Deadnode
CDN redux: Rackspace v CloudFront
Back at the very end of 2008, I posted about my CDN experiences with CacheFly and Amazon’s CloudFront. A few things have changed since then. First, Amazon added the ‘custom origin’ feature to CloudFront, so their CDN will accelerate any webserver you like, not just an S3 storage bucket. Meanwhile,...
Posted on 25 May 2011 — (Read more/comment)90% page shrink, faster LJ-Dreamwidth mappings with AJAX
(Updated 2010-05-09 19:40 UTC: add two introductory paragraphs and before/after screenshots) Web site and page load speeds have been in the news a lot lately, thanks mainly to Google’s announcement that they would be taking load speed into account as one of the hundreds of factors determining the PageRank which...
Posted on 09 May 2010 — (Read more/comment)McAfee fail: deleting svchost.exe because of false positive 'w32/wecorl.a'
Like many others around the world, the Windows XP systems I support started failing yesterday afternoon, with VirusScan claiming to have detected the w32/wacorl.a virus in svchost.exe. Of course, as has been widely reported by now, there was no virus present, this was a false positive in the 5958 DAT...
Posted on 22 April 2010 — (Read more/comment)Resetting OpenSolaris passwords
Between the new file system, ZFS, and some restrictions on the use of blank passwords, resetting a forgotten root password can be a bit of a pain unless you know exactly the right incantations. Having just found myself in the same boat, here they are… First, boot from the OpenSolaris...
Posted on 08 April 2010 — (Read more/comment)New Year, New Platform - from Radiant to Jekyll
With the dawn of 2010, I decided it was time to move away from Radiant as the CMS for most of the sites I host and maintain. Radiant does a reasonable job, with a nice simple user interface non-technical users can grasp quite easily, but it takes a great deal...
Posted on 10 March 2010 — (Read more/comment)Software and free utilities
A collection of utilities I have developed and released as a public service, including:
TFind - Quickly locate files by name on an NTFS filesystem.
BarPass - Generate sets of random passwords, with the corresponding barcode attached.
GTools - General tools for deploying Windows systems, including copying and moving files from batch files with a graphical progress indicator and changing or deleting drive letters
Bin2H - Convert binary files into character arrays for embedding in C source code.
Trix - Little snippets of code for re-use
Tablesearch - filter HTML tables based on a simple substring search in pure Javascript (no server side code)
EZMLM utilities - tools for automating some more complex administrative tasks on EZMLM mailing lists