Rails probably won’t be the next big thing. With behemoths like ASP.NET offering tight integration with existing desktop apps and household names like PHP now bundled with every Linux distribution, Rails doesn’t have enough to offer the run-of-the-mill web developer to win them over.
But some know.
Once you’ve learned Rails (and thus Ruby), you think of [...]
It’s supposed to be easier this way, right? Doing virtual mail hosting with mbox files is just asking for it. My manager recommended dbmail over dovecot, and he’s a smart guy, so I’ll go with it. It can’t be that hard. Much to my chagrin, there isn’t a single recent howto [...]
In a few moments of excitement for the upcoming Ireland tour, I bought a few Skype goodies, including a Skype Pro subscription and SkypeIn phone numbers in both Wisconsin and Belfast. I got a little less than I had bargained for, unfortunately.
One of the last things I did before becoming a poor traveling musician was to spend part of my final salary paycheck on one more Windows-on-Mac product: VMWare Fusion. My day job requires me to use some Windows apps (at least until Microsoft cranks out a Universal Binary version of Office this fall). [...]
I was looking for a quick and simple way for my graphic designer friend to develop/test PHP locally–for Mac. Being a long-time Linux and burgeoning UNIX guy, my first though ran to compiling PHP and MySQL and connecting it into the Apple-supplied Apache. I didn’t enjoy the thought of walking my friend through [...]
An application that was running fine started throwing this exception on startup: javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Name java:comp is not bound in this Context. Tracing showed it came from code that was used to glean the database connection information from the environment (configured through context XML files).
I’m just finishing up a 65-hour week in which I was planning, executing and troubleshooting the first installation of a load balancer in my data center. To quell the rising traffic levels, it was decided to move one of the oldest customers of the company from a “highly-available” active/standby web/application server using the heartbeat [...]
Continuing in the saga of a customer’s SEO (search engine optimization) journey, I was told that I needed to find a way to mask the URLs used by our custom content management system completely using only the .htaccess file. Previously I was asked to make it possible to enter blah.com/bliggity into the browser and [...]
In the post “Mod_rewrite, how could I forget?!?” I wrote about using an htaccess generated by ColdFusion to make links that will display as blah.com/product rather than blah.com/index.cfm?page=123. In practice, as usual, it was a bit more tricky than most mod_rewrite tutorials put it–not vastly different, but just enough to require about 1/2 hour [...]
Due to a recent fiasco at my work with developers wiping out data in databases, I’ve decided it’d be a good idea to export the database so that we could recover individual tablespaces and tables if necessary. The answer doesn’t immediately present itself, however, because I don’t have the ’sys’ user password. I’m ok, [...]