ruby Don’t be a Ruby Robot So recently I encountered a complaint about the students coming out of the the developer bootcamps. I guess this is true of any student in any number of fields; however, somewhere along the way they choose not to think objectively and just regurgitate what they are taught. Perhaps it is
system administration Migration From Physical to Virtual Servers I have not seen too many blog posts on this particular topic. It seems to be some dark art reserved for consultants. So I thought I would share some of this knowledge. Recently the company I work for made the jump from physical boxes to virtualized architecture. We made this
ruby on rails Using Nokogiri to parse XML So recently I found myself needing to parse some XML. This is a quite ordinary task in most languages. In ruby this task is made very easy with the use of the gem ‘Nokogiri’. Roughly translated Nokogiri means ‘Saw’. I can only assume this is a reference to the fact
internet explorer Never Put Underscores in Subdomains! So I found its very rare to find posts on this particular topic. So I am writing up a short post on the subject. Simply put, Do not put an underscore in your subdomain. Example: http://some_name.example.com The reason for this? Internet explorer does not like this
learning Learning Resources for Ruby on Rails I have spent some time finding and taking nearly every Ruby on Rails tutorial I could find. Every time I go through one of the tutorials my skills get a little better and the basics get drilled in. I also gain some insight into a new aspect of Ruby or
apache Blocking Bots in Apache Using htaccess Recently I had an application become the victim of bot spam. Since the web is something on the order of 60% bot traffic, many of these are inconsequential and can safely be blocked or directed to a cache to alleviate server strain. I chose to block them in this case,
iis Blocking Bots in IIS Recently I had an application on apache become the victim of bot spam. As a good measure and to be proactive, I set out to implement the same protection on a Windows Server running IIS 7.5. The web is something on the order of 60% bot traffic, many of
siege Using Siege to Stress Test an Application Recently the company I work for migrated to new servers. During this migration we were all fairly confident that our new architecture would work and would be able to sustain considerable traffic. How much traffic is "considerable traffic"? In all honesty, none of our team and even our
