Cause and effect are easily distinguished, when they occur in succession; but are often confounded, when the operation is continuous and simultaneous.
— Jean-Baptiste Say-
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Category Archives: Technical Notes
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
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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
26 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
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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
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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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Brian’s Latest Comments doesn’t scale.
Or, to be fair, MySQL 3.x is rubbish. But you knew that already. Most of the blogs on the Ozblogistan network use BLC. Recently, Larvatus Prodeo came on board and expected it to work for them too. But it simply … Continue reading
Posted in Technical Notes
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