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…
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 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.
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.
Many usability professionals focus on, well, usability. But there’s more to usability than an intuitive interface. The best stuff in our lives are pleasant, fun, even habit forming.
While you were reading the post about how to ship a used book, you may have found yourself strangely compelled to hover your mouse over the cool, image hotspot mouseover hover caption thingies on the picture of shipping supplies. Perhaps you wondered how you too could harness the power of such hotspots on your own blog. I’ll let you in on the secret.