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 this over email or phone, which I would have to do since he’s a few states away. I was hoping there’d be an easier way.
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Categorised in Technology
Lately I’ve been doing some interesting work with the RADAR project that I’ve been loosely affiliated with for the last few years. The goal was to find a way to receive products from the NWS through one of their public channels and process them into a usable format. Most of the products are in “proprietary” formats (not exactly proprietary, but close enough), so they need special processors or viewers to use. I’m just going to give a brief summary of the project history, and follow up to some of the latest developments.
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Categorised in Uncategorized
I’m being chastised plenty by the loyal, but I want a Mac in the worst way. I’ve been a PC man my whole life, but both Microsoft and the open source community are having trouble competing with the sexiness of Mac. Ok, ok, open source isn’t even in the game. After spending last weekend with the band and sitting alone on my PC while they all played bluetooth tag with their PowerMacs and MacBooks, I know what I need to do.
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Categorised in Art, Change, Money and Music
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).
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Categorised in Sysadmin
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 daemon to a highly-available active/active web/application server using a load balancer. I had three hours of downtime to perform the cutover, which went smoothly, thanks to several hours of planning. I got home around 2am after a good long drive hanging out with Nat Sherman (or at least his delicious “Classic Mint” cigarettes). After tossing and turning for several hours, I was awakened by the call to come in because “the website’s down!”.
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Categorised in Sysadmin
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 have remain in URL box rather than the CMS URL of blah.com/index.cfm?page=123. Now I was asked to make blah.com/index.cfm?page=123 redirect to blah.com/bliggity so that the CMS would not have to be modified in order to have the links on every page refer to the SEOed URL. “Mod rewrite should be able to do this, right?”
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Categorised in Sysadmin
I’d just like to throw out a general gripe about the way Wordpress.com is handling themes. I was a little dismayed this afternoon when I took a look at my wordpress blog and found that the colors were all messed up. I’m assuming that this has something to do with a theme update. I don’t know what provoked the system to overwrite the colors in my CSS, but I’m not particularly enthused about spending another three hours tweaking all of the text into the right places in a way that works on both IE and Firefox. No, not at all enthused am I.
Categorised in Gripes
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 of research.
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Categorised in Sysadmin
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, though, because I can still log in using OS authentication by using sqlplus connect / as sysdba. It does, however, befuddle the ORACLE export command exp, as it won’t accept / for the username and password (the basic syntax is exp scott/tiger, where scott is the username and tiger is the password).
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Categorised in Sysadmin
A developer asked me the other day, “Do we have backups of the [insert website name here] database? I accidentally issued an SQL UPDATE statement without a WHERE clause and overwrote a bunch of data.”
“And you didn’t make an export before you started working on it, did you?”, I replied, admonishingly. The answer was obvious.
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Categorised in Sysadmin