The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
— Leo Tolstoy-
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- Notes towards a set-objective language.
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Category Archives: Technical Notes
Notes towards a set-objective language.
Discovered while searching for something else on my computer is this jibber-jabber from 2009.
Posted in Software Engineering, Technical Notes, Thought Bubbles
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Fancying, part 2.
For a long time I’ve linked from my book reviews to Amazon, giving both affiliate and direct links. I’m still doing it, but now I’m adding nice little visual callouts. To the right you can see an example. The concept … Continue reading
Posted in Site News, Technical Notes
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Fancying up the place
Book reviews have steadily crowded out other posts on my blog. So I’ve fiddled with my theme to make them both visually distinct and, at the same time, stink the place up a bit less. It took more fiddling than … Continue reading
Posted in Site News, Technical Notes
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Repairing a hacked WordPress installation
I have updated this post based on followup investigations. This morning I found two independent reports of virus warnings being given for two different websites in the Ozblogistan network. Given that I upgraded to WordPress 3.4.1 only 2 days ago, … Continue reading
Posted in Ozblogistan, Technical Notes
12 Comments
A not-so-brief aside on reigning in chaos
Everything that humans touch eventually becomes complex, whether we like it or not. (Blog posts too. This one started out as a comparison of three competing software system alternatives and subsequently bloated into a discussion of chaos in computer systems.) … Continue reading
Posted in Robojar, Software Engineering, Systems, Technical Notes
27 Comments
Installing the pg gem on OS X with MacPorts
The pg gem, used to connect ruby programs to the PostgreSQL server, is notoriously difficult to install on OS X. I’m using MacPorts and have PostgreSQL 9 installed. Here’s what I did: jacques$ sudo bash root$ export PATH=/opt/local/lib/postgresql90/bin:${PATH} root$ env … Continue reading
Posted in Technical Notes
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Fixing blogger imports into WordPress
I’ve been expanding my Ozblogistan network and have run into an interesting bug. When importing from Google’s blogspot, all post titles and post content wind up with the ‘>’ symbol prepended. This is annoying. If you have database access, the … Continue reading
Posted in Technical Notes
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More Mongrel2 / OS X notes
Having a bit of spare time this Sunday, I’m continuing to work through the Mongrel2 manual (it’s good, as such things go). There are still places where Mac OS X does not behave according to the expectations of the manual … Continue reading
Posted in Technical Notes
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Building Mongrel2 on OS X with MacPorts
The documentation says “make all install” — use “make macports install” instead. That’s what I get for not reading the damn makefile first. Update: To build the procer utility mentioned in the Mongrel2 manual, a quick-and-dirty hack is to copy … Continue reading
Posted in Technical Notes
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An XCache ‘gotcha’
XCache is a PHP opcode cacher. This is good and well as it speeds up pageloads by removing PHP parsing overhead. On the downside, you must remember to restart your PHP processes after changing PHP files, as XCache doesn’t seem … Continue reading
Posted in Technical Notes
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