Category Archives: Work

Ruby 2 From Source on CentOS 6.4

Posted on September 13, 2013 by M@

Ruby‘s autoconf doesn’t alert you to the fact that your system doesn’t have everything it could use. It’ll blindly clear you even though, for example, nothing crypto-related will work. On a fresh CentOS 6.4 install (with EPEL) the following will … Continue reading →

Posted in Coding, Linuxy, Work | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

MySQL com_select Nugget

Posted on November 15, 2012 by M@

The com_select counter isn’t a raw count of how many SELECT operations the server has performed, but rather the number of SELECT operations that did not get returned from the query cache. To see the real number of SELECTs (assuming … Continue reading →

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NConf 1.3.0 Pass-through HTTPD Auth

Posted on April 3, 2012 by M@

If you’d like to use NConf, but want your HTTPD, e.g. Apache, to do the auth for it, apply the below patch to set the NConf user to the currently authenticated user. — include/head.php.orig    2012-04-03 19:34:13.774594705 +0000 +++ include/head.php    2012-04-03 … Continue reading →

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find -delete

Posted on March 28, 2012 by M@

If I hear one more person recommend using a pipe to xargs or -exec rm -f {}  to the question “how can I make ‘find’ delete the files it finds?” I’m going to scream. It’s really simple: find /wherever -mtime … 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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SmartMenu

Posted on May 10, 2011 by M@

Case: Large menu system where different users use different items more often than others. Some spend 80% of their time in <5% of the options, some spend 60% of their time in the least used 10% of the options. Problem: … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Coding, Work | 1 Comment

Installing OpenQRM 4.7 on Fedora 14

Posted on December 23, 2010 by M@

OpenQRM 4.7 doesn’t compile cleanly on Fedora 14 (x64, but I don’t think that matters for this bug), and coercing it to do so isn’t the cleanest trick. The problem is actually with Busybox 1.14.2 that is automatically downloaded and … Continue reading →

Posted in Linuxy, Products, Work | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

The Next Five Years of IT Personnel

Posted on April 28, 2010 by M@

[NOTE: This essay was commissioned by a client in December 2006. It’s the fifth in a series of old-yet-relevant position-papers whose exclusivity has expired, that I’m editing and posting. Things for the next five look “similar”. There is no formal … Continue reading →

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