Year: 2020

In a previous post I wrote about how NetworkManager on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) lacked some options that are needed to support newer versions of OpenVPN, particularly on versions 2.4 and 2.5. This meant that one would not be able to create a connection configuration to an OpenVPN server using those unsupported options through…

Not that long ago, I wrote about creating my own VPN (Virtual Private Network) for personal use with OpenVPN. In that post I also recounted how I used it for work purposes back when I was still in Singapore. That was several years ago. That time I had no issues connecting to the VPN server…

Now I have always thought about getting a VPN subscription for some time. Already researched a bit about it several times before. I always somehow keep on having second thoughts about getting one for several reasons that I won’t mention here. I’ve already implemented a VPN back when I was still in Singapore, using OpenVPN.…

This is an old-ish Star Wars series. I might have seen some episodes across different seasons, but I know I missed a lot. Then it was probably random viewings, never a commitment to watch this great animated series from beginning to end. Now I’m going to. So where to start but in Season 1 of…

My Android Nokia 6.1 Plus will be 2 years old come December (2020). This Nokia has served me well since then. Didn’t really plan on getting this one at all. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment purchase decision when my 2 other Android smartphones – a Samsung Galaxy Note 1st gen and a Google LG…

One of those people who is guilty of frequently relying on online 3rd party JSON formatting tools so messily formatted JSON strings or one-liners can be saner to read. If you are like me who deal with JSON almost every day for development, reading log messages, error tracing, etc., readability for JSON is a must.…

How many countless times must I have found myself with a piece of JSON string that is formatted in a way that makes it very hard for me to read. Perhaps you’ve also experienced this several times too? As a back-end developer, having to deal with a lot of JSON is unavoidable. Heck, I deal…

Mochi is now 7 months old today. I brought her home perhaps when she was around 2 and 1/2 months. At that time lock-down measures because of COVID19 were already being eased. I thought then that it would be a good time to bring home a pup. Staying at home by myself for 3 months…

The other day I was trying to assign a container of, let’s say, numbers distributed across 20 groups, to a container with a smaller size that can only hold up to 6 groups. The bigger group has values from 0 to 19. It also means that group 0 will always have zero number value, 1…

The other day, I was working on a huge JSON object that had a number of collections in it. The entire object had to be saved into a relational database, which means I was mapping out the raw JSON data to its logical representation as database tables. Though the object wasn’t that complicated, it did…

Using Repository implementation with Spring Data, one can develop applications with an underlying database rapidly in Spring Boot. The Spring Data JPA handles the abstraction of the persistence layer quite well. Many times you probably won’t need anything else beyond what it has to offer. A lot can already be done with the exposed methods…

As a back-end developer, consuming JSON objects is pretty much very common. I think it is second only to publishing data in JSON format, the other end of what is usually a 2-way street. We may have a REST API endpoint that accepts orders for an online food delivery service that takes in JSON formatted…

Going to skip right away to the juicy stuff as much as I can. I won’t discuss about what OpenShift is or what the Secrets feature does. This is only about my experience the first time I dealt with Secrets and how I used it for a Spring Boot Kafka consumer/client application. The problem I…

She’s grown. Not a lot. But still. Her fur has grown thicker. Especially around the neck areas and behind/around the ears. Her back used to be half white and half brown fur. The latter being at the lower portion. Now that brownish hair has creeped upwards almost entirely covering her back. Tail has grown longer…