While developing a Rails apps using PostgreSQL (unlike MySQL) I often run out of db connections and see errors like “FATAL: remaining connection slots are reserved for non-replication superuser connections” and when I do, my Rails app stops working. Restarting Postgres fixing the problem, but it was harder to restart postgres that I expected. Here’s how I do it. Read more…
I keep my music and my photos on a server at home. Whenever I’m home I want all of my shares to be accessible automatically so I can launch iTunes and iPhoto without needing to do anything first (i.e. I don’t want to click anything to mount the drives before I start listening to Adagio for Tron). Here’s how I pulled it off. Read more…
They’re both good, but Last.fm wins. How can this be? Last.fm’s amazing powers are put on display after the break.
I looked around for an easier way to post an internal IP to DynDNS, but I didn’t find one. Scripting to the rescue.
Sometimes you need to know your Windows machine’s IP. For example, if you would like to update your dynamic DNS entry from a script file. Here’s a hack that gets the job done.
There’s more than way to go about it, but I prefer using the open source ClamAV and a script that runs to scan each email as it comes in.
I would like my Facebook Connect app to publish stories to my users’ Facebook news stream. I went looking for how do this with Facebooker and figured out an answer.
Rake tasks contained in a gem are not automatically available to a rails app that requires the gem. Whether that’s the right way to do things is under debate, but in the mean time there are a couple workarounds.
I too ran into some trouble before discovering that my beloved AuthLogic is validating my email field. The validation is a good thing overall, but I want to support blank email addresses as well as properly formatted ones.
I’m going to run out of hard drive space at some point. I’ve got 1.5TB drives in my Drobo right now, I wonder when the 3TB drives will come out so I can just upgrade them in place for double the capacity…
Want to buy a blu-ray movie, but not interested in paying full price? Search on CamelCamelCamel for what you want then subscribe to the associated “3rd party used price” RSS feed (look for the RSS icon: 
). You’ll get an RSS update each time the price changes.
Want more traffic from your friendly neighborhood search engine to your site? Here are some of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks I’ve picked up along the way.
The meat falls off the bone. They taste like ribs should taste. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.
Sneha rolls buffet style, all you can eat. All I can eat when I go is the Chicken Maharaja.
Why should wine get all the good grapes? I buy this stuff by the case when I’m in Sonoma and it still goes fast.
Try the Chicken Pizza and order a large so you can take some home.
The Refuge in San Carlos, CA makes their pastrami in-house and its amazing. You’ll wonder how you ever put up with the conventional, mass-produced pastrami you get pretty much everywhere else.
The mess of cables behind your computer sure doesn’t look safe. And this probably won’t make it any safer, but it sure makes it easier to see what’s going on. It’s all about taking up the slack.
Ziploc freezer bags help keep your cables untangled and easy to sort through. There’s even space for you to write the date when your cable goes bad, in case you are good at predicting that sort of thing.
There comes a time in every professional’s career when they need a graph. Maybe they need to illustrate a usability scale, maybe its something else. Fortunately, the developers at Omni are focused on making it stupid-easy to make graphs—no need to bust open Excel, dust off any math skills, or crack open a book on Photoshop to make the graph you need.