Jonathan Altman

I ran across this today while trying to use the chef community database cookbook.  If you want to use it along with a postgresql database to e.g. create databases and create and assign roles to users, then you may need to do the following, at least…

I am doing a bunch of work in VMs managed with Vagrant+chef, and I have several different VMs configured for different projects/roles so that I can do dev work on a VM that has just the set of things on it that a QA or production box will have.  To…

Ran across this today, and didn't find anything while googling for it so figured I would capture it for posterity and in case it happens to me again.

I went to update Android SDK to the latest version today and it was not appearing after pulling down…

I am one of the panelists for devFestDC today, on the mobile apps panel at 11am.  There's a good chance, though, if you're reading this that you may have arrived here based on that fact.  I'm just now dusting this blog back off, but in the meantime…

Summary

I did not think I would actually make today one of the 100 days, but I pushed through. I guess the incentive of challenging myself is working ;-)

Accomplishments

• Finished debugging the last part of adding the second controlled list admin table. Add and remove working
• Added the third and final admin table
• Committed
…

Summary

After having to make the day I thought up the idea be my Prologue, January 29 turned out to be fairly easy to make 100 lines of code. Not every day will be this easy, I bet. I also know that I opted for get things done over polish things to…

So I decided to start blogging my experience the day after I started actually doing the 100x100 challenge. Therefore, I get the benefit of hindsight, especially since I ended up well short of the mark. However, I would have to say the prologue was…

So I am going to set myself out a hopefully fun little challenge: 100 lines of code in 100 coding days. It's my challenge (and if this catches on, my meme ;-)), so I get to define my groundrules. Of course, someone else who wants to quibble with…

So I disagree with the way the argument in this post is framed, but I am glad to see the "mainstream" tech press realizing there's a better way to get to SOA:

A growing number of companies are finding that lower-visibility Web-oriented architecture…

So ordinarily, this post would have gone up as a link in del.icio.us, but the interesting part of it is actually a single quote that flows in the article but is not the main point. So I will just crib the interesting part here. It is worth reading…

Paul Graham first wrote about a strawman hypothetical programming language blub that examined the constraints that people who choose to stay firmly embedded in only one language seem to impose upon themselves and their programming capabilities and…

Goaded on by requests for screenshots of Tracks running on my n810 I decided to instead document to the best of my recollection what I did to get Tracks and Instiki running on my n810. h3. Table of Contents h4. 1. "Preface: Why?":#Preface h4.…

Well, after 12 years I have switched (back) to Macs. My first computer was an original 128k Mac, one of the very first ones. My mouse actually had a 5-digit serial number, IIRC. I gave up in 1995 swearing I would never buy another Mac: * I bought a…

Here are some quick steps I did to do initial lockdown of a freshly created Joyent Accelerator: h2. Change passwords * Sign in as admin via secure shell to the default account, change its password * _su_ to root and change the root password * Go into…

Having worked at some places with what I would call "restrictive access policies" regarding internet sites and ports that can be accessed, as well as the software and configuration of computers issued to employees, I am led to the following question…

I have posted several times about it, made a bunch of different arguments, and anybody who has talked to me about web services has heard me try and make the argument not to force a web service to be the serialized transfer of object artifacts. But…

Courtesy of Sean McGrath who found it elsewhere. Put this in .fonts.conf in your home directory:

Found this wonderful article today with the following excerpt:

In the world of economics, it is the U.S. that believes in natural selection, and it is Europe, specifically the EU and its leading countries, which clings to an outmoded ideology of intelligent design.

…

Finally, a description of good web service/SOA design that even pointy haired bosses can understand :-) The graphics are designed to make it clear to non-technical users how to go about designing the boundaries of your web services/SOA!

Earlier, I posted about how not forcing all access to web services to go through objects that were serialized into and back out of XML but instead were XML documents that were designed to stand on their own made it easier to implement both web…

Found this quote today from Eve Maler

The trend in distributed computing is towards service-oriented architectures (SOAs). Early in the life of this buzzword, some people said it should really be called a document-oriented architecture (except for…

To list the schemas in a postgresql database:

select nspname from pg_namespace;

I wanted a nice convenient way to have multiple Rails apps share my single postgresql database but keep all the apps' tables/procs/views/other artifacts isolated from each other. I came up with the following solution, which I can't claim is…

NACK the GAC Chris Sells goes over the very few reasons why the GAC should be employed. We've run into most of the issues here at Outtask:

The one where I can only come up with two reasons for using the GAC, the first being very difficult to pull off correctly and the second to happen more and more rarely as we move to SOA and .NET.

This post feels very much like "Why do we still need duals?"…