This post is here for historical reasons. Don’t use this. 3DES via openssl is not considered secure.
Backing Up Dotfiles After hearing about it for months on Security Now, I finally decided to give Carbonite a try. I’d been trying to decide between CrashPlan and Carbonite for far too long and the fact that Carbonite supports a pod cast I enjoy finally put me over the edge.
Carbonite, like many other automated backup solutions, doesn’t provide support for dotfiles.
- Performance At Scale WordPress is an incredible blogging platform and the strategy for deploying WordPress at moderate scale is pretty straightforward: a horizontally scaling web array and a vertically scaling database. The problem is that I (and I imagine the majority of people with industry blogs) don’t need constant scale. A “scaling event” might occur once every few months. I refuse to sacrifice ability to scale for convenience or cost.
- I am not affiliated in any way with Rack Space or OpsCode, I’m just a user that loves the flexibility it offers me. I am a LAMP stack developer that uses Ubuntu. What is Chef? Chef is an open source configuration management tool written primarily in Ruby. Chef is a tool used for DevOps that allows for the provisioning and creation of cloud services and servers using ruby and JSON.
- What is Confirmation Bias Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that supports one’s views or hypothesis. Every time you’re troubleshooting a problem and think, “I know it can’t be ________” you might be guilty of it. As a web developer I know that feeling all too well. Think about your last debugging experience. Did you solve the problem as quickly as you expected? How familiar with the codebase were you?
- Are you uniquing PHP arrays using array_unique? Consider doubling up with array_flip instead. Array_unique is pretty slow.
- While pair programming last week a colleague of mine showed me a great trick for validating user input with multiple options. This trick works best in PHP because of its fantastic array support. But with the right utility classes or frameworks you could really use it with any language. It just might not save you as much time as it does in PHP. In this case we were writing some setters for a class.
- APIs are awesome! Being able to tap into a web service and work with data can make a lot of tasks easier and cleaner. APIs also allow us to link into advanced functionality and provide a richer experience for end users. Unfortunately, a lot of APIs are poorly documented, even ones for well known online services (you know who you are). This can make working with them challenging, and debugging their errors even more of a nightmare.
- I’ve reflected on this old post! Lots of people, not just developers, dream about working from home. Whiling away the hours in the comfort of their castle and making a living at the same time. Why not? Everything is perfect when you’re working from home. Nothing can interrupt or distract you. Success is guaranteed, and just being there dissolves time management challenges and makes meeting deadlines a breeze. Working from home solves all your problems… right?