Category Archives: General
Shifting my own bits
Refactoring plays an important role in the software development lifecycle — an opportunity to incorporate lessons learned, improve code quality, and lay down a solid framework going forward. The entropy decay of code over time that necessitates refactoring plays a role in other places as well, such as our minds. We can apply the principles of science and engineering to ourselves, allowing us to control who we are with rigorous analysis and study. This rather long essay won’t be appealing … Continue reading
Enable WordPress Automatic Updates on a Debian Server
I attempted to get WordPress to update plugins automatically on my Debian server today, and found it a bit less than trivial due to the number of configuration gotchas. Assuming you’re running a Debian server (I have 6.0 Squeeze), on which WordPress is installed in /var/www/site/public_html: 1) Install required packages. I used vsftpd. sudo apt-get install vsftpd openssl 2) Configure vsftpd. I set the following options in /etc/vsftpd.conf # Enable only local users, no anonymous anonymous_enable=NO local_enable=YES write_enable=YES local_umask=022 # … Continue reading
Correcting Message Order with Courier
Recently I moved some local messages from my machine (previously downloaded with pop3) onto the server so I could use imap. I used Mail.app on Mac OS X 10.5.8 to do this. For some reason, the messages in this example were uploaded in a way that caused them to be loaded in the wrong order on iOS 5.0.1. Since I run the mailserver myself, I took a look at the message files to see if I could deduce the cause … Continue reading
Google Authenticator Backup Woes
Google Authenticator doesn’t backup on iOS; before erasing your old device, make sure to re-configure Google Authenticator on your new one. Continue reading
Quicksilver Plugins
As the Quicksilver site seems to be down right as everyone is reinstalling for Leopard, I’ve packaged the plugins I have into a zip available here. Quicksilver itself is available here. To install, just put the PlugIns folder in your Library/Application Support/Quicksilver folder or double click the plugins. [Update] Zon Wakest was nice enough to upload additional plugins. Thanks Zon! These are now added into my archive and the combined list is below. If you got the old archive, download … Continue reading
It’s all about the bits
So the idea here is to talk about programming, all the way down to the nitty-gritty: the bits we all know and love. In particular, I intend to focus on lower-level topics, such as what a piece of code actually does, rather than architecture and design. I’m passionate about performance, so you’ll find both rants about performance problems I come across and discussions of work I’ve done to speed things up when I can. A lot can be done with … Continue reading