This is a pretty familiar concept to (good) software developers but perhaps not to everyone. A bad software developer will look at a piece of code, think it is inefficient in someway, and procede to “fix” it. But without actually measuring the performance you have no idea whether the performance really was unacceptable and by [...]
Geeking out about Water (Containers)
I’m a freak: a computer programmer that doesn’t drink coffee. I don’t drink tea either. Or hot chocolate (unless I’ve just been swimming with dolphins in the seas off New Zealand and hypothermia is a possible concern). I like ice cold drinks: Fruit juice, orange squash, Coke or 7UP, and mostly just water. One of [...]
It’s the money, stupid!
I just read this daft “postmortem” about FormSpring (a social ask-me-anything Q&A site which is shutting down after $14m of funding but it had “been challenging to sustain the resources needed to keep the lights on.“). Ok, I lie. I gave up reading and just did a Ctrl-F for the phrases “profit”, “revenue”, “business model”, [...]
Startup Pubbish-ness
I might be about to commit professional hari-kiri here but I wanted to push back on all the startup love I’ve been hearing. I attended the Cork Pub Summit event yesterday evening, organised like a local mini-Web Summit to provide a place the tech community to meet and local startups to pitch their ideas. It [...]
Configuring Guard notifications with Vagrant
One problem when running everything in a headless Vagrant instance is that you lose the ability to see Guard Rspec notifications. Actually, you don’t lose it but it’s not immediately obvious how to configure Guard. Since Guard is running inside Vagrant, it can’t display the Growl notifications on the guest operating system. However, you can [...]
Preventing the stupid mistakes, like committing focus:true
I frequently use focus: true in my specs when I’m working in a particular area of the code. I also frequently forget to remove this tag and subsequently commit the spec to Git, resulting in most of the test suite not running. Duh! “Removing focus:true” is my most frequent commit message :-/ The solution is [...]
How to backup a Linux server with Tarsnap
I picked up a dedicated server just before Christmas from OVH. It’s a nice little ‘Kimsufi’ 4GB Atom server which is more than enough for a couple of WordPress blogs and some personal projects. As it’s a bare-bones dedicated server I really want a decent backup service to make sure I don’t lose 11years of [...]
Curing the SAD
About 2.5weeks ago I was ridiculously sleepy in the middle of the day, couldn’t think and was basically wiped out. It was like having the flu only without the fever or any actual sickness. I eventually realised that a lot of the symptoms pointed to Seasonal Affected Disorder. Yes folks, I haz the sad. After [...]
Picks of the week: Papertrail, rack-ssl-enforcer, WP-Markdown and Marked
I recently set up PaperTrail on our production server and it’s extremely useful. It basically uploads the log files you configure, aggregates them and let’s you search them. That’s useful but what’s blow-me-away amazing is setting up saved searches and alerts. Now I can easily be notified when a particular user logs it, or when [...]
Securing your web application with Nginx, Rails 3 and Namecheap SSL certs
Securing your web application with an SSL certificate is the least your users will expect you to do. Once upon a time, HTTPS sites were rare and even then, only the “private” parts beyond a login dialog were encrypted. Those times died with Netscape and they aren’t coming back. Here I’ll show you how to [...]