Volunteering 2020
This has been an interesting year, to say the least. We've been counting our blessings that Freshleaf seems to operate just as well with us all at home as it does when we're in the office, but the...
Making sense of IoT
The IoT is not new. It’s essentially been with us since the first computers connected to the first networks. But from conceptual beginnings to real-world implementations in a few short years, it’s...
Incrementally Copying (Rsyncing) Files From A Kubernetes Pod
The most obvious choice for moving files in and out of containers is kubectl cp but it just does a straight copy of all the bytes. If you want to backup just a few changed bytes out of several...
Excel and data management - when will they learn?
We’ve written once or twice before about the perils of using Excel for the management of large-scale critical data… but it seems that big organisations and government agencies (who should know...
Why You Should Always Give Lazily Loaded Images A Width & Height
When images are set to load lazily they will only be downloaded when they come into view but what counts as "in view"? It seems Google Chrome only takes the vertical scroll position into account...
Persisting Data Between Steps In BitBucket Pipeline Builds
When using a build pipeline it is common to create some kind of value, like a path, container ID, auth token etc in one step which is then needed in a subsequent step but the whole point of steps...
Using FallbackResource with Apache Header Expressions Causes Weirdness
Recently we needed to set one of our Apache servers to output a HTTP header for a specific URL, a simple task right? Well it turns out it can be a right pain... The server is pretty standard,...
Hunting For Zombie Pods
At almost exactly 0300 (UTC) on the morning of 22/05 our monitoring systems started sending alerts for a handful of websites. They had begun to respond slower. This was very strange, the sites...