Category Archives: Architecture

Which Oar Best Rows The Boat

Posted on August 22, 2013 by M@

Ted Dzuiba wrote a post that boiled down to identifying his own “language bigotry” as a step along the way to software engineering “Mastery”. He’s absolutely correct about introspecting why one chooses to “fight” other languages. And by saying “languages” I could … Continue reading →

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SPDY for Apache

Posted on April 23, 2012 by M@

Mod_SPDY for Apache is out. If you don’t know what SPDY is, I’d recommend some light reading … or heavy reading if you’re that kind of person.  

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Video Captcha Prior Art

Posted on March 5, 2012 by M@

Nucaptcha claims to have invented video captchas. They didn’t. Neither did I, proabably, but I have talked about them publicly a few times, including this blog post from 2009.

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Caching Functions In Perl

Posted on January 5, 2012 by M@

Synopsis There are occasions, where you write a function that takes some parameters and outputs consistentish data. Example: sub add { my($first,$second)=@_; return $first + $second; } If you call add(1,1) you get 2: always. Consistent input yields consistent output. … Continue reading →

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Merging Filesystems Virtually Under Apache

Posted on January 4, 2012 by M@

Synopsis This is rather old code, but saved my bacon more than once. Runs under Apache with Mod_Perl, and “merges” any number of filesystems. You’ll see the @docroots array that takes a list of “document roots”. These all need correct … Continue reading →

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Reliance On GPS Is A Liability

Posted on December 16, 2011 by M@

I’ve written a couple times previously about how we shouldn’t rely on GPS solely. It appears the US government might have just come to that conclusion as well. GPS is awesome, but it cannot be the only mechanism used for … Continue reading →

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Use MongoDB

Posted on November 8, 2011 by M@

So an Anonymous Coward’s pastebin rant against MongoDB has an awful lot of legs. I circulated a few thoughts yesterday morning to head-off the inevitable concerns of “um, we’re doing a lot with Mongo, and now I’m nervous”: [It] really … Continue reading →

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SSL CAs Are An Unnecessary Evil

Posted on September 22, 2011 by M@

I’ve talked about this to numerous groups, going back to 1999, but seems I’ve never done so publicly. Certificate Authorities are completely unnecessary. “OH MY GOD HOW DO WE MAINTAIN THE WEB OF TRUST?!” you scream. Easy, the same way … Continue reading →

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Redundant Array of Independent Datacenters

Posted on July 8, 2011 by M@

I used a phrase last night/this morning that I use to refer to distributed datacenter architecture, and afterwards decided to google it. It seems that while Cisco mentioned it a lot in 2010, I beat them by a few years … Continue reading →

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Dear MongoDB

Posted on June 16, 2011 by M@

Dear MongoDB, I would like to use the positional operators you have for updates, ala ‘user.$.name’, in the field selectors for queries, ala find({“user.name”: “Matt”},{“user.$.address”}) such that I can see only the fields of that sub-document/sub-object in my return data … Continue reading →

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