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Two small, useful Nautilus shell scripts
If you use a Unix-family operating system with the Gnome desktop and its default Nautilus file browser, you might know that you can extend Nautilus using simple shell scripts. Here two short and simple...
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How many environments?
Assume that you are a lone developer, maintaining a small web site in a shared hosting account. How many software environments do you need from development to production? One environment On the...
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Gap buffers
Tim Bray updated an old piece on binary search this morning — I missed it the first time around, so I was glad that it popped up in my blog reader. Tim’s taking some flak about data abstraction from...
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How not to suck at your presentation
So you’re going to speak at a conference. Congratulations! I cannot help you much with making your presentation interesting, but at a minimum, you want it not to suck — “suck” is what happens when you...
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Templating languages and XML
Erich Schubert is talking about web templating languages. He’s looking for a pure-XML templating solution, but that might not be necessary for simple web-page design, where we don’t need all the extra...
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XML 2006 pickled and preserved
The XML 2006 site is now pickled and preserved for long-term storage. Almost all of the presenters got their papers or slides in for the proceedings, if not on time, at least in time. Unfortunately, if...
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REST: the quick pitch
Now that the Java world is noticing REST, the low-pain alternative to RPC standards like WS-*, people are starting to blog about it again. Gossip with other IT folks also tells me that people’s...
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Anonymity and freedom
Elliotte Rusty Harold is right that anonymity goes together with freedom, and I was happy to read his excellent posting How to Blog Anonymously. Rusty distinguishes three different kinds of anonymity —...
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REST, the Lost Update Problem, and the Sneakernet Test
Dare Obasanjo is giving a bit of pushback on the Atom Publishing Protocol, but the part that caught my attention was the section on the Lost Update Problem. This doesn’t have to do with REST per se as...
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My biggest problem with Wikipedia
Summary: You can’t partition a web site’s users into discrete groups by language. I don’t worry much about Wikipedia’s objectivity or reliability — no sources (especially not newspapers or Britannica)...
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Coding lessons from university
Dare Obasanjo, smart code guy and occasional punching bag for the anti-Microsoft people, is collecting lists of Three Things I Learned About Software In College. I posted mine in a comment on his blog,...
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Three simple tips for LAMP web site developers
You’ve learned to write some basic HTML, CSS, PHP/Python/Perl and SQL, found a hosting service, and are ready to create your first LAMP web application. You’ve already read a bit about security (you...
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[not] Protecting web sites and services from DNS rebinding attacks
Update: Nope, my solution won’t work. As Christian Matthies points out in the comments, it is possible to spoof the HTTP Host header as well (his link in the comment is broken because of an extra...
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Two problems with Google Maps for aviation
I love Google Maps and their API, and am using it extensively in my new web site OurAirports. However, there are two problems that keep coming up for using Google Maps with an aviation application:...
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LAMP stack stability
I’m using a single dedicated server to host ourairports.com, megginson.com, and a couple of minor domains. OurAirports is a database-heavy application using (currently) a MySQL v.5 database hosted on...
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Strange web exploit attempt (?)
In the search logs for OurAirports, I noticed a series of searches for URLs: http://www.feliciano.de/Webgalerie/bilder/Italy/une/yiwul/ http://www.unduetretoccaate.it/codice/aseje/wocobo/...
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Ready for Prime Time?
I bought a cheap HP C4280 printer-scanner-copier today, since my old HP 1210 finally gave up the ghost. Installing the printer in Windows Vista Installing the printer in Windows Vista wasn’t too...
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Customer Problem Checklist
Whether you’re writing a business plan for your personal startup (the tech equivalent of the Great American Novel that every hack journalist plans to write), a report for your customers, or a proposal...
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SQL and simple polymorphism
SQL is about tables and sets. Object-oriented programing is about types, subtypes, and polymorphism. There are nasty, nasty frameworks available to try to move between the two worlds (say, by...
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MySQL wrapper script: variables from the command line
There’s a lot I like about PostgreSQL, and I’ll probably switch eventually, but for now, I’m still more comfortable with MySQL, especially its ability to update huge amounts of existing data in-place...
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