Archive for December, 2008

New year, old bugs

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

Or: Old year, new bugs Or: Bug of the week number Or: It is the first week of 2009, but it is still 2008 We all know that date calculation is tricky. Don't get me started on time zones! I've found a web-based time report application and an online movie rental site that ...

Moved the first Ruby on Rails site from Apache to Lighttpd

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

Yesterday I managed to move the first Ruby on Rails site to its new home on the VPS. The move had been easier if I hadn't decided to use Lighttpd this time around, but finally I got everything working. The site I moved is only the administration interface for the ...

Web and mail server connectivity issues

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

Not long after my FreeBSD file server at home was upgraded properly, my old web and mail server lost connection to the Internet. The server was unable to connect to the Internet (and vice versa) from yesterday evening until midday today. The cause was presumably a routing problem in the network ...

Upgraded my FreeBSD file server

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

Upgrading a FreeBSD server should be less painful than putting a graphics card in a Windows server, unless there is a huge technical debt involved of course... At home I've been upgrading my three year old FreeBSD file server. I bought 3 new 500 gigabyte hard disk drives for a new ...

Solved problems installing a graphics card in a Windows 2003 Server

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

My computer troubles did not stop with the RAM failure on my laptop. The next issue was a server upgrade at work. We needed to put a graphics card into a server. (Don't ask why!) The HP ProLiant ML110 G5 server has a built-in Matrox G200e (with 8 megabytes of RAM) ...

Divide and Conquer Tip #2: Stack Overflow

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

It was months since I mentioned the Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky joint venture stackoverflow.com on this blog. The stackoverflow.com site has been up and running for a while now, and it is both a great resource for getting help, and a possible way to spend a lot of time ...

Divide and Conquer Tip #1: Google Code Search

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Learning by example is very useful when programming, and a lot of examples can be found by searching for source code in Google Code Search. Just remember to check the license if you want to copy some existing code!

Mysterious crashes = RAM memory failure

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

I had some mysterious crashes on my Thinkpad T60p the other day. First I got Firefox hangs, second Firefox didn't start, third I got segfaults when listing a directory on the hard disk, four I got kernel panic when running fsck... Now I'm running Memtest86 and it does not look good: That ...

WordPress upgraded and categories converted to tags

Monday, December 1st, 2008

It seems like I'm always using an old WordPress generation, but hopefully without suffering too much from security issues. After upgrading I installed New Tag Cloud and converted my categories to tags. Unfortunately that means that all my posts are uncategorized now! I also need to fix the CSS styling ...