Month: November 2016

SmartDraw – The Smartest Way to Draw Anything

It’s not often that I need to draw a diagram or a flowchart these days.  My time is mostly consumed by more technically challenging tasks.  And whenever I do have to produce some form of a chart, I usually fallback on to the Graphviz dot, which allows me to do something in literally seconds.

basic-flowchart

However, I’m pretty sure the day will (or, rather, return) when I’d need a tool to produce eye-pleasing diagrams and flowcharts.  For that day, and for that day only, I’m leaving the link to SmartDraw here.  It’s a commercial offering, but at $15/month for their cloud-hosted web-based application, it’s seems to be quite a bargain.

devices-cloud-buy

Quick way to create a PHP stdClass

Simon Holywell shows how to quickly create the stdClass in PHP and populate it with properties and values, by casting an array to an object:

$x = (object) [
    'a' => 'test',
    'b' => 'test2',
    'c' => 'test3'
];
var_dump($x);

/*
object(stdClass)#1 (3) {
  ["a"]=>
  string(4) "test"
  ["b"]=>
  string(5) "test2"
  ["c"]=>
  string(5) "test3"
}
*/

A couple of things to keep in mind here are:

  1. In PHP, an associative array key have multiple same keys.  If you cast such an associative array to object, the latest key will silently overwrite the value of the previous ones.
  2. The order of properties in the object will not necessarily match the order of keys in the associative array.

Very handy!

Fedora 25

I’ve just upgraded my laptop to Fedora 25.  The upgrade process was a breeze (as per instructions from this article):

sudo su -
dnf upgrade --refresh
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=25
dnf system-upgrade reboot

About 2,500 packages (1 GB and some) were downloaded in about 40 minutes (yeah, our Internet connection could use a boost). Then rebooted and the upgraded kicked in. It took about another 40 minutes to run the process (I should get myself an SSD-based laptop next time).

The only thing I had to fix after the upgrade was the kmod-wl package, which provides the drivers for my wireless interface. Another reboot later all was good.

There were no major visual changes (I’m using MATE Desktop), but something felt a bit different.  After focusing on the differences for a few minutes, I think it’s the fonts.  Something is better, sharper, more polished.

Other than that, all is pretty much the same.  I’ll need to use it for a while to see if I can spot any changes.  Hopefully, at least a flickering issue that I got after some upgrade during the Fedora 24 life span is fixed now.  It was weird.  A particular application window would start to flick and refresh until clicked again.  Never figured out what it was. :)

SQL Server in a Fedora Docker Container

MS SQL Server and Docker

It’s a well known fact that I am not the greatest fan of Microsoft and their technologies.  I’ve been bitten many a time through the years.  And not even them becoming a Platinum Partner in the Linux Foundation can change my attitude towards them.  It’s just been too much pain, and scars, and tears, and sweat.

But the way life is, once in a while, I just have to work with or around them.  Recently, for example, at work, we’ve done a project that just had to use MS SQL Server and there was no way to get around it.  Gladly, I managed to find just the right image on the Amazon AWS Marketplace, and spin a new EC2 instance for testing.  The local development was difficult, but at least we had a place to test stuff before sending it off to the customer.

If such a need arises in the future, I think I’ll give the MS SQL for Linux a try.  And that’s when this article from Fedora Magazine might come in handy.  MS SQL + Docker + Fedora.  Hmm.