I was looking for a solution to keep my financial data (quickbooks, excel, important documents, etc…) encrypted on OS X so that if my laptop were stolen, lost, etc… I wouldn’t have to worry about it. I also like to backup my data to my colocated Linux server so in the event that that machine were compromised I wanted to be protected. As it turns out, Mac OS X has the perfect solution for this: read-write encrypted disk images. Here’s how you do it:
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Encrypting sensitive files on Mac OS X
August 20th, 2006Apple is just as proprietary as Microsoft
August 18th, 2006People love to complain about how Microsoft is too proprietary, and rightfully so. Linux/FreeBSD users can make that claim freely but when Apple users make it I cringe. Microsoft has done some “bad” things with API’s and interoperability and is a worse offender than Apple, however, Apple is by no means a saint of openness and isn’t shy about locking users in to their equally proprietary products and services. Here are just a couple of examples that come to mind:
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My favorite family PC support moment
August 5th, 2006Almost every good nerd gets the pleasure of being the family’s go-to PC support person and it’s always great fun to sit around and swap amusing stories with fellow nerds.
When I gave my dad his first PC about 8 years ago, the initial support calls were frequent. Almost every visit back east involved some PC cleanup work. On one trip home I had to show my dad how to:
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Hiring a senior MySQL and FreeBSD systems administrator
July 10th, 2006We’re hiring a senior MySQL and FreeBSD systems administrator to work at GreatSchools (a 40 person company) in San Francisco. If you or someone you know is interested in working on a high traffic website (1M page views per day) consisting of 18 FreeBSD servers, redundant load balancers, MySQL 5 with replication and so on send your resume to jobs-sysadmin at greatschools dot net. If you have a family or want quality of life and are interested in working a compressed week (4 days) or a reduced week (e.g. 32 hours) that’s a possibility too given the right candidate!
Major sites not conserving bandwidth with gzip content compression
July 1st, 2006At GreatSchools we do around 1M real page views per day and another 250k or so for crawlers. Before content compression we were running well in excess of 10Mbit/s during peak hours and were getting hit with bursting charges on high traffic months. When we switched our proxy servers to Apache with mod_deflate (gzip based compression) we saw a 35% decrease in bandwidth utilization and the 3 proxy servers that do the compression and sit in front of our 10 web servers barely register a load at all.
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Implementing CRUD HTTP style
June 28th, 2006I’m amazed by how often DHH can keep coming up with newer, simpler, and more elegant approaches to web development that really make you think. In his recent blog entry/keynote he discusses using HTTP’s PUT and DELETE methods to more elegantly model CRUD operations (slides of his presentation are here) and this is a good 3rd party summary of his keynote:
So rather than the old school approach of:
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June San Francisco Ruby Meetup
June 13th, 2006I attended the June 12th, 2006 San Francisco Ruby Meetup at CNet which was my first. There was quite a turnout, I’d guess maybe 80-90 people. The presentations focused more on process and lessons rather than in-depth technical sessions. Here are my notes: Read the rest of this entry »
Configuring MySQL sql-mode in Ruby on Rails
June 7th, 2006In my previous post I wrote about setting MySQL to a stricter sql-mode to make it behave like most other databases, however, I recently ran into a case where I couldn’t set the global sql-mode without breaking some legacy applications. I imagine this is also often the case when you host on a shared server where a global configuration change would be out of the question.
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Creating subversion repositories for just about anything
June 2nd, 2006I’ve been using Subversion for just about everything I work on including keeping my documents synchronized across multiple computers, backups, source control, etc… I got the idea a while back from Martin Fowler’s Bliki who uses it for a similar purpose. All you need to host your own Subversion repository is a shell account on a machine that you can SSH into. Sure, you could create a repository on your local machine Read the rest of this entry »
Modeling enumerated types in the database
May 29th, 2006Let’s say you have an Employees table and you want a column to track the status of an employee such as ['employed', 'resigned', 'retired', 'terminated', etc...]. You have a couple of options including:
- Using your database’s custom enumeration data-type if it has one
- Creating an int or char column and let the mapping live in the code
- Creating a lookup table
