I recently upgraded to the newest version of Nginx, and discovered that the technique I described in my previous two posts no longer works. The good news is that it no longer works because some of the bugs in Nginx were fixed, and the reason I needed that complicated workaround solution was because of bugs in Nginx. …

Rails will automatically load Ruby files from your /app, /lib, and other directories when you use the appropriately named constant. For example, if you use the name RailsExampleObject in your code, Rails will automatically look for a file called rails_example_object.rb and load it.

However, this autoloading of classes …

XeTeX is an improvement upon the famous typesetting system TeX. XeTeX provides Unicode support and native support for standard fonts.

Unfortunately, XeTeX is fairly poorly documented. Here are some interesting findings I have come across (some particular to XeTeX, others just general ideas for TeX and LaTeX).

Here is how to encrypt and decrypt files using public-key encryption and openssl.

I prefer this over GPG because openssl is installed everywhere (including OS X by default) and it requires no specialized subsystem (keyrings, etc.). Just two key files and the document to be encrypted.

How do you select a random row from a SQL table?

I can find three popular solutions on the web. The first is to sort the table randomly and take the first value. The second is to select a random number between 1 and the number of rows in the table, traverse that many rows down the table, and select that row. The third …

Create the directory, and run git init Add the repository to gitosis, add users, add webadmin with readonly access Initialize the Rails project, with rails . Initialize Capistrano, with capify . Add the .gitignore file Rename config/database.yml to config/database.[USER].yml, and softlink database.yml to that file, …

Following up on my previous post on user web directories and nginx, here is an improved solution that executes PHP scripts in user home directories as well.

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A recent blog post and its corresponding comments thread on Hacker News got me thinking about programming and the law. As a programmer and a lawyer, I’ve found that other programmers have a particular fascination about the law, discussing it often in drawn-out, thoughtful, and often strongly argumentative …

Transcript of a session with Gmail's SMTP server. Items in italics are my entries. bowser:~> telnet gsmtp183.google.com 25 Trying 64.233.183.27... Connected to gsmtp183.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mx.google.com ESMTP h6si2778348nfh.21 HELO localhost 250 mx.google.com at your service HELP 214 2.0.0 …