Community Posts

Node.js is on the rise in the IBM i ecosystem. People are taking notice, but there is still a misconception among some that Node.js and other open source software are difficult to install on IBM i. This article aims to show just how easy peasy it is to get Node.js installed, configured, and running fine on IBM i. Prerequisite This article assumes that you have yum installed and accessible on your IBM i instance. Read more → about Node.js on IBM i: Easy Peasy

As a developer, I want to keep my code as DRY as is feasible for the given project. In a Hugo project, that’s where the Partial templates come in. Partials are smaller, context-aware components in your list and page templates that can be used economically to keep your templating DRY. Partials, however, have one serious limitation, they’re cached during the build of a given page (or scope). Once a partial has been created, no outside logic can adjust what the partial returns (for the page). Read more → about How to Pass Variables to a Partial Template in Hugo

It’s really easy to to set up a website on AWS’s s3 service, but if you want to use a certificate (you do), it’s just a bit more work. With Ansible as my hammer, everything is a nail. Here’s a quick playbook I used to set up my site jxn.is to use cloudfront. This playbook creates the bucket, sets up an s3 website in the bucket, creates a cloudfront distribution with reasonable parameters, enables an existing Certificate Manager certificate on the site, and points DNS records at the cloudfront distribution. Read more → about Hosting Hugo on Aws Cloudfront and Route53 Using Ansible

I’m a big fan of AWS’s SDK’s and API tools because they’re so comprehensive and easy to use, in general, but I sometimes forget that there’s another good, even simpler API for getting data from some AWS resources… the magical http://169.254.169.254/ http endpoint! This endpoint provides read-only metadata about resources once you have access, and doesn’t require additional authentication. This is very handy, for instance, when a client gives me SSH or RDP access to an EC2 instance and I need to know its size, network info, or in this case what Availability Zone it is in: Read more → about Getting Ec2 Instance Availability Zone With Curl or Powershell

Making sure webistes are accessible is a big deal these days. Websites should be mindful of their audience to make sure people with disabilities are not excluded from the site content. Color contrasts between foregrounds and backgrounds is an easy miss when checking that a site is accessible, but one that is vital to hard of sight users. Read more → about Contrast Ratio Calculator

I’ve been pretty heavily reorganizing and simplifying my life lately, so it was time to replace the tired old Wordpress blog at ShellRunner with something more deserving. Wordpress has been a great platform over the years, but as a constant target of attacks, it could also be a pain to keep up. Also, it’s much more fun to write my posts in Markdown, instead of in a browser editor. This is post #1 trying out Hugo, a fast static generator written in Go with a lot of features. Read more → about Trying Out Hugo

Due to community feedback about the install process and usage of my IBM i Dotfiles, I have decided to create a command line interface (CLI) and an RPM to install the aforementioned CLI. Welcome the IBM i CLI RPM and SoBored RPM Repo. This was also an experiment for myself to learn how to build RPMs and host an RPM repo. I have a feeling that I’ll be adding more RPMs over time. Read more → about IBM i Dotfiles CLI RPM & SoBored RPM Repo

A Static Website I had a great conversation with a friend from work about doing some devblog stuff. Till then, I hadn’t heard of generating static web pages, especially not with some content generator. I was intrigued to say the least. Here we are, writing a devblog and utilizing some cool stuff. The only problems I have with this plan: The phrase devblog is not my favorite, and I’m not great at writing. Read more → about Setting up a static site in S3

Inspecting OpenEdge metadata with SQL OpenEdge’s virtual system tables (VSTs) provide excellent statistics that help in database development and maintenance. This article shows a few SQL statements that help reveal information about the database. SQL to query metadata Show all VST tables that contain metadata. Find columns in a table Show all the indexes on a table Assuming UPDATE TABLE STATISTICS AND INDEX STATISTICS AND ALL COLUMN has been run, get # of records for each table. Read more → about Inspecting OpenEdge metadata with SQL

Viewing query plan with SQL in OpenEdge It is important to review query plan produced by the database and improve queries from time to time. OpenEdge generates query plan for the queries you write. This article shows how to view query plan in OpenEdge. View query plan Let’s say the query below is taking a long time: When this query is executed, _sql_plan table is populated with information about how the query was processed. Read more → about Viewing query plan with SQL in OpenEdge