Programming

McGregor Update

Mat Koya

McGregor got some software updates accidently.
It started all with the update of the ICU library. The old library had an security issue, which required it to be updated. Surprsingly the update was dragging a hidden tail of more updates necessary behind.


The operation took 2 steps, upgrading the mail stack and upgrading the web-stack.

The upgrade from postfix 2.4 to Postfix 3.11 was easy. To run rspamd on this system, I had to adapt some 2 little pieces in the source files of rspamd. The library update also required now recomiling rspamd and clamAV. On the end it was still necessary to change some parts of the configuration for v3.

The second step was upgrading the web-stack, especially php from 7.4 to 8.3. This second step became a slightly complicated. To compile php8.x I needed clang-18, that was the easy part. php-fpm, the bridged to Nginx, the webserver, crashed. It turend out that CommonCrypto triggered the crash when the main process forks. php itself doesn’t but php-fpm is constructed that way to do so, but old CommonCrypto doesn’t like it. So I removed CommonCrypto from the source and surprise, surprise, it’s working 😄


El Capitano with an up-to-date web and mail-stack 💪🏽

Chrome phones home

Mat Koya

Once Google Chrome has been installed on your Mac, it phones home every couple of minutes.

Google Chrome has some nice features, especially the debugger comes in very hand when doing java script development together with the Angular framwork. It allows to directly debug the TypeScript code used with Angular and the debugger jumps also in, when the Firefox or Safari debugger fails.

So far so good, but ultimatly, I don’t like to have a software on my box, which phones home every couple of minutes.

To get rid of the updater in MacOS 10.11 one can call the updater like this in the terminal:

~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/ksinstall –nuke

To just disable it, seet the intervall to 0:

~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/ksinstall –interval=0

 

Responsive

Mat Koya

AngularJS looked pretty promising on the first view, but it is complicated to debug and has a steep learning curve. Finally I dropped it for the moment. Then I played around with my own pages and Twitter’s Bottstrap3. Bootstrap is really quite practical and not difficult to understand. I also polished up my knowledge about CSS3, mostly through learning by doing 😉

For the redesign of Muryokoin’s website I also added Boilerplate, which is especially helpful to tighten up security of the webserver. It required also some recoding in the database, which on the end is speeding up the loading of some pages.

I’m still not yet satisfied with the theme of WordPress, so I guess I play a bit around with some other themes until I find one, which I like.

At least all pages are now usable on all devices I tested.