Category Archives: Posts

reddit.com HTTP Response Headers

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I found an old note to myself to look at the HTTP response headers for reddit.com. So I did this:

$ curl -v -s http://www.reddit.com/ > /dev/null
* About to connect() to www.reddit.com port 80 (#0)
* Trying 69.22.154.10…
* connected
* Connected to www.reddit.com (69.22.154.10) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (x86_64-apple-darwin12.0) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.5
> Host: www.reddit.com
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
< Server: ‘; DROP TABLE servertypes; –
< Vary: accept-encoding
< Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 14:37:25 GMT
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Connection: keep-alive
< Connection: Transfer-Encoding
<
{ [data not shown]
* Connection #0 to host www.reddit.com left intact
* Closing connection #0

Fun Server entry in there. Reminded me of little Bobby tables from xkcd.

I’m sure this has made the rounds in other places. Unfortunately my note didn’t indicate where I first saw this.

Bruce Schneier on Backups

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Bruce Schneier talking about the importance of backups:

Remember the rule: no one ever wants backups, but everyone always wants restores.

The smaller or more portable the computing device, the more painful good backups seem to be. Making regular backups of servers isn’t too bad, and desktops are manageable. Laptops, that is where things start to get icky. Modern cloud solutions usually end up being a requirement.

Then we get to tablets and phones. At that point the only viable backup solution is cloud based. No one wants to regularly plug their phone or tablet into something else to let it do backups. This is one of the reasons why the promise of iCloud was so great and not living up to the promise has been so disappointing.

Getting Around the LinkedIn 3rd Degree Connection Paywall

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Last week I linked to Ted Dziuba’s post, The Speculation Trap. I noticed a LinkedIn profile link on http://teddziuba.com/, which I clicked on, curious to know a little bit more about Ted. Off I go to http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddziuba and I get presented with this really annoying message:

I’m already signed into LinkedIn, and apparently Ted is a 3rd degree connection for me. This triggers a response on LinkedIn that hides all of the profile information unless I upgrade to a paid account. I like LinkedIn, but don’t have an interest in paying $20 – $75 per month for it.

Turns out there is a very simple work around to the 3rd degree connection paywall. Logout of LinkedIn, then view the profile page again. You will be able to see the bulk of the profile information.

In my case I use Chrome as my main browser, which means a Shift-Command-N ( on the Mac ) brings up an incognito window where I’m not signed into LinkedIn. Toss in a copy-and-paste and you have a quick way around the LinkedIn 3rd degree connection paywall.

It feels wrong for a site to be more useful when I’m signed out than when I’m signed in.

WordPress 10th Anniversary Party in Utah

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You might have heard about WordPress turning 10 years old on May 27th. To celebrate local WordPress communities around the world are having anniversary parties on May 27th, 2013. This includes the greater Salt Lake City, Utah area. The details are at http://www.meetup.com/WordPress/Salt-Lake-City-UT/930892/:

When: Monday, May 27, 2013, 7:00 PM
Where: Sonny Brian’s; 33 East 11400 South in Sandy


View Larger Map

If you are coming be sure to RSVP so that we have an idea of how many people to expect. Bluehost is also giving away the 10th Anniversary WordPress t-shirts to the first 30 people who fill out this form on wpslc.com.

It will be a fun time to hang out and chat with other local WordPress fans/users/designers/developers.

Code Garage Migration to VaultPress

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Today VaultPress announced the Code Garage migration details. We really wanted to make sure that we had the details and options on this right. I know that migrations like this can often be annoying, so we went out of our way to make the process smooth and inviting.

Code Garage users that migrate to VaultPress will get their first two months on VaultPress free. For those who don’t want to migrate, we’ll refund your last payment.

Even if you aren’t a Code Garage customer, you should go read Peter’s CodeGarage Locker is Migrating to VaultPress post. He gives a personal history of how Code Garage came to be, how it grew, and how it ultimately was sold to Automattic.

TokuDB and MongoDB

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Baron Schwartz on TokuDB going open source:

I think TokuDB will rapidly become the storage engine of choice for MongoDB, and could catapult MongoDB into the lead in the NoSQL database arena. This would have profound implications for opensource databases of all flavors, not just NoSQL databases.

It is easy to forget how long it took MySQL to get to where it is today ( and it still has plenty of issues ). When I look at MongoDB I see it going through a similar path to MySQL ( and most other software ) to reach a point of critical features, stability, and mass. Improving the underlying storage engine, by using an existing open source one, could move it down that path much faster.

Chess Pieces in Unicode

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I was reading up on encoding issues and came across the chess symbols in Unicode Wikipedia page. I knew Unicode had support for all kinds of things, but chess pieces too? That was news to me.

The Wikipedia entry included a codepoint and HTML entity table, which makes it easy to list out all of the pieces:

White pieces:
♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙

Black pieces:
♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ ♟