Like many FOSS fans, I always wanted to be an active part of the movement. My last big project was for the Amiga in the past millennium though. Nowadays I’m happy that after years of small-scale dabbling on various projects I’ve found my haven. I’d like to share my way to my recent gain of push privileges on the Python project and hope to inspire some of you to do the same. Read more →
After I’ve told you what not to do, I’d like to introduce you to the method we use to deploy a wide variety of services. Read more →
Deploying web applications is hard. No shiny continuous deployment talk and no DevOps coolness can change that. Or to use DevOp Borat’s words: “Is all fun and game until you are need of put it in production.“ There are some mistakes I see people doing again and again so I’d like to address them here. Read more →
In our newest installation of “why you should not use Sybase SQL Anywhere” I’d like to report the newest problem I had to solve: for some reason, I couldn’t connect using sqlanydb from Celery tasks. Read more →
All the cool kids already made this step – now it’s time to catch up for the rest of us. Read more →
So you came to the same conclusion as I: Google is actually evil. That makes it kind of uncomfortable to have all your e-mails over there, doesn’t it? I for one decided that it’s time to leave and will show you how to do the same using an UNIX based OS. Read more →
I never did a retrospective but 2011 deserves one. As usual, I’m keeping my private stuff private so this article is just about my year in IT. Mine won’t be as eloquent as the others I’ve read though, English as a foreign language can be really handicapping. Read more →
There is this common notion, that asynchronous IO is hard and that writing a custom connection pool is even harder. The nice thing however is, that in reality asynchronous IO is just “weird” in the beginning – and that a connection pool using async IO is so simple it hurts. Read more →
After switching to the Mac, I had one big itch that spoiled all the bliss: MacVim sometimes simply refused to cooperate with the system clipboard. As you can imagine, an editor that can’t exchange text with other software is a rather painful thing. Read more →
Nope, this isn’t going to be a smug post on nutrition. These tomatoes I’m going to talk about aren’t for eating but for kicking my ass to be more productive. I’m talking about the Pomodoro Technique of course. Read more →
So you want quick offline access to your mails using mutt to fully exploit your SSD and yet still have everything nicely working in Google’s web interface? Additionally, you would like to have access to your Google Contacts just like in your phone and everywhere else? I’ll show you how! Read more →
There’s one thing hackers are opinionated about as about the right editor: The right color scheme. Read more →
Mostly a note to myself as I forget it regularly. Read more →
Using the official sqlanydb driver for Python together with Twisted’s adbapi produces not-so-occasional crashes as of today (sqlanydb 1.0.2, Twisted 11.0.0). Apparently, the official SQL Anywhere drivers aren’t thread-safe. It cost me several days to figure out because I was searching the fault in my code so I hope to spare you some pain. Read more →
I’d thought something like this is a FAQ but the db docs on postgres don’t write a bit about forcing Django to connect using SSL to the database server. Read more →
While I am a pretty happy guy most of the time, there’s one thing that managed to make my life miserable over and over again: insomnia. Read more →
There are few people that influenced me more than Tim Ferris. He was the one who gave me the last nudge to the low carb diet and he was also the one from whom I learned about the “Information Diet”. Read more →
Due to my photography side business I have Windows 7 instead of Linux installed on my private PC (or rather had – I'm on the Mac boat by now). Nevertheless, I want to have always a fully functional development environment built around Python and VIM (and Dropbox). Read more →
It took me a while to figure it out, so I decided to share. Read more →
After a few months of use my Kindle started to freeze randomly. At first I blamed the cold as it happened to be winter in that moment. Fortunately, it turned out to be something different. Read more →
I really thought that no serious company out there would still do stupid validity checks that have nothing to do with the respective RFCs. Actually there is at least one. Read more →
The perception of LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is pretty ambivalent. On the one hand, most software supports it and many people talk about it. On the other hand, there is only one serious open source LDAP server (OpenLDAP), whose qualities are openly discussed. Read more →
Sounds harder than it is – especially when reading the official docs. Frankly if you just want to synchronize two DBs, tell the one (“master”) to write a log and the other (“slave”) to read it. Read more →
Superfluous casting is dangerous because it hides potential errors. Read more →
While developing dietsniff I had to find a way to write pcap logs. However the docs I found were rather fragmented. I try to do a short roundup here. In fact, the format is pretty plain and it’s a pity that there seems not to be a quick’n’easy doc for it. Read more →