Category Archives: Technical HOWTOs

Simple 301 or 302 redirects with Apache & PHP

Posted on September 3, 2010 by matthew

It behooves you to make sure you’ve only got one URL that serves a given piece of content–so says google. But what if you’ve got a bunch of domains that go to your page? For this blog, for example, matthew.mceachen.org, … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

HOWTO: Configure an Amazon RDS instance to use UTF-8

Posted on August 15, 2010 by matthew

RDS has been working out pretty well for AdGrok — it’s a one-click MySQL 5.1 instance that seems pretty promising: Automatic replication and failover to another deployment zone (colo) Easy to set up firewall configuration Easy to scale up (but … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

HOWTO: Mount your USB hard drives at boot time on Ubuntu

Posted on August 14, 2010 by matthew

I’ve got a number of external USB hard drives connected to my ubuntu server that need to mount to a predictable directory. When you log into Gnome, the desktop environment does it’s nifty thing and mounts any drive you’ve got … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dailed-in Rails script/console with pretty printing and history

Posted on July 21, 2010 by matthew

Edit (as root) your /etc/irbrc: # Some default enhancements/settings for IRB, based on # http://wiki.rubygarden.org/Ruby/page/show/Irb/TipsAndTricks   unless defined? ETC_IRBRC_LOADED   # Require RubyGems by default. require ‘rubygems’   begin require "ap" IRB::Irb.class_eval do def output_value ap @context.last_value end end rescue … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged | 2 Comments

Simple MySQL backup to gmail on Ubuntu/Debian

Posted on June 9, 2010 by matthew

Backing up your MySQL database (if it’s a reasonable size, like < 100s of MB) can be done with a cronjob that runs mysqldump, gzip, and mpack.

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

HOWTO enable the query log on MySQL on Mac OS X

Posted on May 27, 2010 by matthew

Tailing the MySQL query log in real time can be a lifesaver for any developer, and it’s pretty easy to do: Make a file for the mysqld process to write to: sudo touch /var/log/mysql-query.log sudo chown _mysql /var/log/mysql-query.log If you’ve … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How to view only unread gmail conversations

Posted on May 17, 2010 by matthew

Gmail doesn’t have an obvious way to only look at conversations that are unread. If you don’t “archive” conversations out of your inbox, it can get pretty crufty. It’s easy add a bookmark to just view unread conversations, however:

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged | Leave a comment

Installing Phusion Passenger on Ruby 1.9.1, Nginx, & Ubuntu 10.04

Posted on May 17, 2010 by matthew

Getting ruby 1.9.1 and nginx and passenger and ubuntu to all play nicely is fairly straightforward, but it’s not just “apt-get” and “gem install” lovin’. Making ruby 1.9.1 the default ruby is OK. Follow these steps:

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Set up JAVA_HOME to track Java Preferences.app on Mac OS X

Posted on March 29, 2010 by matthew

Mac OS X’s Java Preferences.app has a pane for switching between versions of the JDK, but I just found out from a coworker (thanks, Mike!) that you can make your shell match that preference easily — just add this to … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

HOWTO install etherpad on ubuntu 9.10

Posted on March 2, 2010 by matthew

Etherpad was opensourced by google, and has some generic installation instructions. Here’s the translation for Ubuntu Karmic Koala (release 9.10):

Posted in Technical HOWTOs | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments