Tips, software, instructions, and thoughts on all things tech.
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…
For the past 6 months our Web Application Development work-group has been Bugzilla as our issue tracker with quite a bit of success. While it has its warts, Bugzilla seems like a pretty decent issue-tracking system and is flexible enough to fit into a variety of different work-flows. One very…
As members of the under-30 club, Sarah and I have come into adulthood in the age of mobile phones. I got my first cell phone right after college and Sarah has had hers since she was 14; neither of us has ever had a land-line of our own. While the…
One of the requirements in the migration of our web sites to Drupal is that we create a robust and redundant platform that can stay running or degrade gracefully when hardware or software problems inevitably arise. While our sites get heavy use from our communities and the public, our traffic…
I have recently reworked by computer backup strategy to ensure a high degree of reliability by backing my Mac laptop to two drives in two locations using Time Machine. These backups are encrypted as well to allow me to store them in non-ultra-secure locations while not increasing my exposure to…
A few days ago we noticed that our internet connection seemed to be grinding to a halt. We’ve been on the same DSL plan for years without problems until Fairpoint bought out our service area from Verizon. I despise Verizon and just about all monopolistic telecoms and cable companies, but…
I’ve decided to learn a few new programming languages and web frameworks over the next year or so to broaden my experience and just to have fun. I figured that I’d start with Ruby and its Rails framework. Python (and its Django framework) are also at the top of my…
One of the great things about the Git version-control system is the ability to incrementally commit your changes on a private branch to keep a step-by-step record of your thought and writing process on a fix or a feature, and then merge the completed work onto your main [or public]…
I have been using Twitter as a log of my daily doings and wished to export my time-line for reformatting into a calender format. Unfortunately TweetDumpr just retrieves the list of Tweets using a single fetch request which is limited by the Twitter API to a maximum of 200 Tweets….
With the latest OS X Leopard update (10.5.2) Apple finally added an option to turn off menu bar translucency. I much prefer an opaque menu bar as I find it much more legible. There is only one problem with this fix: Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided to hide this…
