Category Archives: Technical

Unix and Windows Sysadmin in downtown San Francisco

Posted on May 16, 2006 by Todd Huss

My buddy Mike at UrbanaSoft is looking for an experienced full-time Unix and Windows sysadmin in downtown San Francisco. Pay is between $80-$100k depending on experience plus benefits and all that good stuff. If you’re qualified and interested or know … Continue reading →

Posted in Systems Administration | Comments Off

Moving MySQL tables live with zero downtime

Posted on May 9, 2006 by Todd Huss

The biggest challege to moving large amounts of data into production with (almost) zero downtime with MySQL is that the old table will be dropped and the new table locked while you’re loading the data. If you try that while … Continue reading →

Posted in Database, MySQL, Systems Administration | 2 Comments

Using log4j to monitor web application errors

Posted on April 22, 2006 by Todd Huss

When monitoring a production website (especially with a dozen or so application servers) you don’t want to rely on combining the logs and reviewing them manually for exceptions, you want the servers to notify you when there’s a problem. There … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Software Engineering, Systems Administration | 3 Comments

Hibernate with the MacBook Pro

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Todd Huss

Thanks to Dion for pointing out how to get your MacBook to hibernate! When I wrote about switching to the MacBook Pro one of my complaints was that upon shutting the lid the laptop doesn’t hibernate, it sleeps, and they … Continue reading →

Posted in Desktop, OSX | 9 Comments

Why nobody is web testing in Java

Posted on April 14, 2006 by Todd Huss

Go into any IDE and create a default Web project and you’ll often get JUnit, but I have yet to see one include some form of web testing support (e.g. Cactus, Cargo, and HttpUnit) and that’s just lame!

Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, Web | 3 Comments

Disassembling the MacBook Pro

Posted on April 13, 2006 by Todd Huss

I had quite a scare today when my new MacBook Pro wouldn’t boot. It would turn on, the screen would go white, and after about 20 seconds it flashed a question mark in a box on the screen. I thought … Continue reading →

Posted in Desktop, OSX, Systems Administration | 4 Comments

Tracking your SEO pagerank

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Todd Huss

I’ve started using Sitening’s free SEO SERP tracker to track the position of GreatSchools.net for terms we want to rank for in Google. If you rely on search traffic and want to keep track of how you’re ranking for certain … Continue reading →

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | Comments Off

Using image tags (for style elements) in HTML is bad design

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Todd Huss

Update 4/11/06: I’ve received some criticism on this post from people who assumed I was saying you should never use image tags in HTML. My bad for the misleading title, I’ve added to the title in parens to be more … Continue reading →

Posted in Accessibility, CSS, Design, Search Engine Optimization | 9 Comments

Crawler side effects of using XHTML entity references

Posted on April 5, 2006 by Todd Huss

We’re slowly moving towards making GreatSchools XHTML compliant (we have a long way to go though)! To start we’ve begun using proper XHTML entity references for URL’s with & as a separator instead of plain old & in a few … Continue reading →

Posted in Design, Search Engine Optimization | Comments Off

Java’s SEO blunder: jsessionid

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Todd Huss

Update: Bryce pointed out a servlet filter you can implement to disable JSESSIONID’s… very nice! When we started moving GreatSchools from Perl to Java + SpringMVC + Hibernate one of the first things we had to figure out was how … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Search Engine Optimization, Web | 9 Comments