Mutterings

Life in the Slow Lane

Entries Tagged as 'Software'

New Rails Project

March 31st, 2008 · 1 Comment

I’ve started a new project which combines several of my hobbies: rails, building websites and motorcycles. Coming soon: tracknowledge.org

Buy domain
Buy VPS hosting for website (thanks mr yin!)
Build initial beta site (in progress…)
Install nginx, mysql, rails, php and site
Announce beta to world

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Tags: Motorcycles · Personal · Software

Speaking at OSCON 2008

March 17th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Looks like I’m going to give a talk entitled “How Not to Build a Service” at OSCON 2008. I’m going to be discussing some of the mistakes made over the last year at FiveRuns and what we’ve done to correct them.
OSCON 2008
Portland OR
July 21-25th
The lovely Tammy is going to accompany me and we’ll probably [...]

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Tags: Personal · Software

Comment Spam

November 25th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Comment spam has gotten bad enough (3-5/day) that I’ve installed two anti-spam plugins into Wordpress. You shouldn’t even notice the plugins but they will prevent robots from posting comments.

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Tags: Software

Mailplane

November 11th, 2007 · No Comments

I’ve got five invites for the Mailplane beta. If you use gmail and OSX, email me (mperham AT gmail) and I’ll send you an invite.
http://mailplaneapp.com/

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Tags: Software

More on OpenSUSE

October 28th, 2007 · No Comments

The installation went pretty smoothly. Some random thoughts:

There’s no master switch for the Beagle desktop search system. My machine is old and slow so I wanted to completely disable it. I wound up just searching for and removing all packages with the name “beagle” in it.
There’s no such thing as a “Startup [...]

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Tags: Personal · Software

OpenSUSE FTW!

October 28th, 2007 · No Comments

Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon release has failed me. I tried to upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy and it does not work with my video card (an ATI 9200 SE 128MB). So I evaluated other Linux distros, notably Fedora and OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE just had their new 10.3 release 3 weeks ago so they are [...]

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Tags: Software

Gutsy Grumbles

October 22nd, 2007 · No Comments

Well, I updated my Ubuntu desktop from Feisty to Gutsy yesterday and now my machine is hosed. X is obviously misconfigured as the screen is corrupted beyond usability so I can’t login. Anyone know how to get Gutsy into Safe Mode and how to reconfigure X from there?

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Tags: Software

New Theme

September 14th, 2007 · 4 Comments

What do you think of the new theme? Why do the cleanest designs usually have the worst looking code? The CSS for this theme is horrible.
TODO Add Google AdWords back in.

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Tags: Personal · Software

Passwords as Byte Arrays

September 13th, 2007 · No Comments

Why do many systems treat a password as a byte array rather than a String? The only reason I can see is so they can clear it out of memory ASAP.

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Tags: Software

BlueFlash - Bluetooth/Disk Controller/Disk Image Archive Card for Apple ][

August 14th, 2007 · No Comments

Wow, now this is an old-fashioned cool hack. Three years of hacking device drivers and microcode!
BlueFlash - Bluetooth/Disk Controller/Disk Image Archive Card for Apple ][

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Tags: Software