Interrupt Driven

I've been screwing around with our new DNS server (we're migrating, or planning a migration, anyway) from our old corporate Web/mail/dns server to a newer box) and have found these articles to be helpful. The first is a tutorial on setting up chrooted DNS servers, the second is a bit of info about securing your DNS server against cache poisoning, and the latter two are both by Cricket Liu and cover BIND 9 upgrade gotchas and Views in BIND 9, respectively.

I'm also switching to Subversion, as well.

In other unrelated news, I need to allocate a weekend to digging into Drosera and FireBug. I don't do much JavaScript anymore, but when I do, it'd be nice to have a debugger. And since we're on the topic of JavaScript, there's this article on the importance of maintainable JavaScript.

This article on PHP design patterns may prove useful.

Here's an interesting bit about writing and writing software are similar activities, from the folks at 37Signals.

I definitely recommend this article on making Firefox more Mac-like; I'm finally giving up on Safari, but there are many things about Firefox that make Safari seem friendly (when it's not giving you the spinning beach ball of death, that is). Barring success with Firefox, I may turn to this article on making Safari a better browser. I'm already using PithHelmet, Saft, and Inquisitor. And there's always PimpMySafari.

This looks like a good reference on how to sharpen a knife. I've got some cheap knives here that won't seem to hold an edge, and I need to fix that.

Finally, Mike and Deb have a blog!

Oh, and I spent Saturday at BarCampRDU, talking about spam and hanging out with my old friend Greg. Good times.

Posted by Steven Champeon at 2:45 PM | Permalink

Heather and I went to see the North Carolina Symphony play music from Lord of the Rings (the trilogy) last night at Koka Booth Amphitheater in Cary, thanks to our friends Craig and Diana, who had extra tickets. It was miserably hot, but no bugs, and the wine and grapes and bread et al. took the edge off a bit. One funny story: when we arrived at Craig and Diana's, they were just opening some champagne; apparently, for their recent anniversay they'd ordered two cases, not knowing there were fifteen bottles in a case of champagne. I thought a moment and said, "ah! a drinker's dozen" to much merriment all around. A good time, despite the heat. They played video of original storyboards behind the symphony and chorale, so you could sort of keep up with the story as the music played. Funny how much more you notice about music when it's not just the background to stunning visuals and involved plot.

Posted by Steven Champeon at 6:39 PM | Permalink

Some more links from my Safari tabs. sshdfilter is a port-knocking solution for SSH security. I've pretty much just locked down my ssh inbound to certain IPs using iptables, but this looks interesting. This article on a similar topic is worth reading, too, as is this set of SSH tricks. I should also read performance tuning mysql for load, to see how bad my tuning approach is.

Seems the W3C is doing something about dynamic multi-column text layouts in CSS. Wonder how many years it will be before we can actually use it? The basic journey of a packet is worth reading again, as is packet school 101. I'm curious to see how ActiveCollab does, but not curious enough to try it ourselves. PHP makes me queasy. 20 years of PC viruses is a collection of articles, also worth a deeper look.

Finally, this chardonnay from New Zealand's only Maori-owned winery is what we were served at Kai in the City when we were in NZ; we're trying to locate some locally. And this Gosling Family Reserve Old Rum is fantastic - real sipping rum of the sort I imagine my Look family relatives loading off the pier back in the day.

Posted by Steven Champeon at 1:19 PM | Permalink

Spent the lovely, insanely hot, Fourth of July weekend thus:

1. suffering from a miserable flu-like bug that Heather just got over; involving horrible body aches and headaches and a general "curl up and die" feeling
2. mulching and generally trying to catch up on all the minor crud that needs doing around the house
3. trying not to die due to heat exhaustion and dehydration

Surprise: today, I am very sore, tired, achy, exhausted, and whiny ;) I'll get over it.

Posted by Steven Champeon at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Looks like an interesting article on Subversion, a good run-down of Ajax accessibility articles, yet another "replace a mainstream desktop app with a web app" attempt at Gliffy, some information about Rails RJS templates.

Posted by Steven Champeon at 1:52 PM | Permalink