I distinctly remember, some time in the nineties, when I was still in school, when the staff of the schoolβs library was tasked with introducing us to a new addition to the libraryβs facilities. Along with the books, and the media library of VCR tapes, and the microfisch archives, there was now a few computers …
Continue reading "Agentic SWE: Not business as usual"Me rapidly descending into AI-psychosis, or, possibly a valuable recommendation towards maintaining our collective mental health? Your choice which is which.
Continue reading "Children in the room"
If you hate having to do ASO for your apps, then this article is for you.
Continue reading "π How I do Agentic ASO with MCP for an instant boost to app discoverability"
Today I vent on by blog (the old) about vibe coding (the new). What an anachronism!
Continue reading "β¨ A lowly software engineer’s rant on vibe coding"
Being polite to AIs: a philosophical rant!
Continue reading "π Thank you, LLM!"How to cleanup unnecessary data on Linux before taking a full-system image backup of your disk.
Continue reading "π΄ Clean up all your Caches before taking a Full System Backup of your Linux machine"
I have created a collection of assorted scripts to translate my flutter apps to multiple languages. Here I share some of this magic with the world.
Continue reading "βοΈ Using Google Gemini to intelligently translate a Flutter app to many locales on Linux"May 2025 UPDATE: Apparently there is now a PPA that allows the nvidia-340 package to be installed on version 6.x of the Linux kernel. I have not tested it, but it is here: https://github.com/kda2210/nvidia-340-ubuntu-24.04/ Up until recently, I had been running the Long-Term-Support version of Ubuntu 20 (Focal Fossa) on my dev machine. When I’m …
Continue reading "π΅ A very sad tale about an old man and his beloved Nvidia GeForce 210 GPU"
How (and why) I reverted my Google Authenticator to a version that doesn’t require sign in.
Continue reading "Google Authenticator app 7.0 requires cloud sign-in. Here’s how to go back to 6.0."
How to easily copy simple markdown from AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini and paste it into the Trac issue tracker and wiki.
Continue reading "β Copying markdown from ChatGPT or Gemini to TracWiki using pandoc"
Heartwarming Kitten Rescue: 30 Days of Bottle-Feeding
How I create engaging video shorts with subtitles for promoting my Android apps.
Continue reading "π Engaging video shorts with subtitles, the open source way"Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love docker compose.
Continue reading "π¦ Two dockerized WordPress sites, with Let’s Encrypt, logging, SMTP relay, controlled by a systemd service, and daily backups"Rant on why I think it’s OK to keep logging enabled in live WordPress sites.
Continue reading "γ WordPress production: To log or not to log?"As a WordPress plugin developer, lately I’ve been using ChatGPT in all stages of software development. Here’s some ideas on how to leverage this tool.
Continue reading "From Idea to Execution: Revolutionize Your WordPress Plugin Development with ChatGPT"Apologies to my usual readers, but this post is not going to be technical. It’s about a dream I just had, today, Monday the 27th. In my dream, I was programming a custom SQL query for some WordPress plugin. The query was an INSERT statement, that simply passed a vector of strings into a table …
Continue reading "π§ Blueberry cupcake string placeholders"A complete working example of an admin pointer in WordPress. Use it to display hints to new users, introducing them to your UI.
Continue reading "π¨ WordPress admin pointers for dummies"This is not an article on how to fix timeout errors on your web server. Instead, it is an article on how NOT to go about fixing these errors. Smh…
Continue reading "β How NOT to fix error “upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out)”"Use PHP output buffering in WordPress to interpolate HTML code and dynamic values in a way that’s more readable.
Continue reading "π© Please, WordPress theme and plugin developers, learn to write proper HTML already… smh"Developing a WordPress theme or plugin? Learn how to use phan and phpcs to improve the quality of your WordPress PHP code.
Continue reading "π© Your WordPress PHP code stinks! Here’s why."Render an SVG that uses the feDropShadow filter to a raster file such as PNG, using a PHP script.
Continue reading "β How to render an SVG with a feDropShadow filter to PNG raster"A script to scrape and save daily usage statistics for a WordPress plugin for later use in analytics.
Continue reading "π» Monitor analytics of a public WordPress plugin using PhantomJS"Instructions for WordPress plugin developers as to how to add GDPR compliance to their code.
Continue reading "πͺπΊ GDPR for WordPress plugin authors"Build translation files to localize a WordPress plugin using grunt. Create separate translation files for the front-end and back-end.
Continue reading "π How to make pot with WordPress"Insider secrets to making your plugin work well on multisite installs, both when it is network activated and when it is not.
Continue reading "π§ The wacky world of network activated WordPress plugins in multisite"How to migrate trac project from 1.0.12 to a 0.11.7 installation if your project is MySQL based.
Continue reading "How to migrate trac MySQL-based project from trac 1.0.12 to trac 0.11.7"I am always aiming for a hierarchical Gruntfile.js structure that reminds me of increasingly verbose memes. And you should, too.
Continue reading "π Building WordPress plugins with an increasingly verbose Gruntfile"How to open a shell here, in the directory of the file you’re currently editing in Geany.
Continue reading "πͺ Open terminal with shell here in Geany"Here’s some code to restore the auto_increment flag on the primary keys of a WordPress MySQL database after a faulty export/import cycle.
Continue reading "auto_increment flag repair on primary keys of a WordPress MySQL database"In this article we will go through some code that I like to use to make dismissible notices where the dismissal persists between page refreshes in the WordPress administration screens.
Continue reading "π¨ Dismissible notices that persist when refreshing the WordPress admin screens"
In this meta-article I will list eight WordPress checklists and a book that you will want to go through, before you publish a theme or plugin.
Continue reading "β WordPress checklists to go through before publishing a theme or plugin"I’m going to share with you a trick that I use to run wp-cli as the www-data user on my Linux development environment.
Continue reading "π» wp-cli executed by www-data user to avoid Linux permission issues"