Ramblings

SSL Joys

2009-05-14T16:02:07Z

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. Andrew S. Tanenbaum I’ve been working with a Apache proxy to force SSL and https. Well, I haven’t had any control over the certificates. And they can come in so many versions, especially given that Microsoft wants to do things [...]

After long silence

2009-04-10T17:27:38Z

The hiatus has been due to me having been really sick with a weird neurological disorder. I didn’t do any coding at all for over 2 months. I’m starting to feel better, but I still have my good days and bad. So, there will be updates. Hopefully before not too much longer.

New Ruby Blog

2009-02-13T18:43:48Z

I’ve started a new ruby blog. Whereas this one tends to longer posts (and not just ruby), the other is intended for short, tight pieces which focus on a single idea. In general they will be in the format of “mini sagas“. I’m shooting for daily updates on it. Ruby Blender

Javascript with CSS Sprites Animation

2009-02-11T20:06:25Z

One of the issues with gif animations is being able to stop and start them at will. This post examines a method of using javascript to control CSS Background Sprites for Animation.

Chibi gets an upgrade

2009-02-06T20:05:16Z

I’m going to have to send my “big” laptop off for servicing, so I upgraded chibi, or as my daughter calls it, “Baby yaptop”. I upgraded the ram to 2gb — it was only $27 with tax. I had held off on this because I didn’t want to “void the warranty”. I found out today [...]

Web Based Portable mysql tool suite

2009-02-18T21:12:42Z

Are you limited in what software you can use at work? This article details how to have a web based tool suite for mysql. It currently has the following tools: AjaxMyTop — a php implementation of mytop (think top for mysql) which runs in a browser. rbdb — a phpmyadmin work-alike in progress. It’s the result of [...]

Prawn’d by Scruffy, Gruff

2009-01-23T22:07:55Z

I’ve been putting together an automated report for my team, and decided to give prawn and scruffy a try. I ended up using Gruff, but here are some of the lessons along the way: Scruffy has issues with bar charts and values from 1-3 (actual values were [1,3,1]). I was able to get around this by [...]

SSL and Java Keystores

2009-01-14T20:39:36Z

If you happen to change a machine’s name, be sure to delete the previous definition from the keystore. Otherwise it will complain mightily and, indeed, fail when you attempt to add in the pem file.

JBoss and Sesame Street’s Count

2008-12-17T20:05:20Z

One, One database record! Two, Two database record! Muahahaha! By default, when using datasources with JBoss, it does a count to validate a connection, both on creation and when it is requested from the connection pool. It looks something like: select count(*) from x Now, this can take take a while when working with tables containing 1.8 million rows and [...]

The “A” stands for Asynchronous

2008-12-02T19:37:41Z

So, I have a piece of code which goes out and updates a list. I’m using Ajax.Updater from Prototype.js, to get data back from the server. In my javascript, however, I’m immediately after kicking off the Ajax.Updater, doing processing based on the results from the update. And they’re out of sync, of course. It [...]