Yesterday I spent a good amount of time writing and updating tests for a Ruby on Rails application. Besides being beneficial to the project…
Thanks to PHP, I found it actually quite easy to write a quick and dirty HTTP proxy. The one I came up with is definitely not a standards…
In the past, I have used this shell script to generate a passlist of trusted emails gathered from a user's "sent" Maildir. Why did I do this…
I read up about the "git rebase" command as well as the "git commit --amend ..." flag, and I'm so glad that I did. Read on to find out why…
I'm writing this post as a quick follow-up to my recent review of Google Apps for Business, adding an additional, external, link and a note…
I'm back working on a Rails application and since its Rails 2.x, I'm using ActiveRecord. That is of course fine, but most of my experience…
I've heard complaints about tools like nmap stating that they cause problems because they can be used to identify security holes, and thus…
"Data Tables" and "Schema" - these two Drupal modules are incredibly powerful! A co-worker told me that Drupal could access external data…
Ah, the term modular. It has many different meanings in many different contexts, but in general it suggests flexibility, interoperability…
I'm working with drupal6. Its impressive. But.... Interesting... I run Apache on port 88 behind an NGINX proxy, so I've updated /usr/share…
Over the past couple of months, I've been working with Joomla. Its been an interesting experience, because I've run the gamut of many…
One of my clients is experiencing performance issues with Outlook accessing Google's IMAP service. To fix this situation, I'm planning to…
I recently migrated one of my clients to the "Google Apps for Business" service, specifically the GMail IMAP service. Here is a quick review…
I love developing software. Its a passion. I engage without much encouragement or convincing, and as such, often pursue my vocation on my…
I was finally able to finalize the migration of one of my clients to Google's "Apps for Businesses" last night! When discussing the…
The other day I was about to integrate an RSS feed onto a web page using jQuery. To ease the way in which jQuery accessed the feed, I…
I'm very glad a co-worker told me about Microsoft Security Essentials! Why? Primarily so that the notifications center will stop telling me…
I am working on migrating a client's email services to Google's Apps for Business Service. We planned to change the MX record tonight, but…
I'm cleaning up some business notes and decided to move these here. REQUIREMENTS: Web Site Shopping cart Ecommerce PLAN: Figure out exactly…
While I have yet to interact with the Liquid Web folks myself, I am working with a firm that serves its clients through Liquid Web. They are…
Here are some git commands I use from the command line: Doh! Now I have to remove some stuff: Why don't I already ignore .svn? Nevertheless…
RoundCube is a webmail client (IMAP) written in PHP. Its very slick in that it leverages modern javascript and CSS capabilities to serve as…
This post is about Slicehost, but the subject matter is about electronic payments in general. I wish it were easier to make payments to a…
A bot at 89.248.172.6 keeps crawling my Movable Type tags, and I don't like it. My robots.txt file disallows automated access to mt-search…
My recent post about whether or not to use scaffolding has come home to roost! This only has to do with generating a controller, but it…
OpenVPN really is a terrific project. Its open source, its built on solid, tried and true components, and its very, very flexible. Heck, it…
Molly Guard just helped my out once again. Big thank you to the developers who created it. :-) What is Molly Guard, you ask? It is a guard…
What is XPS? I had never heard of XPS prior to today when I tried to print a document from Internet Explorer to a file, preferably PDF, but…
I've often wondered if RoR developers actually use scaffolding. I prefer to stay close to the evolution of systems. So I did a little…
I've been using screen for several years now, but I have to admit, not extensively. In the past, Vim has been so useful to me as a way to…
I'm using new video conversion options: Additional bonus, rotate a video 90 degrees with mencoder: The "veryfast" preset doesn't come on…
I'm trying to open a file from with a Ruby Rack extension I wrote called rack-xsl. If I try "File.open(...)", it fails with this error…
I've only used libvirt and virt-manager for about an hour an so far I have to so say it is totally awesome! Well finally I did run into…
Very good Rails and Merb, looks like you've rolled a winner with Rails 3! Especially when it comes with the modularity to use various…
Faced with a hosting environment and security setup not entirely compatible to the software development and deployment workflows I'm used to…
This is an annoying little bug in Vim when using the remote browsing capabilities of netrw. Its annoying because I have to press enter to…
I've created my share of bash scripts and they are all well and good, but now that I've learned about bash functions, I'm definitely going…
I just setup the awesome vim_config resources available on github for super-charging vim, only to discover that the arrow keys were busted…
Why does the rails command include a gem install utility? Links http://github.com/datamapper/dm-rails
I was wondering: A quick search turned up this page at StackOverflow: Why is running "sudo bundle install" a no-no? It does it for us! From…
Whoa! This is an interesting error. Turns out I initialized my rails environment with the 1.9 rubygems version of rails, which is at version…
While I'm absolutely enamored with Ruby these days, I have to admit that it took me awhile to open up to it. Why? Because I'm usually…
I'm finally putting lsyncd into production to synchronize web site mirrors. After I work out any kinks, I'll put it to use for some…
I'm interested in the possibility of creating LDIF files for use with TinyLDAP and CHIMAILMADMIN. This tutorial looks helpful: http://www…
I am a big fan of Sinatra, the adept development framework for building small and tight web applications. So recently when I was setting up…
I'm investigating Joomla and Drupal, as well as the differences between the two. First step: what does the Debian community think? Hmmm…
I tried out the Monkey web server last night to discover if it could easily run the PHP needed for RoundCube. Alas, the version of Monkey in…
When developing and running rails applications, it is common to use WEBrick, Thin, or Mongrel during development, and something like…
I was just doing a little work on Chimailmadmin focusing at the moment on the export of all email addresses to be accepted at an MX host…
Vista? Really? I've recently been working on a workstation that is running, GASP, Windows Vista. While the circumstances surrounding my use…
I'm helping one of my customers migrate their email to Google's "Apps for Business" service offering and decided to share my thoughts on the…
Planet Debian recently featured a post by Obey Arthur Liu about the Google Summer of Code. The section about the Debian GNU/Hurd port by…
I just posted this to StackOverflow in response to a question about PHP sockets: Check out nanoweb and nanoserv: http://nanoweb.si.kz/ http…
I just posted this in response to a question about XPaths and Javascript on Stackoverflow: Personally, I've used Sarissa and the Glyphix…
News that Rackspace has discontinued hosting the website of the church of the pastor who had planned to burn the Qu'ran is getting some…
Judging by the recent, nasty bug I ran into using Ruby 1.9.1 on Debian Squeeze and the recent announcement that Debian Squeeze is frozen, I…
Recently Used Documents in Ubuntu Gnome I don't like having my recently used documents get saved across Gnome. I prefer to set individual…
BankofAmerica.com customers in Massachusetts (myself included, though I am in Bethesda, MD) had a brief outage of the online banking service…
On a recent install of Lucid Lynx Ubuntu version 10.4, I was unable to copy and paste from jEdit to Gnome Terminal. I found this web page…
I installed ruby1.9.1 and rubygems1.9.1 on a Debian squeeze machine today and was surprised by an error on the first try at running gem1.9.…
Experimenting with Apache, mod_perl, Apache2::S3, and DAV I'm going to set this up today and see if this item on my "to-do" list works: To…
I've installed Ubuntu version 10.04 aka Lucid Lynx on my Lenovo G555 and I've just about got it setup how I want, though I definitely made…
This is one of the more complicated configurations I've set out to achieve with Varnish. Over the past couple of years using Varnish, I've…
Do you fear the idea of no one watching your every move? Why anyone would use Foursquare is beyond me. When I'm away from home, the only…
A client just called up with a question about their email service, specifically their Blackberry device was not receiving emails and they…
I used to be such an Apple fan, and believe it or not, it was the iPod and its eventually closed-nature which bothered me so much that I…
I'm getting this error when trying to use the libmemcache-client-ruby1.8 on Debian Squeeze. To troubleshoot, I'm updating ruby1.8. Ugh, now…
This is a blog post about an error I found in my /var/log/mail.log file reported by postfix: "SASL authentication failure: cannot connect to…
The latest version of pfSense is version 2.0 *beta* and it includes a downright bevy of kickass improvements and totally new functionality…
My network is behaving badly - connectivity is sporadic; it works fine for five minutes, then exhibits extreme latency, apparently only for…
Grrrr! I wish Gnash and YouTube played well together. This is what I get when I try to view a YouTube video with Gnash in Iceweasel on…
I recently setup a polling system for a client and when I was planning the design, I decided to use memcachedb thanks to the atomic…
Like this blogger and Facebook member, I recently noticed a new promotion on Facebook for some wacky "new" service - the Facebook Friend…
Plug computing is really coming of age, and in my opinion - that's very cool! What is a Plug Computer? A plug computer is often described as…
I tried out the beta on Debian Linux, and it ran fine. I'd also plan to try it on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. Its amazing that Firefox 3.…
I recently installed Ubuntu on a Lenovo G555 because I was having problems with the Squeeze network install CD (the laptop's ethernet cable…
I wish I'd thought of this setup earlier - its a sweet combo! I've definitely used IPSec between linux and pfSense, but for single external…
This error was greeting me when I'd try to ssh. Increasing the verbosity sheds some light: I did this as root: Which helped a little, but…
Myon wrote another blog post about cool unix features, this time about flock: Cool unix features: flock This is definitely of interest to me…
I'm reviewing my DNS hosting configurations. Until recently, I'd used mostly NSD3 servers, plus one BIND9 server. Then I started reading…
Its simple enough: For browsers without CSS3 support: I setup a couple of classes with trans + "the level of opacity". Also, I recently…
I've recently started to test the use of MaxMind's GeoLocation database to have BIND9 respond differently based on the source or the DNS…
I was again bit by this error which appears to be caused by Norton security software. Background I ran into this error once before when a…
For some time I've used mod_spamhaus to block comment spam, similar to how I deflect email spam. I'm OK with this because it only blocks…
I'm working on a server which crashed tonight, and while its probably a lost cause (its several hundred miles away), I have a tough time…
Some people can't stand HTML tables. Certainly, they are misused from time to time - like the times I have used them for positioning and…
I'm finally writing a post about converting a Subversion repository to Git. I first learned about this from Paul Dowman's blog. Paul…
I have no idea why this bug fix works, but it does. When I run tidy_ffi via a Unicorn, a Sinatra app, and Rack-XSLView manually, it works…
There are some HTTP clients accessing my web servers with strange request patterns. They include a header stating that they are a Googlebot…
I just ran into an error trying to use SquirrelMail behind a Varnish proxy because apparently SquirrelMail was setting too many duplicate…
I'm setting up backup procedures for a client to store weekly backups of their email on Amazon's S3 service. The IMAP directories use about…
Techblogging puts it well: Facebook and privacy
I got this error today when trying to run a Sinatra web application. Not sure what the root of the problem is, but I found a workaround: For…
Earlier this week I can across a bug like none I'd ever seen before. The bug is causing tidy_ffi to fail in its efforts to tidify a string…
I have a lot of appreciation for libTidy - its an awesome tool for avoiding issues when dealing with foreign HTML and trying to transform it…
Marco wrote a useful post yesterday about some less widely known features of iproute. I didn't know about the dummy interface: but I've…
I'm making some modifications to a fork of a gem which I offers the functionality I'm looking for but lacks configuration capabilities I…
There is a very nice side effect to running a web server process from a shell as one's own user id - it inherits the ability to use private…
I'm porting Chimailmadmin, an email management tool I've been working on for a couple of years, to Sinatra. Actually I'm working on porting…
In my humble opinion, jQuery is more than a javascript library because it has a very specific linguistic style. Needless to say - I'm a big…
I forked another ruby library today: gd2-ffij, which happens to be a fork of a fork of sorts. It provides bindings to the gd2 library (think…
Its wonderful! The open source chromium-browser is now available on Debian. Its been available on Ubuntu for awhile, and its not too earth…
I just received an email from one of the virtual servers I manage - it was having trouble resolving a domain name. Its hosted by Linode and…
Something I updated today or recently caused nm-applet to no longer work. It was disappearing from my panel, but was apparently trying to…
Like Bart Simpson must write on the blackboard, I have to keep repeating myself: I will write unit tests I will write unit tests I will…
Simple Defects, the distributed issue tracking system written in Perl with hooks into Git, has been on my radar screen for awhile. I've…
One of my clients travels quite often, and while he's on the road, his internet connection is much slower than when he is at the office. He…
I'm totally engrossed with Ruby these days, so I'm thinking about switching to Ruby instead of PHP. I'll probably use Sinatra as the…
Using Ruby to Convert a Mediawiki to Ikiwiki + Git After doing it once manually and looking at three more wikis to convert, I decided to…
This was an interesting error to debug! It comes from a Sinatra app traceback, but the full traceback wasn't much help, here's a little bit…
Ruby has been a joy for me to learn and that positive experience has led me to try certain tasks I had previously hesitated to undertake…
Cloud computing is one of the hyped up concepts of recent years which I'm really getting into, and even wasn't too much of a skeptic when it…
I'm taking a moment to study up on how to build tests with Ruby. I'm taking a step back and starting with some very simple examples, to make…
My darling mother called me last week for some technical support, so of course I put everything on my desk aside to help her. She was…
I was just reading up some more about Rake when I realized how many awesome tools there are to write Ruby software with. I decided I should…
I feel more empowered when using Ruby than almost any other tool I've ever used. Besides how awesome that is unto itself, my experience…
Based on my personal preferences, I use Microsoft Windows as little as possible. Due to the fact that Netflix is cheaper than cable where I…
I'm trying to login to my phpldapadmin installation but I'm getting these errors: and I'm uninstalling it and reinstalling it... that of…
I hadn't run memtest in ages, but I did so yesterday: The test did not find any errors with the RAM, but I still replaced it as the machine…
One thing I love about Perl is the concept of TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it). This is true for most languages, but I think…
I've just send a question to the Sinatra mailing list: Would it be possible to sub-class or mixin an app designed at the top level of the…
I've heard that they are, but I'm not convinced, especially if you have a class that get instantiated from a base module. I think I'm saying…
First off, I shouldn't complain. I've been a fan of the Ruby-powered sinatra web application development library for some time, and over…
Fun With Ruby Procs! If I understand correctly, procs are somewhat similar to anonymous, or lambda functions, in that they can be passed as…
I know. The title of this post is vague. I'm grumpy because "gem push" to rubygems.org is not working for me. If I try this: I get an…
I love the concepts behind object oriented programming, and in my experience Ruby is taking it to another level! I'm reading up on object…
Git continues to amaze me. Yesterday I learned about "tracked branches", sometimes also referred to as tracked remote branches. I've been…
The Sinatra configuration capacity has always mystified me, but I think I've found the code I need to review to understand how its done…
In my humble opinion, Ruby is the perfect language for discussing classes, instances, and modules because its object orientation is so clean…
This seemed like a really useful little command, but I only found the chance to try it yesterday. What does "git stash" do? In my…
I just tried using the Ruby Tidy gem, the one hosted at Ruby Forge. Alas, its not compatible with Ruby 1.9.1: Thankfully, there is another…
I'm re-contemplating my comprehension of error handling in computer programming. Like testing, error management is sometimes relegated to a…
I setup a few wikis with Ikiwiki before I became zealous about Git and used Subversion instead. I'll likely convert them over to git at some…
This is an example task that shows how awesome git is. What exactly was I trying to do? I had a few ikiwiki repositories in subversion, and…
I still get this error when using Git from cygwin from time to time: I'm not sure what causes it, I think it has something to do with ssh…
This is an awesome gem, though I ran into many errors when I first started to try it out. Here's the code I was trying: I first had trouble…
I use Vlad to deploy my web applications that use git as their code management system, so I haven't used submodules much. Today I decided to…
I've grown quite tired of having to clear out useless cookies from my browser. They are quite a pain in my opinion. I visit many websites…
In addition to Docunext, I also work on a website called Informed Banking. Like Docunext, it also has a blog and a wiki, but it also has a…
Last night I imported a large, but not outrageously large, dataset into a MongoDB database. The complication might have been the structure…
I should probably post this in the Informed Licensing blog, but this one is about Facebook, so its OK. I read recently that Facebook was…
Now that I've actually used both Redis and MongoDB a little, I have to say I really like them both a lot. In tandem with using these two, I…
I'm installing the Ruby Xapian gem, an interface to the Xapian indexing system: Nope, that didn't work: This helped: Setup Xapian and Ruby…
This probably won't make much sense out of context, but I wanted to make note of this anyway. I started work on a little blog engine to…
After reviewing a bunch of "NoSQL" style document-based / key-value storage systems, I decided to move forward with four of them and install…
I'm using jEdit to flatten some CSS files. I search for this: (;|{)\n and replace with this: $1 (note the extra space after the $…
Looks like I'm going to forage ahead in my research into using mongodb with the DataMapper mongo adapter from solnic, if only for the reason…
In researching Tokyo Tyrant, these ruby gems caught my attention: http://github.com/jmettraux/rufus-tokyo http://github.com/igrigorik/tokyo…
Redis and Tokyo Tyrant are the last servers I'm trying out as I explore document-based storage systems, aka NoSQL. Redis I had tried Redis…
These rubygems look very cool: http://github.com/solnic/dm-mongo-adapter - MongoDB adapter for datamapper, supports serialization! http…
I like fixing things, so tracking down memory leaks and patching them is fun for me. In the past I've done this using GTop in Aortica (a…
After posting Redis, MemcacheDB, or CouchDB?, I did some work with MemcacheDB. The convenience was really cool, but the limitations became…
I'm working on a "showcase" sinatra application: http://github.com/docunext/notasinatraapp So far I'm experimenting with caching gems: Rack…
Hmmmm. Is this it? I seem to be having a ton of problems with segmentation faults lately. What gives? Updating rcov seems to have helped a…
Foreward I think these are features new to jQuery 1.4, but I'm certain they are new to me. In the past, I've often wondered the best way to…
I just found out about Pony, a Ruby gem for sending emails. The cool thing about Pony is how simple it is. Good work, people! I'm planning…
Sketch99.com is now using the Google Javascript API for loading jQuery. I don't see any astounding advantages from using it yet, but I was…
I'm having a great time exploring lots of cool Ruby stuff and now I'm eager to get into the document-centric (non SQL) databases that are…
Working with Ruby 1.9.1 and Sinatra 1.0a has been an awesome experience. I've learned a lot, and was ultimately successful in getting the…
I keep harping on this, but I love the fact that when I approach a task with Sinatra the slate is totally blank. Yes, there are some ready…
No, its not released yet, but I'm digging in with Sinatra Ruby and since its a big, compatibility-breaking release, I want to be ready…
I just updated to Iceweasel 3.5.6, and based on the start page, I decided to do an Iceweasel logo sketch:
The hippo says welcome to CYGWIN. CYGWIN is a port of basic UNIX utilities to Windows, allowing a wide array of UNIX software to run on it…
I found out my account with Linode was past due today. How did I notice? The services I have setup on the virtual server I rent from them…
Whoa - this is kind of odd. I was just perusing recent blog posts I made, saw the one about Github being down, and remembered I wanted to do…
I found this post very helpful: easily fetching upstream changes @ gitready.com In a nutshell (for my own reference): Git is really…
22:30PM I've come to use Github.com on a daily basis in a lot of what I've been working on. Now? Their website and services have been down…
I'm digging Sinatra Helpers lately. What about a Configuration helper? More than options (aka set :symbolname, value), although I'm getting…
I might have found a bug in Ruby's XSLT bindings:
I've been using Rake a lot lately, and today I had a nice "epiphany" about automation - that its not about just setting up a bunch of tasks…
I'm getting these bizarre segmentation faults while running spec tests on a sub-classed Sinatra app, docunext-forked-nesta.
I'm hacking up my forked version of Nesta and right now I'm wrestling with YAML. In particular, I've never seen this syntax: I get the idea…
Markdown is a simplified text formatting syntax. There are many like it, but it appears to be the one gaining the most traction. The…
Apple has publicly disclosed its new tablet: What does it do? What I Don't Like About it Already $499 base price is too steep All…
I value my privacy and I like staying connected with my friends and family. In this regard, I find Facebook (and the internet in general) to…
Apple has made some absolutely incredible, and successful, products: the ipod, the iphone, and of course their desktop computers. Some…
NewBay Media LLC is in my opinion a clear and abusive spammer. I believe they obtained my email address from the John Lennon Songwriting…
I ran out of time while writing the blog post titled "What's Up CouchDB, Ledger, XML, BNF, Ragel, and Git?", so I had to end it before I got…
I'm tinkering with a new datamodel for Regdel which relies heavily upon datamapper's single-table inheritance capabilities. However, I'm not…
This one is very simple: http://www.firewallmaker.com/ Its based on an idea I setup at Docunext way back for creating firewall rule sets…
As a result of the Outlook to PST migration I posted about recently, the Outlook IMAP bug reared its ugly head. IMAP is great for a number…
Check out this post by Russell Coker about a "hybrid" computer / laptop: The Lenovo U1 Hybrid - an example of how Proprietary OSs Suck At…
Regular Docunext readers will likely know how much I like boring old technologies. Stuff like static files, 3Com 3c509 network cards, IDE…