I’m a Mac. I’m also an Ubuntu. I’m even a PC. In each of these, I have a pretty interface that lets me drag and drop just about anything to the Trash. Albeit an old, old feature that hardly ever comes in handy; when it does, it’s priceless. The thing is, I hardly ever use my GUI. Ever. I ride the command line like a drunken cowboy trying to prove something to the carneys. Given I really adore the concept of the GUI Trash deferred delete paradigm, I’ve added it to my command-line recipe book, giving it to me; GUI or not.
Programming
19
Apr 10
Simple Approaches to Scaling Any Website
No matter the site, the traffic, the scope or content, a tip of the hat should always be gestured to the scale it needs to support. Not to say any effort should be put forth to make it the most scalable site or webapp in the universe, but certainly a little thought is allowed. Of course, I’ve said plenty of times before and will continue to: don’t fall into the trap of premature optimization. It’s dumb. And in most cases, developing to solve existing scalability issues is a business case most people are willing to take as it will (generally) save time, money, sanity and morale in the long run. Regardless, I also believe there are simple simple steps everyone setting up a site can take. Not as a premature optimization, but as a logical, default method of installing your web tier to ensure it’s optimized out of the box. Particularly when it’s combining different pieces of proven technology and enabling their features to prevent needless overhead, it’s no longer premature, it’s simply expected.
16
Apr 10
Extensible Shell Environment Across Your Servers
One of my biggest frustrations any time I move to a new server: migrating to a new data center, changing jobs or simply adding new servers somewhere in between is keeping my customized shell environment while giving each server a bit of customizability. Of course, in a linux environment, we have our coveted .bashrc that will do this. But what has helped me through this process time and time again is building my .bashrc to allow for server-specific extensions. Here’s how I’ve done it. Continue reading →
2
Mar 10
Don’t forget your stems, smokey
Maybe I’ve been in this industry too long. Maybe I’m a complete moron. Maybe it’s a little shade of both and some of a third. Who knows. The point is that everywhere I seem to look, nobody knows about one of the most useful word matching algorithms. Not text matching as that’s a horse of a different color. Words. Word. The difference is subtle, but it is something that seems to come up a few times a year over the past decade for me, where if I had known about it earlier in my career I would probably have more hair now. The difference is this: word matching, you want to match near-exact gramatical terms. Not necessarily something that rhymes or sounds similar (that’s a something else entirely), but words that are one in the same with different suffixes. Yeah, it’s a little weird and out there, but it’s a problem that seems to bolster its head about every once in a while and knowing about Word Stemming will make your life just a little easier. Again, maybe everyone learned about this in their infancy and I’m just an idiot. Though, every time I use it in a solution, I surprise at least one person… hence why I bring it up now.