About Me
It's been nearly two months since my last Late Night Links post. A lot has happened in that timeframe - including a change in employers for me. Exciting stuff! Nevertheless, I've still been taking note of interesting links that I come across, and I've found a few useful ones you might be interested in.
When developing websites and web applications, you will often have a local environment set up for testing in your browser. But what if you want to test it on another machine or device on your local network?
Chances are, the hostname of your computer won't work as a valid virtual host on a mobile device (and some computers). Additionally, you might have multiple projects on the go that all need unique virtual host names to operate properly.
This problem used to be solved by the "hosts" file (in /etc/hosts on Linux/Mac and C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts on Windows), but there's a better way! You can use IP reflection services or wildcard DNS records to let you use nearly any virtual host name you want.
Over the years, I've heard the advice "Be Lazy" many times. It's good advice, but it has a downside. Some people seem to misinterpret what it means.
You see, there are two kinds of laziness: physical laziness, and mental laziness.
The advice "Be Lazy" means "use your brain to conserve your physical energy by solving problems efficiently and reusably".
It does not mean "spend your physical energy and time in solving problems with brute force or copy-and-paste". That's the wrong way to be lazy, because it creates much more work in the long run.
So don't be lazy: be smart.
Think about problems before you start working on them. Sometimes, thinking first means you can eliminate problems without a single line of code.
That's the right way to be lazy.
Mailstrom is a shell utility I wrote for sending the output of cronjobs via Amazon SES. It's been sitting quietly in the corner of my Github account for a while, badly in need of a touch of TLC.
I've added SMTP support using the SwiftMailer library, so now Mailstrom has some usefulness beyond the Amazon ecosystem. Mailstrom tries to emulate the UNIX mail command as closely as possible, so you can use it much the same way - you can pipe the output of scripts, you can interactively use it on the command line, or you can pass a message body as a parameter.
I should note that Mailstrom is not related whatsoever to the "Inbox Zero" mail client of the same name. It's just an unfortunate coincidence (plus, I named mine first. :P)
The next feature I plan on adding is Amazon SNS support, so your servers can have a simple way to text you from the command line. If you have ideas or feedback on Mailstrom, GitHub Issues would be the best place to submit that.
Thanks for checking in, and don't forget to "star" Mailstrom on GitHub!