To some that might sound obvious, after all what has a nice slick OS to do with that kludgy unintelligible unix command line stuff. But on the apple website itself you can find this page whose url I'm reporting literal because it says a lot: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html. And there's a big image there saying: "UNIX. The UNIX you know. The Mac you love". And so when I was given a macbook pro by my employer after begging to no avail for it to be replaced with a thinkpad I was told over and over that I'd been just fine "...because you know, it's really UNIX, it runs FreeBSD". How disappointing. more »

Seven months have passed, I'm close to a complete full-circle trip of the world and if there's something I found hard living on a different timezone every couple of months that's communicating with people. more »

Recently I took a peak at a default mysql installation and found one interesting, to not say scary, thing. SQL_MODE comes set to empty string and if you dig into the documentation you find that... you find nothing! Yes you heard me, whatever a blank SQL_MODE means is not known yet is what most of the people run with because this little fact is advertised nowhere, especially not in the post installation guidelines. more »

If there are a couple things that a few years of system administration should have taught you, the importance of backups and logs is one. more »

To be compatible across different backends the best option is to store ips and netmasks as longint and manage the transformations in code, otherwise, if compatibility is not a concern or writing that code is a problem, both mysql and postresql offer their own built-in functions to aid with the job. more »