The War on Drugs

Like many of my peers, I believe that the so-called “War on Drugs” that the United States along with many other countries is engaged in, is ridiculous. It has produced no tangible results after decades of enforcement and trillions of dollars spent. Yet it continues, …

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Oracle’s MySQL

I suppose this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. Inevitable really. But all the same, it was a bit of a shock to see it for the first time this evening…

Oh the times they are a changin’!

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MongoDB 1.4.0 for CentOS 5

I know I haven’t posted anything in forever. I mean well! I’m working on an article outlining an introduction to encryption with GPG, as well as my own thoughts about all the NoSQL hoopla currently going on.
But for now, I’ve built RPM packages for MongoDB 1.4.0 …

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MongoDB 1.2.2 for CentOS 5

I’ve built RPM packages for MongoDB 1.2.2 that are native to RHEL5 / CentOS5 systems. They’re in my Yum repository now. Note that I’ve also built newer packages for the Boost libraries because Mongo likes newer versions than the ones bundled with the distro. …

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What I hope I take away from 2009

It’s simple, and I think best expressed by this graphic (my favorite from 2009).

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MongoDB Packages for CentOS 5

Hi all. If you’re one of the (approximately nine) people who read this blog, sorry for the absence. Been a little busy for the last few weeks.
One of the things I’ve been busy with is playing around with is MongoDB which I think is really cool. I don’t have time …

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iPhone vs. Droid

This is genius (disclaimer: planning on getting the Droid fairly soon…)

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Addison Kowalski pwns me onstage at FOWA London 2009

I’ve just gotten back from a few days in London for the 2009 FOWA, which was awesome. The very last session was “The Kevin and Gary Show” with the inimitable duo onstage. There was a live feed of all the #fowa tagged tweets going out written by the very cool …

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Off to London for FOWA

I’m heading off to London tomorrow for Carsonified’s FOWA. I’ll be speaking twice at this one. The first is a workshop where I’m going to talk about emerging technologies that can be used to replace the things in the ubiquitous LAMP application stack. I’m also …

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Python Tornado Packages for CentOS 5 Available

Apparently, I’m just on a packaging rampage these days. Recently, Facebook released Tornado. From their site:

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking
web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed
application is written using a web …

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Easy Python 2.6 / Django on CentOS 5

CentOS (and RHEL) 5 is great for some things, and not so great for others. What these distros do very well is never change. That’s their zen. If you get whatever it is you have working on them, then none of the official updates should ever break anything. They never …

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Yum Repository for CentOS 5

This site is hosted on a (dv) 3.5 server kindly provided by my employer (mt) Media Temple. I set this one up in a non-standard way, by which I mean, there’s no control panel. We normally ship these VPS servers with the Plesk control panel, but this is what I do for a …

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Chromium Updater Script for Linux

My friends over at Techcrunch released a Chromium updater for OS X today (disclosure, I guess, I currently admin the Techcrunch sites). I’ve been using Chromium on Linux for a while and am starting to really like it. It just so happens I have a shell script that sort …

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New Hotness

In an ongoing effort to stay abreast of the things that the cool kids are all doing, I’ve upgraded some of the system software on this blog. Specifically, I’m now running PHP 5.3.0 and Nginx 0.8.8, just because. I have no idea what this is going to do. But, I’m …

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VirtualBox 3.0.0 Fail

So some of you may know that I’m a big, big fan of VirtualBox. I’ve found it to be intuitive, very functional, and it really lets me get the most out of my MacBook. I have five operating systems on it currently (two Linux, one BSD, OpenSolaris and Windows XP) and …

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What you should know about DNS

This is an article that explains some basics about the Internet's DNS system.

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Microsoft just got a +1 from me…

I just went to the Microsoft web site homepage for the first time in at least a year. And I was greeted by awesomeness.
Yes, ladies and gents, there’s a reference to Spinal Tap on their homepage. Behold.

Cheers guys. I think it’s great.

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Impressions of Fedora 11

A review of the Fedora 11 desktop.

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Pretty Emacs fonts in Ubuntu

Like all properly enlightened techy types, I use Emacs as my editor of choice when I’m doing real coding work. I’ve been doing this for a while now, I’ve seen a lot of editors come and go, but Emacs (and XEmacs) have always been here for me. Yes, it’s …

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Make the Logo Bigger

I still get a good chuckle whenever I listen to this. Total awesomeness.

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