confident in my abilities and the solution can be found and it's just a process I go through. One of my more challenging projects was Canvas Eyewear. I was at the time (3 … Continue reading One of my most Challenging Projects
Email Woes
Email is brilliant, it provides near instant communication and is a daily fact of our modern lives. It's hard to think of the days before the invention of email and how the world did business prior to it. However, at the same time, it can be such a burden to manage. I started at my company as … Continue reading Email Woes
End of an era
Today marks the end of a significant era in my life, the project that started me into the career that I have today was sadly shutdown and turned off forever this evening. 10 years ago, in 2007 I had a phone call from Bruce, the founder of 2cu, enquiring about building a website service. I had … Continue reading End of an era
MySQL Query Execution Timeout
There are many reasons why you usually wouldn't allow a user to access or even process a raw query directly within a web app - even administrators. Recently I had a need to do just this. In my particular case, my need for accessing the database directly was for ease of use of creating and saving reports. This allowed those who know a little SQL to write there own reports with some 'magic' tools to automatically replace up to four placeholder values with input variables. No sensitive information is stored in this particular database, or at least, no sensitive information that an administrator of my app should not be able to access... this simplifies permissions for me. I opted to create a single MySQL read only user for this purpose. This at least stops someone from accidentally truncating a table or being tempted to insert and delete records directly (me included).
My Docker Cheat Sheet
I don’t think I am too different to most people where when you don’t use something regularly enough you tend to forget it. One of the big reasons for creating this blog was so that I could note down commands and snippets that I don’t use enough to remember but still need to reference it enough to note it down. Currently I am using Docker Compose for my daily use so all my commands are conveniently in a YAML file. Earlier today I was working on upgrading my MySQL container to the latest version… super basic entry level commands and stuff that I feel i should instantly know but just don’t do it enough to remember the exact command. These are my goto commands that i need … I’ll probably update this post as I need to add more.
Docker for Mac finally enters public beta
I have been constantly battling with getting docker started on my iMac. Up until now, the easiest way to get up and running with Docker has been by using Docker toolbox (previously boot2docker). Docker toolbox made it significantly easier to get setup with Docker compared to the earlier days on a Mac, but it was still significantly flawed. Once up and running, it mostly worked well, but getting Mac OS X to connect to my Docker / Docker Server was a constant battle. Most of the time running "$ docker env" would work but more often than not I would have had to mess around and delete the virtual box image and re-create a new virtual box instance and hope my local environment would connect. In the worst cases I have to completely delete docker and restart over with a fresh install.
Welcome to my blog, my first post
I can remember working for a production house where clients would want to set up a blog on their business websites. They had read that a blog can increases traffic to your website and increase you're Google presence. A blog is a great idea for businesses, it sounds great in practice - but only the dedicated ever wrote a regular post - the majority of businesses let there measly 3 or 4 posts go stale making there website look stale and uncared for. It came to a point where you would discourage customers from creating a blog as they don't foresee the dedication and work involved in keeping it up. What was supposed to be a positive marketing tool for their businesses quickly can become a liability. This isn't a business blog so I don't risk negative marketing and i'm going into this knowing the dedication involved - so with that, lets give it a shot!
