Evaluate a URL to get it's domain and port

In NodeJS if you need to take a URL and extract the domain, protocol and port out, you may have noticed it is harder than it sounds. We came across this problem when creating itsback.at, and this is what we came up with. It currently only checks for http(s) and not other protocols like ftp links. It should return you the domain and port number, defaulting to port [Read More]

ES6 boilerplate, with Webpack, Mongoose, Pug, Stylus and a bunch of other goodies

During my industrial year at Clock Limited I was exposed to a lot of new javascript technologies, however working on an existing code base means you can't always use the latest and greatest tools that you want to. As a side project myself, Kenan, Ben and Matt decided to work on something a little bit different on friday afternoons to keep the noodles ticking over. We came up with itsback. [Read More]

ES6 boilerplate, with Webpack, Mongoose, Pug, Stylus and a bunch of other goodies

During my industrial year at Clock Limited I was exposed to a lot of new javascript technologies, however working on an existing code base means you can't always use the latest and greatest tools that you want to. As a side project myself, Kenan, Ben and Matt decided to work on something a little bit different on friday afternoons to keep the noodles ticking over. We came up with itsback. [Read More]

[Project Log #1] Today I found out rm can only take 100,000 arguments at a time...

I've just began working on my final year project, and was advised to document my progress in a diary or blog, so here we go. My project is going to be based around genomic data that has been sequenced from three strains of yeast. The plan is to annotate the sequenced contigs of DNA, and then compare them against each other to see where the genes of the yeasts differ. [Read More]

HJKL all the things!

If you are a Vim user, you will hopefully have been using HJKL and to navigate your documents, rather than the arrow keys. However I like to take this idea a little further. Well, a lot further. But why? It can seem like an odd thing to someone who has never tried it, however the more you use it the more you notice the micro inefficiencies that come from reaching [Read More]

Mixxx for Swing DJ's - A quick guide

Mixxx is an open source program designed for electronic DJ's, and has a lot of features for specialist DJ hardware, and live mixing. Which is great and all, but for jazz music at a dance event all that stuff isn't really necessary. However it is great to be able to take advantage of some of the more basic functions that Mixxx provides that you won't find in other music players. [Read More]

MongoDB Performance on ZFS and Linux

This was written during my time at Clock. Here at Clock we love ZFS, and have been running it in production on our Linux file servers for several years. It provides us with numerous excellent features, such as snapshotting, incremental send/receive, and transparent compression. With the recent release of Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 official support for ZFS is now here, and we are keen to integrate it fully into [Read More]

FZF & RipGrep - Navigate with bash faster than ever before

I've always had fzf and ripgrep on my radar, and I've finally gotten around to using them together. Good lord it makes a world of difference, especially when added to Vim as well as Bash. Add the following snippet to your ~/.bashrc, this add's fzf keybindings to bash and gets fzf to use ripgrep by default for faster searching. [ -f ~/.fzf.bash ] && source ~/.fzf.bash export FZF_DEFAULT_ [Read More]