I read in New York Magazine this weekend that Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers) has a “regular biweekly ‘boys’ night out’” and that made me wonder if he went out with his friends every other Friday or perhaps every Tuesday and Saturday.  ”Biweekly” is a word that makes me uncomfortable [...]

Note to self: don’t leave your bike parked downtown (or indeed on public streets) over the night.  Apparently there is a great deal of pleasure to be had by thrashing other people’s bicycles.  And while I take pleasure from seeing my fellow man enjoying himself, I cannot really afford to sponsor it any more. I [...]

Apparently something called “click-jacking” can be used to hijack the microphone and camera on my laptop and the way to avoid that is to tell Flash that it can never ever have access to mike and cam.  Fine, done. There is a patch coming out in a few weeks (or it may just be included [...]

I need to pick up an XML file from a server every 30 minutes and process it. I’ve done similar things before, and using Hpricot it is a pleasure: #! /usr/bin/env ruby require ‘rubygems’ require ‘hpricot’ require ‘open-uri’ doc = Hpricot(open(“http://example.com/the_file.xml”)) (doc / :person).each { |person| … } Couldn’t be simpler. This time, there is [...]

[This is a re-write of a project note I wrote in project over a year ago. Published here to make the world a better place.] There has been some commotion recently regarding XHTML and HTML, where standardistas have reiterated their arguments about XHTML: it’s a nice standard, but since is isn’t actually treated as XHTML [...]

So I was writing this tool to create a bunch of SQL statements from a data dump. Simple enough, right. And as always when you generate SQL statements, you have to make sure that the data doesn’t interfere with the SQL syntax by escaping the single quotes (and generally any binary data, but I didn’t [...]

It’s time for the yearly survey for web professionals: But that’s hardly a note to self.  Looks like I’m turning this into a blog.

Installing the mysql gem for Ruby is almost always a mess, as witnessed by the large number of hits one get when googling for “mysql gem leopard”.  To make the gem work with your platform, you need to ensure that the ‘make’ command run internally by ‘gem’ has the right ARCHFLAGS, which most of the [...]

I acquired this server in December 2006 to host a few Rails projects and one of the first things I did was to disable Apache and install Nginx.  Once I decided to use WordPress for this blog, I needed PHP, and while I could have tried to set up PHP for Nginx, I decided to [...]

While this is a public blog, its primary audience is not the meandering surfers of the inter-tubes, but myself.  I need someplace to store various findings and HOWTOs that I write for myself.  I assume that they will prove useful for others too, from time to time, but that is mostly a side-effect. That being [...]