Category Archives: Noteworthy

Adding files to config.assets.precompile in Rails 3.1+

I came across a problem that stumped me for quite a while today, so thought it best I write it down. In Rails 3.1+ with the asset pipeline enabled any files that are not referenced by a manifest file (e.g. … Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Noteworthy, Ruby | 7 Comments

Solving Latin1 and UTF8 errors for good in Ruby

Update: I haven’t tested it fully, but @eevee has a shorter suggestion that seems to work: Tell the mysql driver that you’re getting BINARY back, then use .force_encoding(“UTF-8”)? In a Rails application you can do this by setting encoding: binary … Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Noteworthy, Ruby | 6 Comments

Re-enable Snow Leopard’s ‘Screen Zoom’ feature in Lion

Snow Leopard had a handy feature (I’m pretty certain it’s enabled by default, but maybe someone could clarify?) where if you held down ctrl and scrolled, the screen would zoom in and out. Lion seems to remove this feature but … Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Noteworthy | 4 Comments

Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 with Phusion Passenger and Apache (and Thin)

Migrating to Ruby 1.9 gets harder the more 1.8 apps you have. But it’s a worthwhile migration. At work we’ve written a lot of little Ruby 1.8 apps and we deploy them on an Apache + Phusion Passenger stack. Some apps … Continue reading

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Installing pygame on OS X with a Homebrew Python 2.7 install

Solved this surprisingly quickly today thanks in part to this post by Basti am. His post was mostly correct but some parts have changed, so I’m going to document how I got it working. Note that this method will miss … Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Noteworthy | 12 Comments

How to bring down a poorly deployed WordPress (and how to stop it from happening)

I used to hate WordPress (and Apache). When x5315 and I first got a cheap VPS from XenEurope (I recommend them, but don’t be as stingy as us!) it had 128MB of RAM. We both wanted WordPress blogs. Thus what … Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Noteworthy | 17 Comments

Making the most of DuckDuckGo

Yesterday I changed my default search engine in Google Chrome from Google to DuckDuckGo, known for not collecting personal information and Zero-click info (not my example!). I’ve noted down a few points for getting the most out of this interesting … Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Noteworthy | 4 Comments

Relocating Windows to a new Hard Drive

Moving NTFS filesystems to different (sometimes larger) hard drive can be a nightmare. I’ve had one such nightmare recently and I thought it’d be worthwhile to document it here for others having similar problems. The below points are based on … Continue reading

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Installing Ubuntu with a graphical installer using tftp, dhcpd, and nfs

If you have the facilities, it’s really handy to install Ubuntu using Ubuntu’s nice install environment without having to burn any CDs. Just download the ISO and use it in conjunction with some server stuff and boot any computer off … Continue reading

Posted in Blog, Noteworthy | 1 Comment

Is my Server Back Up yet?

While waiting for one of the Twitterfall servers to come back online after an air conditioning failure in the datacentre, x5315 and I realised that instead of keeping an eye on a ping command, we could be told when the … Continue reading

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