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Whiskey Tango Awkward Foxtrot
It's taken me 7? 8? months to write this blog post. It's the "how do I explain to blog readers I'm no longer working where I've spent the past year and a half? and I signed documents so I can't talk about it" blog post. So yeah, if we haven't spoken in the past 8 months, there's a good chance you're just now finding out I've been working for a startup writing Python and building Ansible backed...
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Keybase Static Site Verification
I recently converted my WordPress site over to a static site (using TightenCo's Jigsaw and ran into a problem I figured others might also: my Keybase.io web site verification failed because the URL to my verification file no longer exists. Keybase sent me an email with the subject "your web (joeferguson.me) proof just broke" letting me know that I needed to replace the file or revoke the proof....
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Announcing Homestead Fifty Six
The most recent major release of Homestead dropped support for PHP 5.6 and 7.0. While these PHP versions are end of life and will no longer be receiving updates, some developers still need access to these tools. You can certainly use and old version of Homestead but at some point the base box will just be too far out of date and things will start breaking. The solution to this problem is for me...
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Passing the torch of Memphis PHP User Group
In September of 2012 David Haskins and I took over MemphisPHP from Jeremy Kendall. David Haskins and I had never run a user group before but we wanted to ensure MemphisPHP would survive Jeremy moving to Nashville. (Jeremy has since come back to Memphis and once again abandoned us for Austin, TX) The past ~6 years have been pretty amazing as I've learned an amazing amount from running MemphisPHP...
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The Only Way Out is Through
On my deathbed I will pray To the gods and the angels Like a pagan to anyone Who will take me to heaven To a place I recall I was there so long ago The sky was bruised The wine was bled And there you led me on 2017 was a pretty rough year for me and I'm not sad to see it go. Professionally I was laid off from a job I really loved, from a team that was one of the best I've...
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Install and Configure PHP 7.1 on Cloud 9 Workspaces
July 8th I'm giving a general PHP training day at the Fedex Institute of Technology and because I'm targeting absolute beginners I wanted to use Cloud 9. Cloud 9 is an online editor that gives you a full linux workspace to build your project in. The first thing I noticed was the container Cloud 9 provides is running PHP 5.5. I've created a simple bash script to update PHP to 7.1 and update...
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GiveCamp Memphis February 7-9
This weekend I will be at GiveCamp Memphis. This year CoWork Memphis is the host and it looks to be a great event. This will be my first GiveCamp event and I'm excited to lend my developer skills to local nonprofits. One of the sponsors this year is Rackspace. I have been familiar with Rackspace for a long time but it was not until I started my current day job that I had first hand experience...
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Enable M Keys on a Razer Black Widow Ultimate in Ubuntu Linux
I've had my Razer Black Widow Ultimate for a long time now. It's absolutely my favorite keyboard. Here is how I easily mapped the M keys in Ubuntu Linux. Info taken from this Superuser thread.
Step 1: install the python-usb package:
sudo apt-get install python-usb
Step 2: Grab blackwidow_enable.py (the original host at finch.am is no longer available; check the Superuser...
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New Domain, New Blog, Nothings Changed
So it was next to impossible to find a domain that wasn't completely terrible. Between a large corporation and a football player I was pretty much out of luck. I finally found something (obviously) so here we are. This is "that post" that every blog gets. It's the post where the author has every intention of comeing back and giving you a daily account of their life. I won't even begin to try to...
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