AI-enabled developer productivity, build systems, and engineering leadership
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Somehow I managed to miss the fact that Mac OS Forge released MacPorts v1.5. If you aren't familiar with MacPorts, it's the reincarnation of DarwinPorts under the Mac OS Forge / Apple banner. For any UNIX admin, or serious OS X-er, MacPorts is an extensive collection of UNIX tools ported …
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Anyone that has spent any time with Best Practical's RT: Request Tracker knows that it is a leader in the open-source ticketing system market. It is both robust and highly configurable. I've used several systems for incident, trouble, and bug tracking over the last 10+ years, but RT is by …
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The Camino Project has announced version 1.5.1 of the Camino Browser for Mac OS X. This update includes security and stability fixes over version 1.5.
According to the release notes, Camino 1.5.1 contains the following improvements over version 1.5:
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By default, MySQL only allows access by the 'root' account from the host running the database server ('localhost'). Often times that's perfectly adequate. There are occasions when you need remote access as the 'root' account, however. In these cases, it's helpful to be aware of one little gotcha when creating …
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If you've spent any time managing a web site, you are undoubtedly familiar with the dreaded Alexa rankings. It's common knowledge that these numbers are fairly useless since they depend on the end user having the Alexa toolbar installed. Obviously, not everyone has this. To make matters worse, Alexa only …
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I wrote recently about using Subversion over SSH. A minor annoyance with that setup is the need to enter your system password at least once, and sometimes multiple times depending on the action you are taking. There are also times when a remote system needs to access another system via …
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If you've ever needed to set up a Subversion repository, you know how long it can take to get WebDAV working with Apache before you even get to the repository set up. Although WebDAV is the best overall protocol for Subversion repositories (it doesn't require real users on the system …
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Currently, I use mysqldump to backup several large MySQL databases amounting to millions of rows of data. During the dump process, tables get locked for reading. 99% of the time, this system works just fine.
Ever so often (perhaps every 50-100 dumps), a read lock will hang on a table …
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Due to security vulnerabilities in WordPress 2.2, Slaptijack has been upgraded to WordPress 2.2.1. As always, if you notice anything amiss with the site, please let me know.
The upgrade fixed the following security vulnerabilities:
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Someone looked over my shoulder the other day and was blown away by my MySQL client prompt.
(slap@localhost) [slaptijack]>
The boring default client just acknowledges that you are using MySQL and nothing more. This prompt indicates your username, the server you are working on, and the database you are …
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By default, a BIND DNS server will report which version it is running to anyone that's interested. All it takes is a simple lookup of the version.bind text record in the chaos class of your server. Check this out:
Skadi:~ slap$ dig version.bind txt chaos @localhost
; <<>> DiG 9 …Posted on in Software
It's recently come to my attention that a large percentage of the Slaptijack site has ended up in the dreaded "Google Supplemental Index". This means that key pages are not being served during normal searches. You can see which pages are in the Supplemental Index by running the following search …
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This is just a little humorous anecdote along the lines of frantically searching the house for the glasses you happen to be wearing. After yesterday's somewhat "heavy" post, I thought the mood needed a little lightening.
I've only recently (in the last month or so) begun using Gmail as my …
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I've written before regarding the command-line email client Mutt, and how useful it can be. Unfortunately, Mutt is designed to read a local mail spool by default. If you need to use Mutt to read email from a remote mail server, <acronym title="Internet Message Access Protocol">IMAP</acronym> may …
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Mutt is a text-based email client for UNIX-based operating systems. To say it is highly configurable is an understatement. It can be compiled to support a variety of mail protocols and runs in almost any terminal emulator. Unfortunately, the glory days of Mutt have come and gone. In the days …
