Mission Logs
Transmissions from the development frontier
Latest Transmission
Launching ORBIT v2: A Deep Dive into Our Space-Themed Redesign
A technical retrospective on rebuilding the ORB IT Solutions website. We cover the migration to Svelte 5 runes, adopting Tailwind CSS 4.0, and building a space-themed, progressively enhanced and, accessible design system from scratch.
Archive
13 transmissionsBuilding an iFrame component for a React application: an unexpected journey
How we got Safari/WebKit to reliably report iframe document height in a React app, replacing a brittle setTimeout hack with a cleaner approach.
Sometimes, you should just cheat!
Migrating VirtualBox VMs to Docker Enterprise on Windows Server 2019, and the pragmatic shortcut that got a stalled integration environment unstuck.
Peak enterprise security: when IT succeeds by making development fail
How we navigated enterprise security requirements that clashed with developer workflows, and saved $45,000 in the process.
Recreating raster images as SVGs: part 2
Part 2 of our SVG series: hand-tightening SVG markup with shapes, defs, and patterns to shrink file size further without losing image quality.
Recreating raster images as SVGs: part 1
Here we describe some techniques involved in converting raster images to SVGs. We also explain why you would want to do this and show how it is benficial to clients.
Homebrew Dynamic DNS with the Linode API
Setting up homebrew dynamic DNS on an OPNsense router using the Linode API, so self-hosted services stay reachable when a home IP changes.
Troubleshooting Piwik database errors.
Debugging a silent Piwik feature failure traced back to disabled PHP error output and generic nginx error pages hiding the real cause.
Piwik installer has PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size exhausted (tried to allocate 20480 bytes) in core/FrontController.php
Solving a Piwik installer PHP fatal memory error during a FreeBSD 10-to-11 jail migration — the real cause was missing PHP modules, not memory limits.
Running dovecot and opensmtpd inside a jail
Two short config fixes for running Dovecot and OpenSMTPD together inside a FreeBSD jail without mail delivery failures.
Solution for fatal error in dovecot configuration file
A missing closing brace in an included Dovecot config file caused a cryptic 'Unknown setting: mail_location' error — here's how we tracked it down.
How I learned to stop worrying about systemd and use something better: FreeBSD
Why systemd's complexity and reliability issues led me from Ubuntu to FreeBSD, where ZFS, jails, and simpler administration won me over.
git show: my hero
A quick git lesson: using git show --stat to see exactly which files changed in a merge commit after a long-overdue branch merge.
Fix Ghost init script not starting automatically in FreeBSD jail
Fixing a Ghost blog init script that wouldn't start automatically on boot inside a FreeBSD jail, with a working rc script you can reuse.