slaptijack

Although I use Git all day long, I actually prefer to use Mercurial for my personal stuff. When I started working on this project to maintain slaptijack.com with Pelican rather than continuing to use Wordpress, one of the things that really interested me was the ability to keep Markdown …

Out of the box, Magento has four methods available for storing session data: filesystem, database, memcached, and tmpfs. The default method is to store session information in the filesystem. I believe that storing sessions in Redis is actually superior to all of the aforementioned methods. Each of the four default …

This is was my next project.

Update: For now I've solved this problem by using FeedWordPress to pull the Atom feed for the Pelican-specific portion of the website.

• Use this as a starting point for the XML-RPC bit.
• It should first try to pull the article before committing a new …

I'm using Jinja2 templates with my new Pelican-based articles. If you have Django experience, you'll feel right at home using Jinja2 templates. I decided early on that I wanted to create my own theme from scratch and keep it as basic as possible. (In fact, 'basic' is the name …

I've been using WordPress on this site since 2007. After all this time, I've decided I want to try something new. So, I've decided to go in a completely different direction and start serving static content. There are three things driving my decision to change:

• The existing site is really …

Captures an El Capitan DNS-search-domain workaround while flagging the need for a current macOS DNS diagnosis and supportable fix.

Sometimes this pops up when you least expect it:

Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.

This morning, I went to refresh one of my git repo's for work, and make spit that out. What the heck happened last night? Anyway, the …

I recently ran into an issue on a Wordpress site running behind an nginx web server. The site was frequently being attacked by a botnet hitting /xmlrpc.php so rapidly, it would eventually force the FastCGI processes behind nginx to consume all available CPU. Naturally, this would cause all legitimate …

Great!

Once again, Apple has made a change in how DNS is handled in Mac OS X. Originally, Yosemite (10.10) had replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd. This meant that all of those who had made a change to force mDNSResponder to always append search domains to DNS lookups had to …

Once again I was working on some Python code for EVE Online. This particular bit of code gathers a list of kills for a particular region and then summarizes that data in a daily report. Everything had been working properly, until one day...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users …

Recently, I got an email that went something like this:

I have completed a BTech in Electronics and Communication. Now, I am working as a desktop engineer. How can I move my career to the network / server side?

Career moves are hard for everyone. Personally, I've been thinking about making …

If you have a directory that you want to keep clean, tmpreaper is a great way to remove files based on how old they are. The other day, I had a directory that looked like this:

x@x:~/dump$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 x x 212268169 Mar 15 01:02 …

The other night I was working on some Python code that interacts with the zKillboard API. The API call returns kill information via JSON for EVE Online. While making the request, I was getting an error that I was using "non-acceptable encoding." It turns out that the zKillboard guys require …

We run several (read: hundreds) of servers that are still running Debian 6 (Squeeze). A few months ago, we started seeing the following errors coming from the daily apt cronjob: "WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!" When running apt-get update the following errors dump out:

$ apt-get update
W: GPG …

It seems this problem has resurfaced again with the new version of Mac OS X. More specifically, this problem seems to affect appending search domains when the hostname contains a dot. In Yosemite (10.10), mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd. Fortunately, all we need to do here is add …