Whisky reviews I’ve been enjoying whisky lately and thought I’d try my hand at describing the flavours of a whisky in a classic review format. My intent being to: Describe a whisky in a way that reflects its taste Using as little jargon as possible Build my whisky flavour vocabulary Build my own ability to notice the subleties of a whisky. Review approach My initial approach is to use a simplified version of Jim Murray’s Approach ( Nose , Taste , Finish , and Balance ) as detailed in his Whisky Bible. My approach being to only consided Nose , Taste , and Finish , with the intent being to incorporate Balance over time and in subsequent reviews. ...

One of the unique features of Amazon Lightsail is its browser-based SSH client, which makes it very simple to get a remote ssh connection to our server. This browser-based client has been serving me very well. However there is an undesirable aspect, which is that the client will time-out if not used for a few minutes. This was enough of a push for me to install a proper terminal. Which has taken the form of installing Ubuntu (a distribution of GNU/Linux) onto my laptop and utilising the default terminal. ...

Now that the blog is set up and running, lets have a look at some deeper / more advanced configurations. We’ll cover: Automated software updates Website address redirections Advanced e-mail sending Server-side SSL settings Automatic updates Since we’re not needing to connect to the back-end of the server in normal usage of the blog, it’s a good idea to configure automatic updates. Security It’s only a matter of time until a security flaw is found and then patched. By installing security updates as soon as they’re available we’ll be staying as secure as possible from all future flaws. ...

Now that my, new, Lightsail server is up and running, it’s time to put it to good use, by installing the Ghost publishing (blogging) platform. This guide is adapted from the Ghost documentation. For simplicity Ghost has only one recommended stack (server configuration), which I’ve chosen to implement: Ubuntu long term support (LTS) 16.04LTS or 18.04LTS (as at 2018) as the operating system MySQL as the database nginx (minimum version 1.9.5 for SSL) as the webserver systemd Node (Recommended version installed via NodeSource) for server-side scripting A server with at least 1GiB memory (RAM + swap) A (non-root) user for running Ghost command line interface (CLI) commands a (non-root) user: [user] Which we’ll use to run all our commands. ...

Since my initial blog-server setup, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have introduced a simple, low cost server option through Lightsail. Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS — compute, storage, and networking — for a low, predictable price. The lowest-cost Lightsail option is $USD3.50/month and cheaper than my current EC2 setup (t2.micro) which is $0.0116/hour or ~$8.352/month. Although the Lightsail option has half the memory (0.5GiB vs. 1.0GiB). So given that Lightsail is designed to be simpler to setup and use, and is cheaper, I thought I’d use it as the base for the transition to a ghost blog. It’s not certain, but the ghost documentation looks like a 0.5GiB will be enough for the server (assuming this blog doesn’t become a run-away success). ...

So it’s been a while since I’ve done any blogging… I have also recently come across ghost, which brands itself as: “…a proud non-profit organisation building open source technology for journalism " This concept aligns to my own personal values by being simple and focused. It also matches nicely with what I’m trying to achieve with this blog, which is to write blog posts. The icing on the cake is a dedicated android-based editing and publishing app that enables blog post writing on the go. ...

Zero to One, is one of the most thought provoking books I’ve read in a while. Thought provoking in that it challenges and structures entrepreneurial activities. Alternatively this book is about the lies people tell. ‘Zero to one’ begins a single, simple, question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Generally an easy answer to this question is also a bad answer. Bad because: they are not important, not a truth, or already agreed by lots of people. ...

tl;dr Adapting to technical change is the best strategy, but how should structural unemployment be tackled, and will there continue to be enough new jobs? “Technical change and employment”, was published in 1979 and still bears strong resemblance to technical change and employment discussions today, albeit for rather different technical changes. At the time of writing the advent of electronics was a key driver of discussion, whereas the coming of artificial intelligence and machine learning are key drivers of today. ...

tl;dr A book detailing the architecture of data-based graphics For my first review I wanted to start with one of my favourite books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. This book covers, with excellent detail, the world of ‘graphs’ in particular graphs that deal with numerical (quantitative) information, hence the name. Tufte argues that a well designed and presented visualisation or graphical display of information delivers far more value than a table of values would or could ever produce. For example Anscombe’s quartet is a set of 4 datasets with nearly identical descriptive/summary statistics but which are very clearly widely different when visualised (mean, variance, linear regression equation, and correlation co-efficient are identical to 2 decimal places) ...

A quick guide on installing WordPress on an Ubuntu server. Begin by downloading the latest WordPress image to the home directory. $ cd ~ $ wget -c http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz Extract the image $ tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz Copy the extracted files to the root website folder $ sudo rsync -av wordpress/* /var/www/html/ Setup permissions $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/ $ sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/ Setup the default database for the WordPress server to use ...