The error message contained “exceeded the timeout of 300 seconds” so it was easy to identify.

The fix, run from the terminal was:

export COMPOSER_PROCESS_TIMEOUT=1500

Where the number is the number of seconds before a composer operation timesout.  This fix is temporary, for a permanent solution have a look at how to make environment variables persist.

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I was able to get things running though by installing Docker Toolbox which puts the Docker daemon inside a VirtualBox VM. While trying to pull down an image to build a container via docker pull the command would fail and I would get the error message:

unauthorized: authentication required

This seemed weird, I’ve never had that problem on my work machines. These are public images, why would I need to be authorized? What could be the difference? The fact that the failure happened after some of the larger files were downloading made me think that something was timing out. It seems that there is token authorization happening during the download process and they are expiring. And these downloads were much, much slower on my home 2Mbps connection compared to 100Mbps at the office.

Some Googling pointed to an option for the Docker daemon that may help:

–max-concurrent-downloads

So in the case of having the Docker daemon on a vm, I used the docker-machine command to SSH to the daemon to put this extra config into a daemon.json file that is parsed when the daemon starts.

First, from your OS terminal:

docker-machine ssh

Then when you are logged into Docker VM:

echo ‘{“max-concurrent-downloads”:25}’ | sudo tee /etc/docker/daemon.json

This ensures that all of the files are downloaded concurrently, starting to download before what I assume is the token expiring. You will need to restart the daemon, I did it from directly inside the vm with

sudo /etc/init.d/docker restart

While our slow “high speed ultra” Internet has been an annoyance with poor quality audio and video and slow downloads, it has never caused something to absolutely not work without modification. This is a demonstrable example of how the poor quality of PEI’s rural Internet can impact employment and innovation.

The post What to do when your rural high speed Internet is too slow to use Docker? appeared first on mitchmac.com.

Let’s look at the frequency of 10+ cm during five day periods from 1944-2016. For the days below we show the percentage of years that had at least 10cm of snow fall on a single day during the 5 day time period focused on that day (that day, 2 days before, and 2 days after).

So on December 17, 10cm+ of snow has fallen in the 2 days before, the day of, and 2 days after on average 57.3% of the time. With this calculation I’m trying to find periods of time that tend to get moderate/heavy snowfall.

December 16, 17 & 18 tend to get a moderate/heavy snowfall the most often followed by the time period of February 15, 16 & 17 and their surrounding days. In a followup post, I will show that the mid-February storms pack a greater punch though. November and March seem to ease us in and out of the winter season when it comes to snow.

It also looks like a heavy snowfall around Boxing Day is more frequent than around St. Patrick’s Day!

The post Stormiest Winter Periods on Prince Edward Island appeared first on mitchmac.com.

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From 1943-2016, July 26 had an average mean temperature of 19.47°C and an average high of 24.41°C in Charlottetown.

The post Warmest Day of the Year on PEI appeared first on mitchmac.com.

• security – WordPress security has improved a good deal over the past few years but there are still core security issues being exploited yearly. With auto-updates, the risk is minimized but it’s still there. Plugins exist to better secure WordPress, but core issues can never be completely protected via plugins. WordPress installations can’t be neglected for this reason.
• performance – WordPress out of the box isn’t very fast and chews up memory. Again, there are plugins of various quality with cumbersome installation steps that may mitigate these issues. There are server side caching solutions as well, but for a personal website why bother?

When it comes down to it, most personal blogs are just serving HTML content with little need for the dynamic abilities that PHP gives to WordPress.

What about WordPress.com? The cost is certainly reasonable, but the arbitrary limitations on what can be customized and enabled just doesn’t seem right.

But what if we think about WordPress as a static website generator? When WordPress is first installed, the only dynamic functionality that is enabled besides the admin dashboard is commenting and search (and XML-RPC and REST…). If you don’t need that functionality or can find alternative services, using WordPress as a static website generator is relatively straightforward.

First you have WordPress installed somewhere. If you still want to be able to create and edit content via the web, then you can install it as usual but limit access to it at the web server layer (Apache, NGINX) by enforcing basic authentication or some other mechanism. There are many ways this could be done, with firewalls, Docker, etc. the possibilities are endless. Otherwise you can just install it on a computer at home.

Disable comments and search, unless you have alternatives in place like Disqus or Google Custom Search Engine. Configure WordPress like usual and start creating content! Use a tool like HTTrack to create a static mirror of your website and upload the HTML somewhere!

Of course the last few steps have a few details you’ll need to work through but they can be automated so that you can update your website quickly. With static HTML, you can use Amazon S3, Github pages, GitLab Pages, Dropbox, or a simple static HTTP server to host the content with less risk than a wide open WordPress install with better performance and it can be for free or very cheap.

As I work through hosting my own blog in this fashion, I will try to share tips and code to make WordPress as a static website generator as easy as it is sensible. I think many brochureware marketing sites and blogs that are built with WordPress could ultimately be static websites.

Finally, what about traditional static website generators like hugo? They are certainly the answer if: you don’t need native web access for content updates and are able to customize a theme or use one of the more limited number of ones that are open source.

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