Josh Wieder

Every year, like clockwork, someone makes sure to do something clever like this. Dont forget to set your max ttl to a little over 100 so you get ALL the lyrics. You don't want to miss out on a Christmas miracle. $ traceroute -m 120 xmas.futile.net traceroute to xmas.futile.net (77.75.106.106), 120 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 ec2-50-112-0-86.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (50.112.0.86) 1.700 ms ec2-50-112-0-82.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (50.112.0.82) 2.160 ms 2.121 ms 2 100.64.1.143 (100.64.1.143) 1.287 ms 100.64.1.157 (100.64.1.157) 1.850 ms 100.64.1.179 (100.64.1.179) 1.514 ms 3 100.64.0.114 (100.64.0.114) 1.697 ms 100.64.0.56 (100.64.0.56) 1.431 ms 100.64.0.66 (100.64.0.66) 1.637 ms 4 100.64.16.89 (100.64.16.89) 0.816 ms 100.64.16.29 (100.64.16.29) 0.870 ms 100.64.16.153 (100.64.16.153) 0.929 ms 5 205.251.232.166 (205.251.232.166) 3.181 ms 2.279 ms 54.239.48.184 (54.239.48.184) 1.175 ms 6 205.251.232.154 (205.251.232.154) 1.731 ms 1.315 ms 205...

I recently came across this question on ServerFault: " I've subsonic application running of [sic] tomcat. Everything else works on apache. I don't want to write port number everytime [sic] so I'd like to set-up [sic] a simple directory where subsonic will be accessible. So, I'm trying to make virtualhost file [sic] inside apache dir. [...] I tried many variations, but cannot make anything work. " The poor chap than [sic - ha!] provided an example of his latest go at the problem, an excerpt from his httpd.conf file: <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/streamer ProxyPass / http://mini.local:4040/ ProxyPassReverse / http://mini.local:4040/ </VirtualHost>   Not sure a bad go of it, all thing considered. Still, it wasn't providing him with the sort of results he was looking for. Naturally I had encountered similar issues not long ago myself, with the implementation of a Ghost blogging soft...

I grew up reading pulp science fiction. There was a time when I would never had admitted something like that in public. But times have changed. Computer programming is now a career instead of a bizarre waste of time that might get you arrested. People wear and fiddle with mobile computers; displaying them at coffee shops like peacock plumage. When I was a kid and told adults I liked computers they assured my parents it was a phase I would grow out of. As bitter as I may be of the past, I was delighted to find that the University of Sydney Library had combined my youthful passion for computers and science fiction comics into one mammoth project of love. They digitized the Frontiers of Science , a comic strip which was a big deal in Australia in the early 60's by way of the Sydney Morning Herald. But they did more than just scan the damn things. Any unpaid intern can do that. Instead, they relied on the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) in order to provide contextual search capabili...

Here is a simple function for performing symlink analysis using C.  The readlink function gets the value of the symbolic link filename. The file name that the link points to is copied into buffer. This file name string is not null-terminated; readlink normally returns the number of characters copied. The size argument specifies the maximum number of characters to copy, usually the allocation size of buffer. There is significant utility for such a function in a variety of contexts. Have fun with it! h/t Tanguy

It was one of these days, not long ago, that I work up one day and realized that I had become an Old Man. Mine is the last generation that remembers a time prior to the internet. I remember using acoustic couplers. My first laptop, a Toshiba, had dual 5 1/2 inch floppy drives, but had no hard drive. I was so excited when I got my hands on that machine. It meant I could connect to networks using my acoustic coupler from a pay phone! My ruminations on aging is at least somewhat related to the topic at hand. You see, among the memories rattling around my grey hair ensconced head are a few about searching Windows file systems for files of specific types. This sort of thing is very important, even just for every day normal computer usage. When your computer starts running out of space, wouldn't it be nice to be able to find all of the really large files on that computer? Or perhaps you are looking for an important document you wrote - you can't remember the name of the file but ...

There seems to be some mis-communication making the rounds about the new node.js-based Ghost blogging platform's ability to automatically generate a sitemap.xml. As of August of this year (2014), automatic sitemap.xml file generation is a core feature, not a plugin. The new documentation on Ghost's development roadmap on Trello makes this clear: But, if your like me and usually check on this sort of thing by browsing through the forums, its easy to get the idea that sitemaps will be handled in some nebulous, future plugin: I'm fairly new to working with node, and my forrays with Ghost are partly an excuse to learn a bit more. So far, I like what I see. Its true Ghost isnt as mature as say, Wordpress, but it also doesnt have the same target painted on its back (ever go through your server logs for bad requests for wp-admin.php?), and a lot of what is not there or not built well I can re-do myself. Anyone else jumping on the node.js blogger bandwagon, either wi...

Click to Enlarge h/t to Matt Bors