Blog Entries

After reading Todd Hoff’s list of scaling lessons learned, I decided to put together my own list of scaling tricks. These were all learned the hard way as well, and will scale you up to thousands of concurrent users.  It’s worth noting that many of these don’t cost anything beyond programmer-time, and take less time [...]

The current version of my website runs on a lightweight perl framework called Dancer. It’s easy to learn and avoids the massive weight of Catalyst, making it ideal for use in shared hosting (paying to get a VM just so you can install thousands of perl modules is not cool). Dancer runs under fastCGI, mod [...]

In Ubuntu Lucid, there is apparently an infrequent problem with NetworkManager not coming back properly when waking up a laptop from sleep/hibernate. Even though it seemed like the wireless driver was somehow no longer working, it was actually due to an inconsistent state being saved/restored. No amount of stopping/restarting services or reloading modules helped, since [...]

When I set up Kubuntu Lucid on my new laptop a month ago, I promised I would document what was needed to get the broadcom wireless driver working. As it turns out, that was incredibly simple so I never got around to it. However, I just had an issue with my laptop losing wireless after [...]

Apparently ubuntu removed the rather-old libstdc++5 library in Karmic Koala, and it’s still missing in Lucid Lynx. This leads to some 32-bit programs throwing errors like this: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory There is a ppa (personal package archive) you can add to re-enable [...]

I just set up dual-boot on my new Dell laptop with Windows 7 and Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 beta1). It worked great (the new ubuntu installer is awesome) up until I rebooted into windows. Technically that worked well too, until I rebooted again and got the error: No module name found. Aborted. Press any key [...]

The security model in postgres is very granular, and is locked down by default.  this is great for production, but is kind of a pain as a developer working locally.   Coming from MySQL, it’s natural to try “GRANT ALL ON * TO some_user;” for development. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t work.   From a fair bit of [...]

I just switched from using Gnome at work to using KDE4, which unfortunately meant that I lost my dual-screen setup.  While that doesn’t make much sense, it turns out to be possible to get it back without.having to change too many things or change to proprietary drivers. This is all done with an ATI Radeon [...]

Laziness is the prime virtue of a good programmer (along with being a polyglot, knowing the ins and outs of their editor, and knowing how to google APIs), but it is often forgotten when working on a personal project.  My website has been no exception – I’ve actually spent far too much time writing my [...]

I appear to have lost all of my old blog posts, due to them being stored in a now-forgotten format on a now-defunct server.  Hence this new blog on wordpress, which I will attempt to backfill once I dig up and decipher the ancient texts. [edit: all useful old posts have been imported]