Which Oar Best Rows The Boat
Ted Dzuiba wrote a post that boiled down to identifying his own “language bigotry” as a step along the way to software engineering “Mastery”. He’s absolutely correct about introspecting why one chooses...
View ArticleECDHE vs DHE In The New World Order
There are a lot of things we now know, and a lot of things we believe to be true, given the recent and ongoing spate of revelations by whistle-blower Snowden. One of the things we know, is that the...
View ArticleAWS EC2 Reserved Instance Auditing
If you’re running instances atop AWS, you’re probably at least bleeding money. If you don’t know what reserved instances are and/or aren’t using them, you are hemorrhaging money. One of the worst parts...
View ArticleLosing Aaron
Boston Magazine has published a very powerful interview with Bob Swartz, father of Aaron Swartz, nearing the anniversary of his death. I cried.
View ArticleBuilding Mapserver 6.4 and Mapcache 1.2 on Amazon Linux
More for me than anything else, but building and installing Mapserver and its cache from source can be a pain. echo "/usr/local/lib" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/xmaps.conf yum install libpng-devel...
View ArticleA[nother] Call To Arms
Bruce Schneier’s latest essay, essentially Battle For The Internet, is another well-defined look at the past, present, and possible futures given the current climate of pervasive government...
View ArticleAdobe’s Creative Cloud Breached At Least Twice
So The Verge is reporting Adobe’s “Everything-Changing” “Creative Cloud” has been breached a couple times, dishing out all sorts of nice data about a few million users to the attackers. They fall back...
View ArticleCopyFS Update
Years ago I added features to CopyFS 1.0, then 1.0.1 came out and I never bothered to forward-port my changes. After spending some time moving, merging, rebasing, etc. in git this morning, CopyFS...
View ArticleRuby Hash Extensions
As I mentioned before, one of the nice things about Ruby is its malleability. Here are a couple extensions to the Ruby Hash object: class ::Hash def random return self.keys[rand(self.size)] end def...
View ArticleRuby 2 From Source on CentOS 6.4
Ruby‘s autoconf doesn’t alert you to the fact that your system doesn’t have everything it could use. It’ll blindly clear you even though, for example, nothing crypto-related will work. On a fresh...
View ArticleOut Of The Clouds
Dear Everyone: You’re understandably upset that some of the world’s governments have been and will continue to spy on you. This is your fault. You kept shipping your data to “the cloud”. You kept...
View ArticleWhich Oar Best Rows The Boat
Ted Dzuiba wrote a post that boiled down to identifying his own “language bigotry” as a step along the way to software engineering “Mastery”. He’s absolutely correct about introspecting why one chooses...
View ArticleRuby String.each
While I find Ruby to be a half-assed attempt at an object-oriented Perl, I have been using it quite a bit lately to stay consistent with a lot of existing intellectual property. One of the more...
View ArticleMySQL com_select Nugget
The com_select counter isn’t a raw count of how many SELECT operations the server has performed, but rather the number of SELECT operations that did not get returned from the query cache. To see the...
View ArticleSPDY for Apache
Mod_SPDY for Apache is out. If you don’t know what SPDY is, I’d recommend some light reading … or heavy reading if you’re that kind of person.
View ArticleNConf 1.3.0 Pass-through HTTPD Auth
If you’d like to use NConf, but want your HTTPD, e.g. Apache, to do the auth for it, apply the below patch to set the NConf user to the currently authenticated user. --- include/head.php.orig...
View Articlefind -delete
If I hear one more person recommend using a pipe to xargs or -exec rm -f {} to the question “how can I make ‘find’ delete the files it finds?” I’m going to scream. It’s really simple: find /wherever...
View ArticleVideo Captcha Prior Art
Nucaptcha claims to have invented video captchas. They didn’t. Neither did I, proabably, but I have talked about them publicly a few times, including this blog post from 2009.
View ArticleCaching Functions In Perl
Synopsis There are occasions, where you write a function that takes some parameters and outputs consistentish data. Example: sub add { my($first,$second)=@_; return $first + $second; } If you call...
View ArticleSorting Strings Ending In Numbers In Perl
Synopsis I deal with a lot of names that look like “somedumbserver2″ and “somedumbserver15″. Using Perl’s default sort, “somedumbserver2″ comes before “somedumbserver15″ because the character “2″ is...
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