Author Archives: Todd Huss

Apple is just as proprietary as Microsoft

Posted on August 18, 2006 by Todd Huss

People 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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Desktop | 19 Comments

My favorite family PC support moment

Posted on August 5, 2006 by Todd Huss

Almost 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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Links | 4 Comments

Hiring a senior MySQL and FreeBSD systems administrator

Posted on July 10, 2006 by Todd Huss

We’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) … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration | Comments Off

Major sites not conserving bandwidth with gzip content compression

Posted on July 1, 2006 by Todd Huss

At 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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration, Web | 3 Comments

Implementing CRUD HTTP style

Posted on June 28, 2006 by Todd Huss

I’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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby, Web | 1 Comment

June San Francisco Ruby Meetup

Posted on June 13, 2006 by Todd Huss

I 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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby, Software Engineering | 3 Comments

Configuring MySQL sql-mode in Ruby on Rails

Posted on June 7, 2006 by Todd Huss

In 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. … Continue reading →

Posted in MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering | 1 Comment

Creating subversion repositories for just about anything

Posted on June 2, 2006 by Todd Huss

I’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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Source Control, Systems Administration | Comments Off

Modeling enumerated types in the database

Posted on May 29, 2006 by Todd Huss

Let’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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Database, Ruby, Software Engineering | 3 Comments

When installing MySQL always set the sql-mode

Posted on May 28, 2006 by Todd Huss

As I’ve described before, MySQL has some appalling out of the box settings which will thwart your attempts at good data integrity! They’ve clearly seen the light though and at least give you an option to achieve good data integrity … Continue reading →

Posted in MySQL, Systems Administration | 1 Comment