Today I found unexpectedly good reading in Middlebury’s new 2012 Town Plan. The document is really well done and its quality highlights the vigorous engagement between the town, its citizenry, and businesses that makes this a fabulous place to live. While all 226 pages are worthwhile, I found Section 2.13 …
In 2005 I took a 3-week trip around Turkey with my parents and brother. Mid-way through this fabulous trip we met the affable Roland Pfitzenmaier, a German man touring the middle east on a Triumph motorcycle. While I am someone who usually travels with a full load of gear —…
One of the joys of participating in a CSA is exploring new vegetables and foods that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about or thought to eat. Last year we received husk cherries, red carrots, bok choy, several types of kale, purple potatoes, and at least 4 varieties of beets in…
The RiverLevels widget provides an easy way to monitor the amount of water flowing in your favorite streams and rivers right from your Dashboard. The RiverLevels widget is of particular interest to whitewater kayakers and canoeists. Once any United States Geological Survey (USGS) stream-gauge station is selected, it is automatically…
My current woodworking project is a Mission-style bookshelf that I designed to match the sofa table that I built last year. The bookshelf will sit below a window to the kitchen, so it is low and extra wide to fit that space. To support the weight of the books without…
Let’s say you are working on a large feature or update that requires a bunch of commits to complete. You finish up with your work and are then ready to merge it onto your master branch. For example, here is the history of my drupal repository after some work updating…
For the past few months I have been doing a lot of work on the phpCAS library, mostly to improve the community trunk of phpCAS so that I wouldn’t have to maintain our own custom fork with support for the CAS attribute format we use at Middlebury College. The phpCAS…
A hundred yards from the aptly-named Bittersweet Falls Road, the Beaver Brook cascades over a formation of marble and dolomite to create a beautiful 18 foot cascade. Above Bittersweet Falls, the Beaver Brook cuts a deep ravine through layers of black slate. The gorge can be difficult to traverse without…
Here is a quick command to generate a list of the top pages in the Apache web-server’s access log: gawk ‘{ print $7}’ /var/log/httpd/access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 20 Parts of the command explained: gawk ‘{ print $7}’ — return only the 7th…
Note: This is a cross-post of documentation I am writing about Lazy Sessions. Why use reverse-proxy caching? For most public-facing web applications, the significant majority of their traffic is anonymous, non-authenticated users. Even with a variety of internal data-cache mechanisms and other good optimizations, a large amount of code execution…
