Rather proud to have relaunched I Play Red with a far cleaner interface and presentation. It was important to take the visually stunning elements of Boardgame and Table top games and make them more prominent, and better organising the other content that while still relevant is secondary to the blog posts and game walkthroughs. The design makes rather nice use of parallax to divide the sections and moves to a more streamlined and readable layout.
The work was a response to an increase in content and all in preparation for the Spiel 2017 event in Essen and so was time sensitive.
Back in 2009, whilst freelancing, I applied to join both the teams of PledgeMusic and Songkick . I was lucky enough to join PledgeMusic and I am still there today. SongKick are still a cool company though and their product is a very simple one. They harvest gig listing data from thousands of sources and build a list of venues, bands and gigs (historical and upcoming).
This data is very simple yet very powerful, you can use their website or their app to select your city (Brighton) or cities you’d travel to (hell anywhere cool in Europe) and import your favourite artists from Facebook, Spotify or your music from your phone. That’s it, but this means you can now easily search for what bands that you like are coming up and track those events, announce you’re going or if they have tickets buy them from Songkick or via one of their partner vendors (the usual suspects).
Having travelled to Europe plenty in the last 10 years this services makes it really easy to add a gig to our sightseeing itinerary. Last year it was D-A-D in Gothenberg, Conny Bloom in Oreboro and then into Stockholm for a pootle around the city before home. And before that we travelled to Brussels to see Messer Chups after getting similar notifications.
This service is not only powerful for Consumers but Bands and Promoters should take the time to ensure their events are listed on the site, add them if not or just ensure the bands are listed properly and date and venue are accurate. And this guarantees that little bit more exposure and your target customers don’t end up missing Messer Chups when they come to Brighton. This may have happened :(
Having decided to attend Mammothfest 2017 this year. I took a look at the listing and it appeared that over 20 bands (both established and new on the scene) were not listed. Since any user can edit a listing I added in the missing ones and one day later the app is notifying me about new gigs for ‘Hole In The Sky’ and ‘Mutually Assured Destruction". Excellent, so not only is the gig listing more accurate but fans are automatically notified that new bands are added to the bill. Potentially making that push in sales that any artists, promoter, gig needs. Don’t miss out on that little bit more exposure because just a Facebook Event just doesn’t cut it anymore
So why not pop on over and let me know if you’re also going to Damnation 2017
Getting Too Many Connections errors from MySQL. At the point where couldn’t determine why so many additional connections had appears from nowhere we had to immediately raise this limit. Fortunately you can do it while MySQL is still running.
mysql> show variables like 'max_connections';
+-----------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-----------------+-------+
| max_connections | 300 |
+-----------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> SET GLOBAL max_connections = 500;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> show variables like 'max_connections';
+-----------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-----------------+-------+
| max_connections | 500 |
+-----------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
You can also check how many connections there are at a given time.
mysql> show status where `variable_name` = 'Threads_connected';
+-------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-------------------+-------+
| Threads_connected | 275 |
+-------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Be sure to memorialise your config change in my.cnf because restarting the server will loose this change.
I recently changed the default SSH port of one of my client’s servers. It appears that the first time I tried to deploy via Capistrano it hanged and I had to kill the task.
It appears to be connecting on the custom port for that new server.
export GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -vvv" export GIT_ASKPASS="/bin/echo" GIT_SSH="/tmp/somerepo/git-ssh.sh" ; /usr/bin/env git ls-remote git@github.com:someuser/somerepo.git
OpenSSH_6.9p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2d 9 Jul 2015
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 19: Applying options for *
debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0
debug1: Connecting to github.com [192.30.253.112] port 1234.
So for some inexplicable reason it’s trying to forward using the same port as the initial connection is made from. I can’t find an option to turn this off in the Capistrano 3 config so I am going to force the port to be 22. Editing ~/.ssh/config on the server with the following fixes it. Be sure if this is a new file to chmod permissions to 644.
Sublime 3 keeps opening files and hanging and generally telling me it’s reloading open files, kill Sublime, re-open and those files are still being loaded up on start up.
Came across and interesting problem. We decode a base64 string that is received as a parameter and decode it to work out where to build a new path. The problem here is that the extra characters \xDB\x9D\x00 shouldn’t be there and cause YAML to blow up
2.2.2 :017 > Base64.decode64('LS0tCi0gOnBvbHltb3JwaGljX3BhdGgKLSAhcnVieS9BY3RpdmVSZWNvcmQ6%250AUHJvamVjdAogIGF0dHJpYnV0ZXM6CiAgICBpZDogODAyNQo=%250A')
=> "---\n- :polymorphic_path\n- !ruby/ActiveRecord:\xDB\x9D\x00Project\n attributes:\n id: 8025\n"
2.2.2 :023 > YAML.load("---\n- :polymorphic_path\n- !ruby/ActiveRecord:\xDB\x9D\x00Project\n attributes:\n id: 8025\n")
Psych::SyntaxError: (<unknown>): control characters are not allowed at line 1 column 1
Somehow control characters are appearing in our Base64 string and we need to strip them. It just doesn’t seem as simple as
That’s much better and now YAML can decode this successfully.
It is at this stage I notice…. %250A in the Base64 string and at the end of the string. This represents a carriage return, that can happen in parameters easily enough, so I am decoding a carriage return and then stripping it from the string. I should just strip the carriage returns in the first place.
rails@snarf:/var/www/mini-epic/current$ sudo -u postgres createuser --interactive
Enter name of role to add: rails
Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) y
rails@snarf:/var/www/mini-epic/current$ RAILS_ENV=staging rake db:create
rails@snarf:/var/www/mini-epic/current$ psql epic_invite_staging < /tmp/mini-epic.pgsql