Running Arch on the new Tornado instance (see this article) has been worth the journey so far. To get up and running quickly, I stuck to using Arch Linux as my server's distribution; but I ran into some problems with getting the kernel to work with my firewall.
View Full PostTornado VPS (formerly known as prgmr.com) is a small and not-very-often mentioned VPS provider coming from the West Coast. Their plans are inexpensive and the service has been reliable thus far. This site is actually hosted on one of their slices. Outages are rare and maintenance logs are sent out all of the time. I'm not certain how large their staff is, but it seems to be more than enough to keep the service up and running for the past 17 years.
View Full PostI failed the Google phone interview. Not happy about it at all, but of all the interviews I've encountered this is the first that has seriously stretched my limits.
View Full PostFamiliar with Bit.ly and tiny.cc? These two services came out years ago to help users create shorter links to alternate websites on the internet. Additionally, as those services grew in traffic, their owners figured out clever ways to track traffic coming into the sites by tracking the number of times links were clicked.
View Full PostI found a bug when scrolling through my portfolio (of all things). It was pretty easy to fix up, but it wasn't completely obvious how it got there. Read on to see how it might help you.
View Full PostA few months ago, I started writing a tool to help deal with chopping up data in CSV format. I came back to it yesterday out of a need for quickly uploading the data I needed for a basic shopping cart. The `awk | sed` incantations needed are well beyond the scope of my knowledge and patience. I'm also not a big user of Perl, so it would have taken me just as long to figure out something there, if ever. Short on time? The tool is called briggs and can be downloaded via Github at this link.
View Full PostI'm an Arch fan. It's always been there. It's easy to install, light on space and light on intrusion. I've come a long way since picking it up almost 8 years ago, but how would I go about doing it now? I probably wouldn't do a whole lot differently, but I'll run through a basic install.
View Full PostLucee (and other CFML engines) were based off of the idea that case-insensitivity is a good thing. At one point, this was probably true. For anyone who has worked with it recently though, one of CFML's biggest limitations seems to be dealing with JSON. It's Serialization functions return a string with uppercase keys regardless of what kind of data you feed it. For me, it caused quite a few annoying bugs when dealing with API responses in Javascript. Fortunately, a fix is pretty easy to come by--and if you are tasked with designing an API or SOAP resource with ColdFusion, you may find this interesting.
View Full PostFor the past five years, I've been working with SQL server in some way, shape or form. I've neve r had to administer it, but have always had to wrangle some data out of it. Fortunately, they've made it simple for us Linux guys to get going with it, and I have to say that I'm impressed with what they've done. Now, most open-source aficionados will probably want to use a product that i s completely open-source like MariaDB or Postgres. So why would one consider a Microsoft product in the first place?
View Full PostVMs suck. They're kind of a necessary element for the tools we're using, but let's be real. They suck. There are always lots of things to configure and lots of extra to do. Seeing as though I always have to do this, here's a quick guide to getting Debian set up on a system. We're going to use VirtualBox as a hypervisor. Your host operating system doesn't matter.
View Full PostIt's been about two weeks since I returned from San Francisco. I knew no one, but was able to meet a few people in my hostel as well as around town at coffee shops and whatnot. I even met a goodly fellow in the terminal on the plane ride home with some unusually helpful tips on how to get a new job in tech.
View Full PostUsing find on Linux can be extremely helpful. Using xargs is the way to make it happen. If you ever need to find a directory full of files with a specific criteria and just copy the matches, this combination makes that possible. The following would copy all *.c files to the fold/ directory.
View Full PostDo you ever need to extract strange packages to your Linux system? Occasionally, vendors will package scripts or binaries as a tarball and kindly omit a Makefile or other scripts to handle installation. While running an experiment with OSS a few months ago, I saw myself trying to figure out how this worked. So the next time you run into a binary package that is distributed this way, try this to make short work of it:
View Full PostIt's been about a year and a half since I started working at North Carolina Central University. They are a fairly medium sized HBCU located in the middle of Durham, North Carolina and have been around since 1909. This is my first position in higher education and a lot of things were much different than working at a regular Fortune 500 company. One thing, I did not see coming however, is using a language for server-side development that I had not touched before. TL;DR Lucee is not really such a bad solution for developing your web applications today, especially if you are skilled in Java or some other C-based language and do not want to deal with compilation.
View Full PostJust started playing with Laravel after a long time of not really touching PHP. To get it running wasn't as straight-forward as I hoped, so I've written a little set of instructions to help me remember how to get it going in the future. This little guide is only for Cygwin right now, as I have yet to do this on a real Unix box.
View Full PostI'm starting to get more questions on what I consider to be basic AJAX usage. So, to make sure that I'm explaining it correctly and so that others who aren't really familiar with it understand it, I've penned a small guide to getting it working in your own applications. To better illustrate it, I'll avoid jQuery or any of the other popular Javascript libraries and focus on what actually happens.
View Full PostUnix and Windows still don't get along very well. I don't know why this is in 2017, but it's very much a thing. From access control lists to setting up git and mercurial, moving sound programming tools to Windows is still absolutely too difficult.
View Full PostI love Vim, but admittedly, it's not a batteries included IDE. Depending on your point of view, this is a plus or a minus. With some ingenuity, Vim can be made to act like just about any other IDE worth its salt.
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