To some that might sound obvious, after all what has a nice slick OS to do with that kludgy unintelligible unix command line stuff. But on the apple website itself you can find this page whose url I'm reporting literal because it says a lot: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html. And there's a big image there saying: "UNIX. The UNIX you know. The Mac you love". And so when I was given a macbook pro by my employer after begging to no avail for it to be replaced with a thinkpad I was told over and over that I'd been just fine "...because you know, it's really UNIX, it runs FreeBSD". How disappointing. more »

Seven months have passed, I'm close to a complete full-circle trip of the world and if there's something I found hard living on a different timezone every couple of months that's communicating with people. more »

Recently I took a peak at a default mysql installation and found one interesting, to not say scary, thing. SQL_MODE comes set to empty string and if you dig into the documentation you find that... you find nothing! Yes you heard me, whatever a blank SQL_MODE means is not known yet is what most of the people run with because this little fact is advertised nowhere, especially not in the post installation guidelines. more »

If there are a couple things that a few years of system administration should have taught you, the importance of backups and logs is one. more »

To be compatible across different backends the best option is to store ips and netmasks as longint and manage the transformations in code, otherwise, if compatibility is not a concern or writing that code is a problem, both mysql and postresql offer their own built-in functions to aid with the job. more »

A while ago I set on the search for a cheap domain and ssl certs reseller and settled for namecheap.com. Here I'm documenting my, overall positive, experience with them. more »

I never cared too much about my web presence and spikelab.org is the only domain I ever owned, so back then doing extensive researches to save a couple bucks didn't make much sense. Someone recommended Gandi to me and there I bought it. As for ssl certificates, CACert is what we all should use and push for, but right now we're far from a large adoption, and considering the associated fees (read bribes) required to be accepted in largely used browsers like IE it won't probably ever happen. more »

A friend of mine had to move some websites configured as vhosts on a certain ip to another hoster/ip and wanted this to happen without users noticing. The common approach is to lower the TTL a few days before switching to the new ip and maintain the old server up for an overlapping period. This is necessary because of broken dns cachers that won't honor the TTL and serve the cached ip. more »

Last night I had some kind of brainfart and ended up creating a new style for my website. It's kinda funny 'cause it took me ages to decide about my former one and instead this came out in about 1 hour. To me this looks much better, cleaner and more readable now that I moved away from the black background. The logo has been cut from a wallpaper I had in my collections, unfortunately I cant trace the author, all I could find is a reference on deviantart saying the wallpaper is from pixelgirlpresents.com, but that's it. Hope you like it.

I have some friends running a music digital promotion company and I recently got them on Trac. They simply loved it, and kept on saying for weeks they couldn't believe they worked without such tool. Face it, especially if your business is software development, living without a SCM/project management system is a suicide. more »