https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/Musings about life and codeTue, 23 Dec 2025 08:53:48 +0000clj-rsshttps://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/email-setup/2025-12-3-putting-email-in-its-place/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/email-setup/2025-12-3-putting-email-in-its-place/I had a few free hours recently and decided to have a go at a long-simmering idea: To improve how I manage multiple email accounts. As someone who struggles mightily to cope with distractions (I have the attention span of a gnat), I was hoping to consolidate several separate interfaces into one, simpler, less distracting, more focused client.Sadly, I wasn't quite successful -- my work emails remain out of reach. But I learned a lot and ended up in at least a better place.Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/ssl-setup/2024-04-01-setting-up-ssl-for-my-local-apps/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/ssl-setup/2024-04-01-setting-up-ssl-for-my-local-apps/One huge and welcome change in the last decade or so for Web development is that secure connections are ubiquitous. Free certificates are available and most hosting providers make it very easy to obtain, use and renew the certificates automatically. This site, for example, runs on Amazon Web Services and enabling https took not much more effort than ticking a few checkboxes.Browsers, like Chrome, Firefox and Safari, have also played their part, by gently steering users toward secure connections, warning about sending sensitive information over plain text and switching to https automatically, when available.Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/ha-followup/2024-02-16-ha-extras/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/ha-followup/2024-02-16-ha-extras/My last post was my first in a long time and I'd forgotten how hard they are to write. After a couple of days, I got sick of looking at it and just chopped out a whole bunch of detail and posted it. Here's a quick follow-up with some bits I left out.Zigbee vs Z-WaveFri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/home-automation-three-years/2024-02-11-home-assistant-three-years-later/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/home-automation-three-years/2024-02-11-home-assistant-three-years-later/Almost three years ago, deep in the pandemic, my kids got me my first Raspberry Pi. That started me on an adventure with Home Assistant, mostly because it was one of the first search results for "what to do with a Raspberry Pi."I'm still going, and learned much since then, so it is time for a quick update.Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/home-automation/2021-06-21-handy-around-the-home/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/home-automation/2021-06-21-handy-around-the-home/For the past six weeks or so I've been playing around with home automation. It's a rather large and complex subject and I've only just started, but thought it might be worth writing up what I've found so far.The adventure started when the kids gave me a new Raspberry Pi for my birthday near the beginning of May. I installed Home Assistant on it and, a bit later, Node Red. Then, over the next few weeks, much to my wife's dismay, I purchased 10 smart light bulbs, a few motion sensors and half a dozen smart plugs -- gradually changing the house into a version of HAL. Each time she would come home from work, some wall switch or another would stop working as it did... She's been very patient!Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2021-03-16-a-year-on/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2021-03-16-a-year-on/A year ago, I was told to vacate the office and start working from home. I expected it to last several weeks or a few months, at most. I also expected it to be fun. Working from home is fun. Conducting every meeting, every discussion, every personal interaction of any kind, for months on end, through the virtual keyhole that is Zoom is a bit less so.I've adapted surprisingly well, in some respects. I talk to my children more frequently now than I did before the pandemic, for example, and I've slowly assembled a very comfortable working environment in one of our spare bedrooms. But I can also count quite a few costs: I've lost a year in my seven-year-old granddaughter's life. I miss being able to hug my kids, something I now realise I did far too infrequently before the pandemic. (Let that be a lesson: Hug while you can.)Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-12-06-walking-along-with-suffering/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-12-06-walking-along-with-suffering/I've been volunteering for a couple of years with the Jesuit Refugee Service, which aims to support refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. I'm a volunteer "social visitor." Before the lockdown, that meant regularly travelling out to the Immigration Detention Centres near Heathrow, Europe's largest. (There are two centres, next to each other, called Harmondsworth and Colnbrook.)Several hundred young men, and a very small number of women, are held here indefinitely, often for several weeks or months, while the courts consider their cases. They are usually alone, with no family or friends to visit them. My job is mostly to just talk with them and treat them as people, not cases to be adjudicated.Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-11-05-developers-bin/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-11-05-developers-bin/I'm fortunate to work for a team that gives its developers time to play -- a day, every other week, that we can use to learn about or try something new. Over the years, a number of useful stuff has come out of those days. Many of them are small utilities that developers have created for themselves -- for example, to automate a task. We've gathered quite an eclectic collection of these, written in all sorts of languages and frameworks.Unfortunately, for the most part, these were just being used by the programmer who wrote them, squirrelled away in some directory in their path (~/bin). For example, I've written some command-line utilities in Clojure that I think others would find useful, but we're a Scala and NodeJS shop. I don't want them to have to install Clojure build tools to try them out.Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-05-24-who-am-i/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-05-24-who-am-i/The extended family members are getting together again tonight, on the usual unwieldy, international Zoom conference with too many people on it. In an effort to make it less cacophonous, we're each being asked to come up with something to share -- a piece of music, a poem, or whatever -- that we liked. We'll each get three minutes.I like the idea, so I thought I'd write my thoughts on my "thing" beforehand, so that I can make the best of my three minutes.Sun, 24 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-04-25-remote-first-emacs/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-04-25-remote-first-emacs/At my work, we are advocates of pair programming. From an organisational perspective, the practice has several advantages. We're often more productive working with someone else -- we keep each other on task and get stuck less often and for shorter periods of time. More importantly, the resulting code is generally better and more robust, in my experience, especially when combined with test- or behaviour-driven development.Businesses often object to the practice based on cost. Why pay two programmers to do the work of one? But at the end of the day, you'll have two developers intimately familiar with the code for future modifications and maintenance -- i.e., the bulk of the software's lifespan. Yes, you spend more in the short term, but for a better payoff in the future. You're investing in the team, spreading the knowledge more widely.Sat, 25 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/sustainable-pace/2020-04-10-a-sustainable-pace/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/sustainable-pace/2020-04-10-a-sustainable-pace/It's now been a few weeks since many of us in the U.K. have gone into lockdown. We're spending a lot more time at home and our social calendar has suddenly freed up, completely, for the foreseeable future. So why are we so tired?When we first moved to the U.K. in 1998 from the Boston, Massachusetts area, my very smart Aunt Kathleen gave my wife and I an abbreviated version of the course she gave to corporate managers who were about to go on overseas assignments. We found this training to be extremely helpful in the first few months in London. It was a guide for handling life-upturning change, precisely what we're going through again right now, and is one of the reasons I was expecting the tiredness.Fri, 10 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-04-05-well-honed-tool/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-04-05-well-honed-tool/I took a few minutes last night to add a small feature to Emacs, saving me from some repetitive steps when I'm starting a blog post (like this one). It was a tiny bit of code and nothing exceptional in itself, but it reminded me of why I choose to use an editor that's nearly as old as I am. It is designed for this kind of organic, incremental growth.I often find it difficult to explain to my younger colleagues why you would use Emacs or Vim (another vintage editor) over modern tools such as VS Code or Intellij. The old editors are harder to learn. You can't just sit down at one and be productive in minutes. It takes some effort, and usually at least a several weeks of it, to get the hang of them.Sun, 05 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/zoom-woes/2020-03-31-zoom-woes/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/zoom-woes/2020-03-31-zoom-woes/I'm trying to get one of the charities I work with on Zoom before our next scheduled meeting on Monday. This is at least the third time now that I've gone through the pain of getting a new group of people on the app, and it's a very painful process. Every. Single. Time.What kind of problems, you ask? Let me count the ways.Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-29-changes/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-29-changes/Here's a game to while away some of those long evenings in lockdown: Predict how the pandemic will change the world. What do you hope, or fear, will be different about our everyday life in a year or two?It's likely that very little will change. We're pretty good at getting used to anything and carrying on as before. Eventually, a vaccine, wide-spread immunity or an effective treatment will relegate COVID-19 to just another hazard out there that might kill us, but probably won't. The roads will fill with traffic again, commuters will pack the Tube and we'll all just go back to business as usual. It's hard to knock us off track, especially well-grooved ones.Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/tweaking-configuration/2020-03-23-tweaking-configuration/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/tweaking-configuration/2020-03-23-tweaking-configuration/On this site, I want URLs like https://my-site.com/my-page/ instead of https://my-site.com/my-page.html. It's a subtle difference, but the addresses just look a bit neater, a bit more professional, less late-1990s without a filename at the end.Cryogen, which I use to generate this site, can do this and does this by default. I had been overriding this behaviour because it wasn't working with Amazon's S3 service, but apparently I was just doing it wrong and Amazon's S3 should be able to handle URLs like this.Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-22-reasons-to-be-cheerful/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-22-reasons-to-be-cheerful/Reason #1: My immediate family (my kids, my sisters and my parents) have been using videoconferencing to keep in contact regularly. I think I've seen some of my kids more often because of this. A new tool we're using is Zoom. It allows several of us to have a virtual get-together. I use Zoom at work, which is where I first heard of it, but hadn't realised how useful the free version is. The free version limits meetings to 40 minutes, after which you just need to create another meeting. But if you know someone (i.e., me) with a paid account, you can have them host the meetings and go over that limit. It's easy enough to set up that I might even introduce my parents to the idea, gently.Reason #2: The food bank I belong to has had to curtail a lot of its activities, such as serving tea and coffee, but we're still open. We were quite worried about yesterday's session -- the first we've held since the near lock-down conditions have been imposed on London. We expected large, possibly aggressive crowds because the local supermarket shelves are empty. But that didn't happen at all. We were busy, unsurprisingly, but everyone was lovely and helpful. I'm going to miss sitting down and having good conversations with many of our visitors, but we can still exchange a few kind words and we're staying open.Sun, 22 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-19-getting-real/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-19-getting-real/If I had to put a word on what I'm feeling about all of this, it would be "grief." In a matter of a few short weeks, just about everything we were looking forward to is gone. Holidays, family get-togethers, celebrations -- all put on hold, as everything we once thought stable becomes uncertain. So many people will lose their jobs, their businesses, and even their lives.I see people going through the stages: The roads in my neighbourhood have been full of the hard-core deniers, off to work as normal. When the schools close next week, even those last hold-outs won't be able to ignore the pandemic any longer. The next stage is anger. We're beginning to see that already as people queue for hours for a bag of dried pasta. Bargaining? What is meant by "isolation", exactly? How far can I push that?Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-16-home-sweet-work/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-16-home-sweet-work/As of today, I've joined the hordes told to work from home, for an indefinite and probably lengthy period. It felt weird walking out of the office this evening. I may not see my colleagues in person again for weeks or months, people I've spent the bulk of my waking hours with for the last four years.We are living through an extraordinary, historic time. This compares with 9/11 in momentousness, but is unfolding in slow motion, as farce. Imagine if Coronavirus was as deadly as Ebola? We've proven ourselves unready. I hope we learn something.Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-12-well-that-was-easy/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-12-well-that-was-easy/As described in my previous post, I wanted to automate publishing to this site via Github Actions. As a Jenkins user at work, I expected this to take some time, requiring reading reams of documentation and writing fiddly scripts that don't work the first 56 times you try them.Thu, 12 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-10-creating-this-site/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-10-creating-this-site/I've had this domain for a few years, letting Amazon's Route 53 auto-renew it each year without actually doing anything with it. I've made a few starts, but hubris would always get the better of me. I'd start writing something overly complicated like, say, a single-page app in React (or whatever the framework du jour was at the time). I kept rediscovering the obvious: I'm too busy, and I'm rubbish at estimating what I can accomplish in my free time. I'd get 80 percent there, life would crowd in, the work would languish until some other shiny new technology caught my eye and I'd start again. A cycle of failure.When a mostly free Sunday afternoon presented itself last week, I remembered with some chagrin that I had promised one of the charities I work with a web site. I promised this back in 2017. You already know what happened with that (see "cycle of failure") and no web site has materialised. So, I really do need to get going on this, and I figured the best way to get started on the charity web site is to practice on one of my own.Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-08-intro/https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/2020-03-08-intro/This is my own web site. There's not much here yet. I'm hoping to document how I get this online.The title comes from a prayer I read once. In any given moment, there is one thing necessary for us to do that will brighten the world. We don't need to solve the bigger picture, we just need leave the world and the people around us a little better off, more compassionate, kinder.Sun, 08 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000