Summersault Blog

I’d like to expand on one of the points in Tim Berners-Lee excellent recommendations on designing a good URL. He suggests leaving access out of the URL. An example of that would be the inclusion of “Public” in this bug tracking URL.

Tim is concerned about this primarily because URL access changes over time, causing the URL to need to change when the resource hasn’t changed.

There’s a bigger problem with putting access in URLs. In the era of web2.0, more sites are data-driven, providing different views of the same resource depending on how you access it. Commonly, an administrator may see links to edit and modify the data, while the public has fewer or no options to alter the content.

The problem comes when people try to share URLs to resource between different access groups. Instead of displaying the resource, the user may be prompted to login, since they are a different group than the one needed to view the resource. That’s somewhat silly– why block me from accessing a resource that I can see, even if it’s a bit different than what the sender sees?

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One of the most frequent uses of Perl in my job is to validate web-based forms. Here’s some explanation and sample code to how I do that efficiently and effectively.

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I was recently tasked with finding out how much each disk space each of our PostgreSQL and MySQL databases was taking up.

The job was considerably easier for PostgreSQL, which ships with tools in contrib/dbsize to do just this. After following the simple instructions there, all that was necessary for easy reporting was to create a simple view. Here’s the one I used:
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Today I downloaded and tried the view preview release of Flock, a new web browser based on Firefox.

I went into the experience cynical, having used many browsers in my experience as a professional website developer. What else could they possibly add that I would really want?

I found one feature in Flock that by itself makes it worth considering the browser.

Flock has built a better bookmark.

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It wasn’t all that long ago that Mozilla released the first public offering of Sunbird, a calendering companion to the popular Firefox web browser that I already use and prefer.

I paid no mind to the announcement at the time, as I was happy enough with KOrganizer for this purpose. Recently one bug drove me over the edge to seek alternatives. I was being asked to repeatedly click on an error message which wasn’t helpful enough to allow me to solve the problem, which I couldn’t confirm was a problem anyway. Very frustrating.

In just a few days of use, Sunbird seems so much better– it’s hard to imagine going back anytime soon.

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There’s been quite a lof interest in source control management (SCM) software since Linus Torvalds recently announced that he will no longer be using BitKeeper to manage the Linux kernel project. Related to this, kerneltrap.org has a timely survey about favorite SCM software. Sure it’s unscientific, but being skewed towards people who have some interest in large projects like the like the Linux kernel does make it more interesting. These are generally readers of kerneltrap.org, after all.

The two in the lead are no surprises: CVS and Subversion. CVS is the old heavyweight with a large mindshare. Subversion has gained popularity as a “better CVS”. Beyond these, the options get interesting because they get distributed.
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I love simplicity, and I found it today in shfs, a tool that allows me to
browse any server I can ssh into as a local file system.

Consider this common case: I’m working on some content for my website at home, and I’m ready to upload to my website. I can only access with SSH-based tools, to prevent my password from being sent in the clear, as FTP would do. That means my choices are basically ssh, scp, and sftp.
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Linux as a desktop operating system is finally at place where it can be
comfortable alternative to Windows or Mac OS X for a lot of people.

Linux has outgrown the perception that it’s necessary to use the command line
or have to compile your own software.

Yet, the hacker culture it has evolved from is ripe with opportunities for
additional efficiency and power for those users that do dare to visit the
command line.
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We use the excellent RT request tracker for our support system.

Each request is tracked through a unique ID that gets passed the e-mail subject line. Sometimes I want to update several tickets at once using a collection of unrelated IDs I have in my Inbox. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a tip for unix geeks:

After years of using tail -f to review log files, I’ve discovered this can be done with less in a way that you allows you to browse around the file as well as reviewing the last few lines.

After using less /log/file/path, just press Shift-F to cause it to move to the end of the file and wait for new data.

sandip’s blog just taught me some other uses for less I wasn’t aware of, such as the ability to review compressed files without using a seperate program to first uncompress them. Very nice.