musings

This is more a plea for help than a real blog post. Those of you that visit this blog with a browser might have seen the “Database connection error” page instead of the content. Usually, a simple reload takes care of the problem, and the you can read my ramblings. However this is annoying. More annoying, that I have exactly the same problem on another server with the same setup. Both servers are stock Joyent Smartmachines (small ones). ...

One of the first programming environments I worked with was the 6502 CPU and its assembler. I liked it quite a bit better than the Z80 (which didn’t hinder me of course to ask for a Z80 programming book as a birthday gift - my parents surely thought I was crazy) I never, really really, grasped assembler then (although later, one of my first big software projects was to write the DES encryption for 8051. ...

Every web application needs to do things asynchronously. Be it that messages need to be passed to other parts of the app, or tasks that take a non trivial amount of time (sending an email, calling into another web service). Ideally, you spin these tasks off from the thread that services the web request and count on them being done in good time, without holding up the request. Until recently we used Resque for this. ...

When I did my Masters in Science, I had to take a number of modules on topics that were wasted time (“Web Programming in XHTML and PHP” being my absolute favorite time and energy wasting exercise), but one module where I learned heaps and heaps was “Security Engineering”. The course itself was so so (as - unfortunately most of the modules and courses that the University of Liverpool gave), but the book we were required to read was one of the best technical books I ever had the joy to read: Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (Amazon. ...

We are almost back to normal here at Mobino dev center, and I wanted to share a video with you, that was made at Lift13 by Charbax and in a few minutes shows you both how the payment process with Mobino works, and some thoughts from our CEO about the product and were we are heading. Choice quotes from JF Groff include “credit cards are from the 60s” and “sorry, we don’t need you”… ...

To all of you who wondered what the day of woodcarving produced: A guitar stand for my Telecaster and the Norman acoustic. As you can see from the detail shot, I made a mistake in the geometry of the stand. The back is angled, so the lower support should have been angled too. There’s also a cut visible, but this one I left in deliberately. It is my rendition of Wabi Sabi. ...