fabric-graphite is a fabric script to install Graphite, Nginx, uwsgi and all dependencies on a debian-based host. Why? I was reading a few interesting posts about graphite. When I tried to install it however, I couldn’t find anything that really … Continued
One of my primary aims when building a resillient cloud architecture, is being able to spawn instances quickly. Many cloud providers give you tools to create images or snapshots of existing cloud instances and launch them. This is great, but … Continued
One of the best rules of thumb I know is the 80/20 rule. I can’t think of a more practical rule in almost any situation. Combined with the law of diminishing returns, it pretty much sums up how the universe … Continued
When talking about security, the first thing that usually comes to mind is encryption. Spies secretly coding (or de-coding) some secret message that should not be revealed to the enemy. Encryption is this mysterious thing that turns all text into … Continued
Scoring a goal against google is never easy. Google analytics allows you to do some strange and wonderful things, but not without some teeth grinding. I was struggling with this for a little while, and it was a great source … Continued
I’ve come across a small nuisance that seemed to appear occasionally with unicode urls. Some websites seem to encode/escape/quote urls as soon as they see any symbol (particularly % sign). They appear to assume it needs to be encoded, and … Continued
On my previous post I talked about django memory management, the little-known maxrequests parameter in particular, and how it can help ‘pop’ some balloons, i.e. kill and restart some django processes in order to release some memory. On this post … Continued
A while ago I was working on optimizing memory use for some django instances. During that process, I managed to better understand memory management within django, and thought it would be nice to share some of those insights. This is … Continued
About a month ago I posted about tweaking timthumb to work with CDN. Timthumb is a great script, but great scripts also have bugs. A recently discovered one is a rather serious bug. It can allow attackers to inject arbitrary … Continued
Following from my previous post, I’ve come across another issue related to caching in wordpress: dynamic content. There’s a constant trade-off between caching and dynamic content. If you want your content to be truly dynamic, you can’t cache it properly. … Continued
[IMPORTANT: please check that you have the latest version of timthumb! older versions might have a serious security vulnerability. A little more about it here] I’ve been recently trying to optimize a wordpress based site. It was running fine, but … Continued
A quick-tip on the importance of timestamps and making sure your time zone is set correctly. I was recently playing around with fail2ban. It’s a really cool little tool that monitors your log files, matches certain patterns, and can act … Continued
[Also published on testuff.com] Most people I know tend to simply use the same password on ALL websites. Email, Paypal, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter. This is obviously a very bad idea. Passwords are always a problem. Difficult to remember, hard … Continued
This saturday, 8th January 2011 I’m running a small geeky arts project at Madame Lillie’s gallry in Stoke Newington. SMILE – a temporary exhibition The smile project attempts to capture snapshots within the exhibition space. The audience takes an active … Continued
I was really pleased when my good friend chris asked me to help him with his edition of 1 project. I guess it was exciting working on an arts project. I also liked his project because randomness is an interesting … Continued
One-Time-Passwords always fascinated me. Long long time ago in a land far far away I suddenly had this idea. The idea was simple and in today’s terms pretty common, perhaps trivial. One-Time-Password without the need for an extra token. After … Continued
I recently noticed my iphone clock wasn’t accurate. I’m not exactly sure why. It was only a few minutes behind, but it still annoyed me. Why couldn’t my iphone sync its time with an internet time server?? I know it … Continued
On my last post I described how I get my asterisk box to know the caller name from a csv data file. The thing is, my address book keeps changing on my iphone. People change their phone numbers, I meet … Continued
Caller ID is a wonderful feature. Don’t we love getting a call from someone we like, and perhaps more importantly, ignore those annoying callers who we really don’t want to talk to. But this is yesterday’s news. We all have … Continued
ISPs are a strange breed. They’re supposed to give a very straight-forward service – plug me in to the Internet please. That’s all. Plain and simple. It seems like some ISPs have different ideas as to their roles and responsibilities. … Continued
Perhaps yet another misleading title for this post, but bear with me. When I was a child we used to play outside a lot. I always remember the neighbours complaining if we made too much noise. Such is life. There … Continued
This is something I never thought would concern me. All those domain ownership issues, I thought, were with people who just aren’t organised enough to renew their domains, forget their passwords, or pick domains that others try to steal. I’m … Continued
I’ve had a strange thing happening a while ago. I sent a CD in a padded envelope to someone, and it was returned to me. Well, it didn’t look like it was returned, more like they actually delivered it to … Continued
Perhaps the title is a little misleading, but it’s an opportunity to combine two of my greatest loves: food and computers. I suppose even this intro is misleading. Oh. Forget it. Lets get down to business. And this time our … Continued
I don’t like being late. It runs in the family. My dad is so obsessed with being late that he’s always early. How embarrassing. Unfortunately I seemed to have inherited it from him. I do however try to compensate. I … Continued
Not a particularly interesting post, unless you happen to be running Debian 4.0 etch running on Virtuozzo host and are trying to install JDK5. I saw a post with a user reporting the same error on the parallels forum , … Continued
Just so to set the records straight, I’m the real dummy here, as you would obviously see. I absolutely have no experience with python, lighttpd, turbogears or wsgi, fcgi but I was given a task to set it up on … Continued
[Migrated from tuzig.com] This is something I thought would be simple. Then I began scratching my head reading all the posts on the web, thinking I might actually need to get a proper book. Finally I realised it was actually … Continued
[Migrated from tuzig.com] I’ve been struggling with getting the iCal app on Mac OS X to use a shared calendar on Apache installed on Windows and using domain authentication (SSPI). It is all supposed to be so simple, yet it … Continued
[Migrated from tuzig.com] 2009 Aug 14 Update: Looks like rsnapshot is now packaged in cygwin! Thanks to pseudo-anonymous coward for the comment! Some of the information below may still be of interest, so it’s left unchanged. Rsnapshot is a great … Continued