elwoodicious

Something wicked is on the rise.

james — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:57:16 +0000

Shot last night using my iPhone 3GS as the storm finished rolling past Tolland.

Summer Rider

james — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:30:27 +0000

Entertain my vanity, two photos I shot as wallpapers for the iPhone.

james — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:17:22 +0000

Been far too long since I walked about with my camera and even longer since I shared anything. Here’s two photos that I took and am using as wallpapers for my iPhone, maybe you might like them as well.

Because my brain is a sieve here’s how to serve custom maintenance pages based on the subdomain

james — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:43:23 +0000

Just like the favicons post of yore, this is another one that came up in conversation, “Can we display a custom maintenance page for each subdomain?” Since I had managed to sketch out a proof-of-concept with the favicons I figured this one shouldn’t be too hard.

The way this works is that Apache checks for a file called maintenance.on and if it exists it rewrites all traffic to maintenance-[subdomain].html. In practice, maintenance.on is set during deploys that require downtime such as one that might do work on the database, and at the end of a successful deploy the file is either removed or moved to something like maintenance.off.

Granted, this is a little kludgy as it depends on a separate html file for each subdomain and I don’t have a fallback position if that maintenance file doesn’t exist, Apache will just serve up a 404.

Anyway, here’s what’s in the Apache site file:

# Check for the maintenance.on file and redirect all requests to # to a custom maintenance page based on the following formula # maintenance-[subdomain].html # get the requested subdomain name into variable %1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.]+)\.*
# skip the rules for images and css RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(png|jpg|jpeg|gif|css|ico)$
# check to see if maintenance.on exists RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/system/maintenance.on -f RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance-1%.html
# write out the custom maintenance page based on the domain RewriteRule ^.*$ /system/maintenance-%1.html [L]

This was gratefully stolen and extended from the Codahale post, Time For A Grown-Up Server: Rails, Mongrel, Apache, Capistrano and You.

“If you ain’t sassy then you ain’t nothin’.”

james — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:00:37 +0000

Some months earlier, Gabi turned three.

james — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:22:44 +0000

The passing of the day can lay you low.

james — Fri, 07 May 2010 12:06:30 +0000

The Lord of the Pumpkin patiently waits.

james — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:50:19 +0000

All along the watchtower, Princes kept the view.

james — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:03:47 +0000

My netbook is absolutely great when I don’t have to use it.

james — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:52:42 +0000

See that knot? The one that looks like I had been stung by a bee? That is from spending the last two months working full-time (meaning 10+ hours) on a cramped, tiny, crappy, little keyboard. I have no idea what it is but it sits right on two tendons and while it doesn’t hurt per se it makes typing, guitar playing, chopping vegetables, shuffling cards, and raking the yard really uncomfortable. It rolls around like a marble causing the tendons to “pop” when they stretch.

So the pro’s of this netbook are:

Killer battery life (~6 hours)
Light (maybe 2.5lbs)
Fast wakeup and shutdown (SSD helps a lot)

The con’s:

IT WILL TRASH YOUR WRIST

At the moment, the con is completely outweighing the pro’s. Really looking forward to my laptop arriving.