Whether you a new to software development of a relic of the early Dilbert era of developers version control has been around in some form or another since the early days of programming in the 1970’s. Granted programming existed prior to 1970 but what happened on punch cards is really not relevant to this discussion. What really matters is the pervasiveness of today’s open source projects and the need of programming teams to collaborate between iterations. [Read more…] about Serving git with FreeBSD
TechnoBabel
iOS7 is good but…
Sure iOS7 is far better than the seemingly unfounded fears rampant through the development stage. Sure the icons and interfaces are flat but in a minimalistic way. Once again Apple has push us by giving us what we wanted before we knew it.
Unfortunately there is indeed a dark spot on this seemingly sunny day. Apple seriously has to rethink it’s deployment strategy. The new mobile OS was released yesterday and as of this morning it only had a 28% adoption rate. Droid fan boys and Microsoft will of course spin this as end user rejection however it truly has more to do with the ridiculous deployment scheme employed by Apple.
Consider a family with two or more iPhones on a less than optimal internet connection having to each individually download the binary update. I saw reports on twitter of 52+ hours to download. At one point my computer reported 84 hours and the number of times that iTunes froze during the download is utterly unbelievable. Each time you restart the process it begins all over again from the beginning. Saying that this experience is frustrating would be an infuriating understatement. This is incredible because the file is only 752MB, which makes me want to shout, ‘What the Frak?!?’ [Read more…] about iOS7 is good but…
Filtering without regex in PHP
Did you know that there are a whole set of nifty filtering methods built into PHP? I know it’s crazy to think that the Swiss Army Knife language of the internet would have it’s own built-in filtering system but it does. For instance a common use case would be to sanitize user input prior to using it.
What I mean is perhaps you require a user to enter an email address into a form but let’s face it there are a lot of nefarious types out there who do not wish to play by the rules so they might try entering some arbitrary text or worse attempt to escape a command prompt in the package. Obviously no body wants to hand over their hard working website to some sort of script kiddie so what do you do? You filter the input of course. We’ve all seen code with a function like the following; [Read more…] about Filtering without regex in PHP
How to make Xcode play nice with Mac Ports
Recently I upgraded one of my Macs to Mountain Lion and subsequently need to upgrade the installation of MacPorts. I hope that writing this will help some future self avoid the pain points I did experienced during this process. While it may seem logical upon reading it was a lot of trial and error (mostly error) to reach this point.
Initially as a shot in the dark I attempted to run a self update. While it may seem like small change to upgrade to 2.2.0 from 2.1.2 unfortunately, there were issues. As promising as the update started after a few minutes the results ended up in failure as demonstrated by the following output:
[Read more…] about How to make Xcode play nice with Mac Ports
Boosting your logs with cronolog
Continuing in our series on logging, with a quick look at cronolog which is another powerful logging tool you can employ on your systems. With cronolog you can organize your logs into a chronological hierarchy of files. An interesting twist is the symbolic linking of the current log file back to a specified location which can be useful in working with log analyzers like Webalizer and AccessWatch.
Once again it is we will define a custom log format but you can use a predefined one if that suits your needs. Remember if you intend to use this format on multiple virtual hosts then you should consider defining it either in the main httpd.conf or a config file that is included prior to the vhost config.
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b" SpecialLog