February 2011
1 post
Catching up on some reading
Today’s list
Michael Lewis on Ireland
Recommendation Systems
Egypt Military and the Economy
Jimmy Carter
September 2010
2 posts
Port Knocking
http://www.portknocking.org/
Never seen this done before.
Ruby rescue learnings
Learned that rescue in Ruby does not rescue LoadErrors. You need to explicitly rescue anything that is not a subclass of StandardError
More details at http://whynotwiki.com/Ruby_/_Exception_handling
August 2010
10 posts
Trying out Cappuccino
Built out a demo Cappuccino application. Don’t like the Objective-J syntax much, but very cool GUI tools that may be very helpful for my current project.
Renoir and Arthritis
Went to the Late Renoir exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art today. Was amazed at how arthritis crippled his hands and yet he was still able to persevere and still make beautiful things. Very motivating.
4 tags
Rails / MySQL / Concurrency
Learned a lot about Rails, MySQL and concurrency. Yehuda wrote a great post on threads that was very helpful interesting. Wound up prototyping with MySqlPlus and MySQL2. I now understand why Merb was created and wished my application was based on it rather than Rails. I am not looking forward to the work that it will take to migrate to Rails 3.
if statements do not introduce scope in Ruby.
http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/ruby19.html#7
I had no idea.
1 tag
The Missing Rule of Productivity
In my browsing travels today, I stumbled upon the Rules of Productivity. Really interesting presentation and many good rules of thumb. But one thing I believe they missed.
One of the key conclusions of the presentation is that working > 40 hrs per week will result in a short performance boost followed by a productivity drag. So you should always try to have your teams work 40 hour weeks,...
The Great Derangement and what I learned about...
Last night/this morning read The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi. Taibbi is one of my favorite writers, especially when he is revealing the relationship between corporate influence buyers and politicians. What I would recommend reading in the book are his interludes on how laws actually get made (hint, not like this, which of course inspired this fantastic Simpsons clip). Learning about how...
Ike and the Interstate Highway System
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s experience as a member of the first 1919 Transcontinental Convoy on the Lincoln Highway and his appreciation for the German Autobahn system he gained during World War II led him to his initiate support for the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 and the establishment of the Interstate Highway System.
From...
MySQLReport taught me much about MySQL
We are having some bizarre locking problem in our application. To try and debug it, I used mysqlreport. If you are using MySQL, I really recommend reading the user guide even if you never use the tool. I learned a bunch about the stats that are coming out of MySQL and how to tell whether your app is well tuned.
The good news was that our app does not seem to be locking at the DB level. So...
How to setup Amazon S3 to be your Rails asset host...
We are using EngineYard Cloud for hosting PackLate.com. We wanted to set up an asset host for static content. This asset host needed to support both HTTP and HTTPS and we wanted to use a different, cookie-free domain. Unfortunately, the EC2 instances that EngineYard Cloud runs on only can have 1 public IP address and we are not using wildcard SSL certificates.
So we could either set up a whole...
HTTPS and IP Addresses
Every IP address can really only support 1 SSL certificate really. And EC2 servers may only have 1 public IP address. So if you want to have 2 non-wildcard SSL certs for your site, you need 2 EC2 instances.