Articles in the Programming category

1. A Little Perl: DBI and Transactions

   Posted on July 30, 2008 in Programming

   Database transactions are really no mystery. For the uninitiated, the idea is that we want to make changes to the database inside of a transaction that can be committed or thrown away. Why is this a good thing? Without transactions, changes to the database have to be manually undone if …

2. PHP Time Comparison in WordPress Themes

   Posted on July 21, 2008 in Programming

   ProBlogger Darren Rowse recently posted a question about putting dates on blog posts. A lot of folks were interested in the idea of removing dates from older blog posts, but don't know where to start. This is a useful PHP excercise, so I decided to implement it on my personal …

3. Choosing a Language for Custom Nagios Plugins

   Posted on February 12, 2008 in Programming

   Choosing a language in which to develop your custom Nagios plugins is pretty easy. You have two roads you can go down: compiled or scripting.

   If you decide to build plugins using a compiled language, just about any will do. Generally speaking, C is the usual choice for something like …

4. Apache, SSL, Rails and a Broken Redirect

   Posted on February 06, 2008 in Programming

   If you are using Apache and <acronym title="Secure Sockets Layer">SSL</acronym> as a proxy front-end for your Ruby on Rails application, you might have a problem with redirects if the backend server (Mongrel, for example) does not use SSL.

   In a nutshell, you'll discover that redirects are sent …

5. ActiveRecord and SELECT DISTINCT

   Posted on November 20, 2007 in Programming

   I'm writing this post for two reasons:

   1. For some reason, I couldn't find a lot of information on ActiveRecord and SELECT DISTINCT().
   2. I'm hoping some Ruby / ActiveRecord guru will stumble across this and provide a better solution.

   Recently, I was working on a project written in Ruby with ActiveRecord that …

6. Installing RubyGems with MacPorts

   Posted on October 30, 2007 in Programming

   Quick note.

   I recently needed to install a few RubyGems on my Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) development system. I use MacPorts to keep my system consistent, but MacPorts was causing the problem. Here's a look at the output I was getting while trying to install Active Support.

   $ sudo …

7. Logging Active Record Queries to a File

   Posted on October 29, 2007 in Programming

   I was recently helping a developer with some SQL optimizations in Ruby. The developer was using Active Record, and (until now) my Active Record experience has been pretty minimal.

   One thing that was really driving me bonkers was how to get Active Record to print out the queries it was …

8. Perl, ntop and Odd Hash Assignments

   Posted on October 19, 2007 in Programming

   This is a silly mistake that can be easily avoided.

   I was working on a Perl script that grabbed network traffic information from my ntop server and reported on it. ntop provides an <acronym title="Application Program Interface">API</acronym> that specifically supports Perl. Although I was seeing the data …

9. Get Subversion Updates via Email

   Posted on August 28, 2007 in Programming

   Sometimes it seems like a great idea to receive updates whenever someone commits something to your Subversion repository, right? This has definitely seemed like a good idea to me, but it's only nice if you work in a small shop with only a few developers. Too many developers make this …

10. Get The Most Out Of Ruby on Rails With Railscasts

    Posted on May 11, 2007 in Programming

    I recently came across Railscasts via Digital Media Minute (that name might sound familiar thanks to Jim's XHTML Character Entity Reference).

    Ryan Bates hosts individual episodes three times a week delivering tips and tricks for Ruby on Rails. Each screencast is less than ten minutes long and requires Quicktime for …