Vancouver Django Meetup
The first monthly meeting of the new Vancouver Django group took place today. Good times and Django lore abounded. Want to come to the next one? Check out the Meetup page.
Jul 23
Jul 22
Centos LAMP Restart Script
Here's a simple script to monitor a web app hosted on a Centos/Red Hat server for the "white screen of death" that you'll get if PHP runs out of memory or you get a fatal error with error display turned off. In the example below, the script is monitoring Drupal by checking the user login screen:
#!/bin/bash wget -q http://<your site>/user -O /tmp/apache_test.html if [ -s /tmp/apache_test.html ]; then echo > /dev/null else /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld restart /usr/sbin/apachectl restart fi
Jul 01
Jun 22
Haml for Drupal
I just committed a Drupal input filter for Haml to Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/haml. It depends on phpHaml, which in turn depends on PHP 5.
May 20
Linux Keychain
While setting up an automated rsync over SSH, I learned about the useful keychain utility which makes using ssh-agent easier for passwordless authentication. Although the links to the project's source code were dead, "yum install keychain" conveniently installed it in Centos.
May 10
Sphinx Talk Slides
I've posted the slides from today's Sphinx talk at Vancouver Drupal Camp.
Ianiv of NowPublic pointed out that while Sphinx is quick to search, its updating speed is less than that of Xapian, another C++-based search engine. Nonethess, Sphinx is going to dramatically increase speed and search quality for the vast majority of sites.
May 06
Sphinx Talk At Vancouver Drupal Camp
I'll be doing a talk this Friday at the sold-out Drupal Camp Vancouver on the fast and elegant Sphinx search engine. Sphinx is open source, straightforward, and used by folks like NowPublic and The Pirate Bay to provide scalable search.
Apr 23
Getting The Rotating Desktop Cube Working in Ubunutu Hardy Heron
Last weekend, I configured my Macbook to dual-boot, via rEFIt, Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta and MacOS Leopard. I'd previously been frustrated when attempting to run Gutsy, but Hardy is a vast improvement: other than some minor glitches, everything important works well.
One thing I found a bit confusing, however, was setting up the snazzy Compiz Fusion rotating desktop cube, so I thought I'd document it because the process is a bit weird.
Apr 19
State of Django Pluggable Applications
Click here to view/download a PDF of my presentation for Open Web Vancouver 2008.
Apr 17
Open Web Vancouver 2008
After nearly a year of organizing, Open Web Vancouver 2008 went off amazingly. Over two days, we managed to feature over 30 talks in three rooms. Over 300 open web enthusiasts attended and the crowd seemed fun and diverse, with a lot more women attending than I've seen at past conferences. Gerald Baurer managed to organize a SocialCamp track that provided a forum for Vancouver startups and online ventures to show their stuff.
