As I sit here on a hot, humid Friday night with my scotch and my laptop (21st century #fail), in a thoroughly air-conditioned room, I try to make myself useful. In this unbearable heat, only a desperate socialite would even think about going out. I, myself, much prefer pointlessly scrolling through the day’s worth of...

With the VPS expansion you can now get a (very) small virtual private server (VPS) for a very affordable price. However, when you get a server with something like 256MB or 512MB RAM and a portion of CPU power, using default MySQL/PHP/Apache settings is a pretty bad idea. Performance and scalability tuning of a server...

GoogleCL is a command-line client to Google services that was released recently. It should appeal to Web geeks, many of whom, in my non-scientific observation, are Mac users. GoogleCL documentation suggest you use MacPorts to install it on Mac. Now, I have to admit - it really pisses me off when people talk about installing...

yum clean all yum clean metadata yum clean dbcache and then: yum makecache

The “git status” command only shows uncommitted changes locally. But what if we need to see “what files would get pushed if we did a push now?”. The answer is not trivial (and no, “git push –dry-run” is not useful since it does not show changed files). I’ve been looking for an answer, and since...

MacRabbit’s Espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/) has been my favorite editor for server-side scripting for a while now. I was an avid Coda user before that, and Coda is a fine editor, but I like several features of Espresso better (e.g. large file browser in the center and ability to simultaneously open files from any number of servers)....

An absolutely awesome jQuery book: http://jqueryenlightenment.com/ It’s this simple: if you are a Web developer, you need this. And you will support the project. And PDF version is dirt-cheap.

If you use Terminal application on Mac OS-X to connect over SSH, you have most probably been annoyed by closed connections. Following is a quick recipe to prevent timeouts: Open Terminal > sudo vi /etc/ssh_config Edit the file to make lines 20-21 look like: Host * ServerAliveInterval 5 Save file and restart Terminal. Your connections...

Prerequisite: Make sure .htaccess overrides are allowed for the folder you are protecting! In the folder being protected create two files: .htaccess:\ AuthUserFile /path/to/file/.htpasswd AuthType Basic AuthName "Secured Access" Require valid-user or if you need to protect just specific file, change the last part of .htaccess to read like:\ Require valid-user For the creation of...

Following is a handy matrix for those among us who like to indicate HTML (font) sizes in “em”s. All modern browsers use a 16px default font size. Specifying the font-size and line-height in ems (relative to the 16px default font) allows the user to resize the font in the browser and produces the most consistent...

This step-by-step tutorial walks you through the installation of Django 1.1 with Apache and MySQL. on CentOS 5. The example VPS used during the walk-through is the popular SliceHost from RackSpace ™ The steps involved should be quite similar for any properly installed CentOS 5.x (or RedHat EL 5.x). We use the latest stable version...

Ack is a recursive grep-replacement Perl script that you can download from: http://betterthangrep.com It is somewhat similar to “egrep”, but is much smarter and has ten times nicer output format. It also automatically ignores annoying .svn files and you can teach it different file types. If you are a Drupal developer you need to put...

Even though you may find xdebug in a yum repository, due to version incompatibilities you may need to compile/install it using Pecl. Following are several easy steps to achieve exactly that: > pecl install xdebug check the output of the command above, if everything went well, you should see something like :\ Installing '/usr/lib64/php/modules/xdebug.so' install...

Acquia and Phase2 Technology will be hosting Tattler (app) and OpenPublish™ Webinar tomorrow Wednesday, September 23, 2009 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT. To sign up visit: http://bit.ly/2nypWj

=== Originally published at: The Agile Approach === In the ’90s romantic comedy that we borrowed the title from, a chain of dramatic events take place, while the main character (played by Peter Gallagher) is in a post-accident coma. Comatose sleep is a little too dramatic for this, but just in case you spent the...