At work, we develop an enterprise iOS application — which is to say one
that is not listed on the Apple App Store. As such, we have a sales team who
periodically have a need to demo the software. I used to go through quite the
rigmarole to get the sales team set up to be able to demo the app remotely
— say via WebEx or GoToMeeting.
The other day, for giggles, I decided to see if I could convert a virtual
private server (VPS) into a desktop and access it remotely. Seems to have worked,
so I’ve decided to do it again, in case anyone else ever wanted to. At the end
of this, you’ll have a server at Digital Ocean running Ubuntu
MATE that you can access from almost any platform with X2Go.
A while back, I dropped WordPress as my blogging platform in favor of
Ghost. At the time I was looking for something simpler to manage than
WordPress, and something new to play with. Ghost seemed like a pretty good
candidate — it is still kind of the new hotness. Node.js seemed like a
potential interesting new thing to learn. So I went for it.
I have 3 kids. And a wife. We lead pretty hectic lives, and there doesn’t seem
to be an end in sight to the insanity. Given all of that, it seems as if we
always have a list of stuff that we need from the grocery store.
We’ve recently begun writing automated UI tests in Calabash for
our main Xamarin.iOS_ project. While the tests are still under development,
I decided to make a Jenkins_ job to fire off the the UI tests whenever a change
was detected on the branch where the tests were being developed.
A couple of weeks ago I started putting some thought into moving my blog away from
Wordpress. I don’t necessarily have any problems with Wordpress, I was just
looking from something different, something simpler.
Xamarin released some documentation recently that talks about using Jenkins
in a continuous integration set up. Bravo. I read through with rapt anticipation,
only to be let down. Again.
I’ve got an idea for something that I want to write, but I’m going to keep it to myself while I work it all out. It will involve using Twilio. I’m not a programmer, and I’m by no means a Python expert. I’ve written one thing in Python so far (a bot for the now defunct turntable.fm). I’ll probably keep this next project in a private GitHub repo until I get it done.
I’ll be honest — I don’t really like turkey. Even though this year, I
think the turkey turned out pretty well. Turkey notwithstanding,
Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. I enjoy all the cooking and
then the 2 days of leftovers. I got a couple of phone calls yesterday about how
I do a few different things, so I decided that I’d take a moment and jot down
what I did this year from a cooking perspective. While it is too late for this
article to help the people that called, maybe they will remember this article
next year and be able to refer to it.
