I’m not generally one to wade into the OS religious wars. I use all of the top 3 major OSes on a daily basis and all of them have benefits and drawbacks. However, these pictures comparing the system calls for a webpage request to Linux/Apache and Windows/IIS are quite eye opening. The opportunity for security […]
A great rant over at jbrains.info about Shotgun Programmers. These are the programmers who randomly shoot code at the compiler and hope it hits the problem they’re dealing with. Scary. From the post: As soon as something connects, whether or not it happens to actually be the pinata, you beat the hell out of it. […]
Apparently there is a giant security hole in Rails, which has been fixed. See here for further details on the issue. For me the usual ‘gem install rails’ didn’t work right away on Debian. I got an error that looked something like tbeck@whalespine:~$ sudo gem install rails Config file /home/tbeck/.gemrc does not exist Attempting local […]
There’s a slight issue with the init.d script for lighttpd on debian. If you try to reload or start the application, it doesn’t properly detach itself from the process. I discovered this when I stopped getting my web stats update email from logrotate. The reason was logrotate was never finishing because lighttpd was holding onto […]
Ever since I got the shuffle I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. I monitor about 10 or so podcasts in iTunes for interesting episodes but there is a core group of casts that I always make a point to listen to. Here they are for your listening pleasure. Drunk and Retired – This […]
In the world of Rails, Capistrano is a great tool to automate deployments. I started using it several weeks ago and it makes rolling out new versions of your web app very easy. Installation was as easy as doing ‘gem install capistrano’ and then doing a ‘cap -A’ in my application directory. The only glitch […]
Everyone knows that lighttpd is the popular choice for deploying
Over the weekend I took a Celeron 400, with a 2G drive, that I had laying around and installed Smoothwall on it. I’m not sure I really needed a dedicated firewall box at home, but I’m a geek and technical overkill is what we do. Anyway, there was really nothing to it. The installation was […]
Now that I’ve moved almost exclusively over to the Powerbook for my computing needs, I thought I’d start using iCal and see if I can get a little more organized. Of course Andrea wants to use iCal as well and we want to share our calendars. To do that you either need a .Mac account […]
For all two of you who read this blog, I’ve not been writing much lately due to several family visits in the last six weeks, a newly minted Masters degree (and all the celebrations that go along with that) in the house and just a general lack of stuff to write about. I’ve got several […]