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Rossi pulls a push mower behind a 1965 International riding lawn mower he restored. He found the mower on the side of the road and replaced a bunch of parts.
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If you want to release frequently, a problem you may encounter is that some features, even though functionally complete, don’t stand well on their own, but require other features to be valuable to the user. If you want to release the system in this state, you need a way to hide features. A Feature-on/off-switch is a simple idea for dealing with this. A feature-on/off-switch is some mechanism to hide features from a system.
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In case it wasn’t already obvious, I am a huge fan of git , and often prefer it over sliced bread . Recently to help a small team of programmers collaborate, I decided to setup a private git server for them to use. By no claim of mine is the following tutorial unique, however I am writing this to aid those who had trouble following other online tutorials . Goal : Setup a central git server for private or public source sharing, wit..
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In case it wasn’t already obvious, I am a huge fan of git , and often prefer it over sliced bread . Recently to help a small team of programmers collaborate, I decided to setup a private git server for them to use. By no claim of mine is the following tutorial unique, however I am writing this to aid those who had trouble following other online tutorials . Goal : Setup a central git server for private or public source sharing, wit..
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Java supports checked exceptions. Many people have strong opinions about if they are good or bad. I believe they are good, but let’s agree that Java has them and they’re not going away. (Any exception extending “Exception”, which can to be thrown from a method, must be declared at the end of method’s signature, and any caller of the method must handle the exception or itself declare to throw that type of exception; Any exception extending..
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Interestingly this sort of question pops up a lot in my referring search term stats. Why CAPTCHA’s never use the numbers 0 1 5 7 Its a relativity simple question with a reasonably simple answer. Its because each of the above numbers are easy to confuse with a letter. See the below, CAPTCHA With 0 and O - image lost sorry… CAPTCHA With 1 and I CAPTCHA With 5 and S CAPTCHA With 7 and J L I
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Moving from Subversion SVN to GIT can be a little confusing at first. I think the biggest thing I noticed was that GIT doesn’t have a specific work-flow; you have to pick your own. Personally I wanted to stick to my Subversion like work-flow with a central server which all my machines would pull and push too. Since it took a while to set up I thought I would throw up a blog post on how to do it.
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I tried to use my company laptop outside of the office for the first time. I clicked on the “VPN” option in the start menu which the company had installed on the laptop. Up came a browser, trying to access the VPN page (accessible from the Internet). However, it didn’t work, as the browser was trying to connect to the company’s web proxy. The company web proxy is obviously only available once one is in the company network, i.e. once the VPN..
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As a general observation, it seems that when software architects try to solve general problems, they come up with horrible designs; when they solve specific problems, they come up with good designs. Designs made without reference to a problem often become complex and not very fit for purpose when we’re solving specific problems. As a general rule, avoid generalizations. Some examples: An Enterprise Service Bus may create a big project and m..
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With Google recently starting to involve load time in search rankings, there has been a lot of talk about GZIP. Google Webmaster Tools exclaims "Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by X KB:". Many people listen to this, and go out looking for a quick fix without realizing that poor GZIP implementation has a strongly negative effect on the overall user experience . There are two main ways in....
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With Google recently starting to involve load time in search rankings, there has been a lot of talk about GZIP. Google Webmaster Tools exclaims "Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by X KB:". Many people listen to this, and go out looking for a quick fix without realizing that poor GZIP implementation has a strongly negative effect on the overall user experience . There are two main ways in....
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A server filesystem can store millions of files in one directory. Unless you need to store more files than this, there is no need to artificially introduce an extra layer of directories to keep the number of files per directory down to a lower number. We kept millions of files in one directory at uboot. Often one needs to store lots of files in a filesystem. For example, at uboot.com each user has a “nickpage”, and each of these nickpages..
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If you allow users of your website to upload data (e.g. images), and you display this data to other users, you need to open the file on the server to examine it and check that it really is what it should be (e.g. an image). Most website software will need to examine the image anyway, to extract thumbnails, determine width/height, etc. In which case, this security comes for free. But I’ve seen software which doesn’t have any such needs, an..
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At a TechEd I attended a few years ago I was watching a presentation about Security presented by Rocky Heckman (read his blog its quite good) . In it he was talking about security algorithms. The part that really stuck with me went like this, “Don’t write your own Crypto algorithms unless you have a Doctorate in Cryptography.” Interestingly someone there did have said qualification, and Rocky had to make an exception for that single pers..
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When Steve Jobs left Apple in the 1980s, he started a new venture that produced NeXT UNIX computers that ran a custom UNIX system called NeXTSTEP on Motorola 68000-series computers. The first Web browser was made my Tim Berners-Lee on one of these NeXT computers! When I was an undergrad student at the University of Waterloo, we had a few NeXT computers (literally two of them I believe) and a bunch of HP PA-RISC 712s running NeXTSTEP for o..
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The UNIX program “mail”, not the mail client one would use by choice under most circumstances. However today I have the pleasure of using a Solaris box which seems to be filled only with legacy tools like original “vi”, a “tail” where if you do “tail -f *” it only tails the first matching file and not all files.. but I digress. $ mail mail: Too many letters, overflowing letters concatenated I mean ignoring the error itself and the disres..
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When Steve Jobs left Apple in the 1980s, he started a new venture that produced NeXT UNIX computers that ran a custom UNIX system called NeXTSTEP on Motorola 68000-series computers. The first Web browser was made my Tim Berners-Lee on one of these NeXT computers! When I was an undergrad student at the University of Waterloo, we had a few NeXT computers (literally two of them I believe) and a bunch of HP PA-RISC 712s running NeXTSTEP for o..
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In response to my query last time, ezyang asked for any tips or tricks I have for finding my way around the Linux kernel. I’m not sure I have much in the way of systematic advice for tracking down the answers to questions about the Linux kernel, but thinking about what I do when posed with a patch to Linux that I need understand, or question I need to answer, I’ve come up with a collection of tips that will hopefully be helpful to others lo..
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In response to my query last time, ezyang asked for any tips or tricks I have for finding my way around the Linux kernel. I’m not sure I have much in the way of systematic advice for tracking down the answers to questions about the Linux kernel, but thinking about what I do when posed with a patch to Linux that I need understand, or question I need to answer, I’ve come up with a collection of tips that will hopefully be helpful to others lo..
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Do not be fooled by the elegant simplicity of the mighty closure! Behind its shiny dynamic veneer lies a powerful machine capable of destroying your immortal soul. Behold: function GetOutputFunctions () { var outputFunctions = new Array(); for ( var i = 0 ; i < 4 ; i ++ ) { var x = i * 2 ; outputFunctions . push ( function () { alert ( x ); }); } return out..
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One thing that comes up a lot on sites like Stackoverflow and the like is how to backup MySQL databases.The first answer is usually use mysqldump. This is all fine and good, till you start to want to dump multiple databases. You can do this all in one like using the –all-databases option however this makes restoring a single database an issue, since you have to parse out the parts you want which can be a pain.
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When developing a system that people use in their day to day work, I often meet the following requirement: “A user should be able to see all tasks from each functional area on a single screen.” This requirement requires integration with all parts of the system, making it architecturally costly. Luckily, the requirement might often not be needed at all! Everyone will tell you: The most powerful technique for dealing with a large problem is b..
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Usually, when you need to put something down, you just place it on the next table and don't think much about it. After a few days (or weeks/months/years) your appartment looks like shit and you have to clean it up. How do you clean? One thing at a time. So one by one you take each item lying on the floor, on a table, in a shelf and find it a new home. Sometimes you can see a pattern in all your stuff that's lying around and you might find a..
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Usually, when you need to put something down, you just place it on the next table and don't think much about it. After a few days (or weeks/months/years) your appartment looks like shit and you have to clean it up. How do you clean? One thing at a time. So one by one you take each item lying on the floor, on a table, in a shelf and find it a new home. Sometimes you can see a pattern in all your stuff that's lying around and you might find a..
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Im not usually one to promote events and the like unless I feel there is a genuine benefit to be had by attending but this is one stands out. Richard M Stallman, the guru of Free Software is coming Down Under to hold a talk. You can read about him here, Open Source Celebrity to visit Australia You can register for the event at the ACS Website I am certainly planning on attending.
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I learned PHP and built the online website creator N.nu from scratch myself (examples). From the start one of the principal focuses has been to make sure that the system has optimal SEO and it is my intention that N.nu is the online website creator with the best SEO. This blog is of course hosted [...]
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I learned PHP and built the online website creator N.nu from scratch myself (examples). From the start one of the principal focuses has been to make sure that the system has optimal SEO and it is my intention that N.nu is the online website creator with the best SEO. This blog is of course hosted [...]
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I used to think I knew a bit about performance, scalability and how to keep things trucking when you hit large amounts of data. Truth is I know diddly squat on the subject since the most I have ever done is read about how its done. To understand how I came about realising this you need some background. Essentially what I have been working on and hope to launch soon is a highly vertical search engine that websites can employ on their site ..
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For license reasons (god damn GPL), ZFS can’t be integrated into the Linux kernel, but there is a userland fuse version called [ZFS-FUSE](http://zfs- fuse.net/), so I tried to measure the fuse overhead vs others filesystems presents on my server. This tests are not benchmarks, but just show that ZFS-FUSE is fast enough and seems to be stable (at least for my personal server) ZFS with lzjb compression dd if=/dev/zero of=/testzfs/toto bs=2048..
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In a production environment you could hit this one: DatabaseError: Invalid handle! It seems to happen when Oracle is called with OCI interface (cx_Oracle) by multiple threads. Yes using apache with MPM worker or mod_wsgi, will create threads in the same process, by default cx_Oracle is configured to be used without threads cause it will add a mutex and a performance hit. The solution is to pass the threaded parameters to the connection stri..
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I haven’t been feeling very motivated to blog lately – I’ve missed the last two weeks of Iron Blogger, and I’m not totally enthusiastic about any of the items on my “to blog” list. But, I do enjoy blogging when I actually get into posts, and I’d like to keep updating this blog. So, in a bit of a copout, and following in Edward’s footsteps, this is an appeal to all of you: What should I blog about?
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I haven’t been feeling very motivated to blog lately – I’ve missed the last two weeks of Iron Blogger, and I’m not totally enthusiastic about any of the items on my “to blog” list. But, I do enjoy blogging when I actually get into posts, and I’d like to keep updating this blog. So, in a bit of a copout, and following in Edward’s footsteps, this is an appeal to all of you: What should I blog about?
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I thought I would post some examples of websites with bad website search. Rather then pick on some small blogs lets go after the big boys. Starting with eBay. “There was a screenshot of ebay here at one point but now it is lost for all time… sorry” The link to the left is an example of a simple search I performed on eBay for an iPad. The search comes back pretty quickly which is good but has a few issues I will go through now.
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I was reading a blog post today linked from Dzone which alluded to test driven development being a waste of time I am one of those people who has caught the test driven development (TDD) bug and I am a big fan of TDD and unit testing in general. In fact I am the one who posted the first comment on the linked blog and prompted the authors change to it.
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The below is just a few things to keep in mind if you are writing a crawler or considering writing one. The first is to assume that all of the links you have are broken to begin with. When I write this I dont mean assume that the link goes nowhere, but that the URL itself is actually wrong. Even when you seed your own list (like I did) you can still get some bad URL’s in there.
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One of the things that I always have to look up (when doing it manually that is) is how to export specific databases or all of them from MySQL using mysqldump. To avoid having to Google around every time I need the commands I thought I would preserve it here. Export a database from MySQL in one line NB password must follow -p without a space mysqldump -u user -pPASSWORD mydatabase > mydatabase.sql Export all databases from MySQL
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So in keeping with the lean startup style, I needed to work out which version control system and which bug tracker I would use. Internally at work I use subversion and JIRA. Both do the job quite well but I have found some shortcomings with subversion and JIRA is needlessly complicated for a single developer at the moment. So I looked for alturnatives. Version control was easier of the two to pick. I have been toying with GIT for a while ..
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I wanted to learn how to build mobile apps, so last weekend I bought Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa . I don’t have any problem learning a new language, in fact I really enjoy it, but I was reluctant to to pay serious dollars for a Mac just to learn the skill. The book covers how to build a website that is tailored for the iPhone. It looks and behaves like an iPhone ..
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