So I was looking into building a quick, fast rpc server in Go for one of our office projects. It may end up becoming opensourced, but for now I can only share the sample server/client that I set up to test the possible performance. Go’s RPC docs give an example of how to run an [...]
Last week at Vimeo we had a challenge. Build a better query string parameter sorter for a Varnish plugin. The gauntlet was thrown down at 5pm on a Friday and by 2am Friday night we had our first contender. I arrived home to see the code and decided to throw my hat into the ring. [...]
I recently built a new homepage to celebrate Fall and kill a few weekends playing with canvas, javascript and CA. A little while back I had an idea to use Cellular Automata rules to generate random groupings of xy coordinates. This worked well as a way to generate a rock pattern for my canvas drawing. [...]
Maintaining passwords for multiple servers across multiple development environments is a pain. A few weeks back there was a downed service on one of my servers and I was at a computer without my passwords and hosts files. The debugging session that followed required hopping through multiple servers and in general took a lot longer [...]
Just a little function to add to your .profile that automatically turns on a socks proxy and tunnels all your traffic through the server of your choice. It’s a simple setup and <CTRL>-C kills the connection and shuts off the proxy. This assumes that you have shell access to some server that you trust to [...]
This weekend I set out to do some canvas drawings. The first one ended up being the centerpiece of my home page. It was inspired by the leaves of a tree on my street. Oh it’s good to be back in the deciduous loving climate. The second drawing was inspired by a recent campout in [...]
I was in a position today to refactor some code that didn’t belong to me. Without going into much detail I was asked to implement a feature that required some significant changes to some fresh code. A friend was online at the time. I remembered he had a very gentle way of dealing with other [...]
Well I really had a blast working with @darkgoyle on the Merry Ecsmas project on Christmas Eve. It was my first attempt at a canvas creation and it came together great. I am still finding myself creating snowflakes there! All this canvas exposure and seeing how @darkgoyle does his maths got me in a mood [...]
I’m happy to announce the release of DumbledORM 0.1. It’s a major revamp from the initial release. It’s still the same ~200 loc, but now chocked full of comments and under the MIT license. A few noteworthy changes. PDO now throws exceptions by default. The standard default in PDO is to fail silently. This was [...]
I’ve been considering diving into nginx for a bit now. Rumors of it’s speed and Cyrillic error messages have intrigued me. With recent forays into node.js apps and their requirement for a free port, I wanted to find a nice solution that complimented the evented speed of node.js without exposing a port publicly for each [...]