When Arithmetic Was Not Enough for News Clustering
An early SoCalNomad clustering experiment exposed the need for multi-story article membership and a better separation between deterministic code and semantic judgment.
srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
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The ISPConfig Database Prefix That Broke My WordPress Import
A WordPress database import failed because I confused application-friendly names with ISPConfig’s actual multi-tenant database identities.
Building a Local WordPress Workshop with Docker
How I built a safer local WordPress workshop with Docker, MariaDB, real production content, and a bind-mounted child theme.
The Calendar Became The Performance Test
I started the calendar as an event-discovery feature. It became a test of whether the whole platform could behave like a production system. An entertainment site can publish articles all day and still fail readers if they cannot find something to do. The calendar was the practical interface: dates, venues, artists, ticket links, and enough … Read more
Security Hardening A Small PHP Portal
Small internal tools have a way of becoming production tools before anyone admits it. That is dangerous because the assumptions are different. A development tool can tolerate rough edges. A production portal that handles images, campaign links, customer-facing email HTML, and authenticated workflows cannot. The BDC security audit forced me to admit that transition had … Read more
Two VMs And A Fiber Line
The production architecture I am proudest of was not large. It was disciplined. SoCalNomad ran from a home Proxmox environment on a residential fiber connection with a business account. The public side looked like an ordinary HTTPS site. Behind it was a small two-VM architecture that separated page serving from automation and data processing. That … Read more
The Image Tool That Became Shared Infrastructure
I built the BDC image tool as a practical helper. Email campaigns needed images in predictable sizes. Vehicle photos, logos, footers, banners, and promotional graphics all had to fit templates. Manually resizing and converting assets over and over was wasted effort. So the tool handled the repetitive work: Upload an image. Resize it. Convert it … Read more
Docker DNS And The First Black Box Lesson
One of the earliest SoCalNomad automation failures looked like an AI problem. It was not. The workflow was supposed to let n8n call a local LLM service running in another Docker container. The model was up. n8n was up. Both containers were attached to the same Docker network. The HTTP request node looked reasonable. The … Read more
The First Newsroom Was A Filter
The first serious SoCalNomad automation problem was not writing articles. It was deciding what did not deserve to become one. The early ambition was obvious enough: collect Southern California entertainment stories from many sources, filter them, synthesize useful coverage, and publish through WordPress. The trap was also obvious once I looked at the data. Entertainment … Read more
SoCalNomad Was Never Just a Website
SoCalNomad started with a modest public premise: Southern California entertainment, events, photography, and local culture. The engineering premise was less modest. I was not trying to stand up a brochure site. I was trying to build a small media platform that could collect event information, publish original and automated coverage, organize artists and venues, serve … Read more