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Mark Wunsch, on Installing Gems

By on August 8, 2011 in ruby, technical

I have 3 or 4 queued up posts about Ruby but­thurt, and what Mark has to say is pretty in line with a lot of it.

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The iTunes 10 UI is an abomination

By on September 2, 2010 in apple, diatribes, opinion and libel, shit stirring

So, iTunes 10 looks like Apple's col­lege intern office bitch slapped the design together over the week­end while on a ben­der. What hap­pened to those LEGIONS of UI design­ers they employ?

Let's Talk About That Icon

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NNTP readers on OS X are built from failure

By on October 13, 2009 in applications, mac, opinion and libel

In the office where I work we use/maintain a news­group server with a vari­ety of inter­nal news­groups where every­thing from items for sale to com­plaints and has­sles are posted. Late last year I went pretty much all-Mac, all the time, with a Remote Desk­top win­dow con­nected to a Win­dows machine in the office which I used for Out­look (because we're an Exchange shop) and Thun­der­bird (to read the news­groups). Won­der­ing if I could cut ties a lit­tle fur­ther, I looked into NNTP read­ers for OS X.

A small bit of back­ground first: I'm using Snow Leop­ard and I'm unwill­ing to deal with the vagaries of less-than-native clients. This means that I'm not using ported Unix apps. So no Gnews, news­post, Pan, Pine, Slrn, or Tin. Those are right out.

This left me with a list cob­bled together from MacUpdate:

I had intended this to be a mar­gin­ally com­pre­hen­sive review of my time using these clients, but I barely got into the account setup with most of them, if I installed them at all. Here's how it broke down…

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nice marmot

By on June 18, 2009 in friends, technical

While this would have been bet­ter posted to bash, I present a snip­pet from Triple-Em him­self regard­ing an inad­e­quacy in the stan­dard I/O libraries avail­able to him:

1:37:20 PM Matthew Miller: Think I'm going to write an RFC with the sug­ges­tion that we extend the stan­dard 4 option I/O error han­dling direc­tives -- Abort, Retry, Fail, Ignore -- to include a fifth: Fuck_It_Dude_Lets_Go_Bowling
1:37:31 PM Ryan McKern: i'll sec­ond it if you do
1:37:45 PM Matthew Miller: excel­lent. let's see what the experts group thinks.

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Text editing for fun and profit

By on June 15, 2009 in applications, editors, mac

In the attempt to stream­line the process of main­tain­ing the myr­iad scripts and con­fig files that I use day to day as part of both my day job and my droll hobby. I've used Text­Mate for every­thing, which I've pre­vi­ously dis­cussed (par­tic­u­larly using it in con­junc­tion with CSSEdit, which we'll come back to). But this has sort of spi­raled out of con­trol as I've spent more time work­ing with PHP scripts (such as Word­Press themes) and I've started to won­der about the newer gen­er­a­tion of all-in-one editors.

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Updating WordPress with libssh (and what I did when it was broken)

By on June 14, 2009 in php, site meta, wordpress

This article was orig­i­nally about auto­matic updates over SSH2 not work­ing for me when I upgraded to Word­Press 2.8. Word­Press 2.9 is out now, and this prob­lem turned out not to be their fault.

After fil­ing a bug report and work­ing through it with the Word­Press team, a solu­tion was even­tu­ally found (see the final update to this post). If you're not inclined to skip to the end then here is a spoiler: turn off open_basedir or make the dec­la­ra­tion less restrictive.

If you're not expe­ri­enc­ing this prob­lem (and Google says you're land­ing here if you're look­ing for help set­ting up SFTP/SSH updat­ing for Word­Press), I don't think this write-up will be of much help. But feel free to stick around; I've got snacks!

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Apache Admin Notes: Raw Performance Numbers

By on January 15, 2009 in apache, linux, site meta

In late Decem­ber I started look­ing at alter­na­tive web servers, hav­ing hit a point where I actu­ally asked aloud (though to no one in par­tic­u­lar) why I still use Apache for any http or php needs that may arise.

I sat down, installed nginx (nginx 0.6.33) from the EPEL (Extra Pack­ages for Enter­prise Linux) repos­i­to­ries and lighttpd (lighttpd 1.4.20) from the RPM­forge repos­i­to­ries (both third party repos­i­to­ries worth writ­ing about in detail at a later date). Apache was already installed (httpd 2.2.3), so a vir­tu­al­host was con­fig­ured to serve data from the same doc­root using all three servers, and PHP through fastcgi was con­fig­ured for lighttpd and nginx1.

I then set up a stock Word­Press 2.7 blog, some large images, some thumb­nails, and cre­ated what amount to approx­i­mately a 20k index page with noth­ing cached. Using ApacheBench to fetch 1000 requests, 100 requests at a time, I came up with some sim­ple num­bers show­ing how long it took to return the same page for each web server.

While I openly admit that the bench­marks pro­duced here are arbi­trary and super­fi­cial, they do give some rough insight (10,000ft overview level insight) as to how much faster nginx and fastcgi are over apache 2.2 and mod_php. lighttpd also per­formed admirably, and with less has­sle involved in set up than nginx, but I sus­pect that may just be pre­vi­ous famil­iar­ity with the configuration.

A table of num­bers (soon to be a graph, when I feel like mak­ing it) and some thoughts as to what they mean and why we (the web host­ing com­mu­nity) still use Apache reli­giously fol­lows after the jump.

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  1. Credit where credit is due. I couldn't have started to work out the nginx fastcgi con­fig­u­ra­tion with­out help from this post on redemp­tion in a blog. ↩

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