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 [...]
Making Apartment & Delayed_Job play nicely
Background Delayed Job is a popular gem for running background tasks on Rails applications. Apartment is another useful gem for switching Postgresql schemas in response to particular subdomains (it means that visiting ibm.myapp.com will automatically switch to the ‘ibm’ schema and select * from user will only return IBM users). What’s the problem? Getting these two [...]
Picks of the week: TP-Link, Parcel Motel, Staples Arc, WD Passport and Giottos Monopod
Sometimes it’s the things you don’t notice which are the most valuable. I realised this week that I haven’t rebooted our TP-Link WR740N broadband modem since we got it over 6mths ago. Now, obviously, that is how modems are supposed to work but over the past 8 years every single modem from Eircom and Vodafone [...]
Picks of the Week, Bumper-edition: Fast 50′s, How to win friends, O’Mahony’s, TDDium, moment.js
I’ve just moved this blog over to a new host so I held off on creating new posts until the move was complete. Here’s a selection of the things that have delighted me over the past 2 weeks and which I heartily recommend: Fast 50′s — the fast 50mm lens is a favourite among most [...]