Category Archives: tech

WordPress 3.5 Initial Impressions

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This blog has been updated to WordPress 3.5. Initial impressions:

  • everything is less rounded now
  • Twenty Twelve (the new theme) sucks for following reasons:
    • uses custom font: causes this blog unreadable until fonts are loaded (at least in chrome)
    • image header: positioned below navigation menu (and the header text is above the menu)
    • no more search bar in navigation menu
  • the new media uploader looks useful

Overall there isn’t much change (what should I expect here) but the new theme sucks. At least to be used on this blog.

PostgreSQL authentication quick start

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Connecting to PostgreSQL from command line can be a bit confusing.

For starter, just like MySQL, psql command defaults to connecting to socket instead of tcp. To make matter confusing, most PostgreSQL installation defaults to ident (also called peer)authentication for socket connection: it basically matches current user’s username (ssh login, etc) with PostgreSQL equivalent.

So, instead of using this to login from root to PostgreSQL superuser (usually named postgres or pgsql):

# psql -U postgres

you do this (assuming sudo installed):

# sudo -u postgres psql

The configuration for this is located in pg_hba.conf of PostgreSQL data (or config in Debian) directory (/etc/postgresql/$version/main in Debian, /usr/local/pgsql/data in FreeBSD, /opt/PostgreSQL/$version/data in EnterpriseDB PostgreSQL).

To switch to password based authentication for all methods just replace ident (or peer) with md5 in respective lines and reload/restart the service. Don’t forget to set password for postgres user first before changing this otherwise you won’t be able to connect. You can then connect using psql to any user using password.

Windows 8 Initial Impressions

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6 hours with Windows 8.

  • Metro Modern UI is shit (the applications)
  • The Start Menu (or whatever it’s called now) is ok-ish though
  • The lock screen is awesome with its customizable background image
  • The global one is difficult to change though
  • File association was updated and doesn’t work properly in at least IrfanView and 7-Zip
  • Compressed folder still exists and can be disabled the same way as Windows 7
  • So is Aero Shake. Really though, there is no more Aero but there’s still Aero Shake? Is it some kind of joke?
  • The window border is thick-ish but I guess OK for now (quick google also showed some border customizer)
  • Hyper-V is in it as promised. Works as expected. Most OS need Legacy Network Adapter (except Ubuntu and SLES) or installation of the integration driver for some OSes. The biggest plus is it works at system level – VMs can be automagically started as Windows starts
  • All applications I usually use works without problem
  • It’s not move to (top right) corner but move to corner and move down a bit
  • Updates (from Microsoft Update) which requires license agreement doesn’t work (at least on my PC)
  • There’s no discernible performance difference
  • Yes, Everything also works
  • Also, flat
  • Windows Explorer is a bit better: no more intrusive action buttons above file list (moved to the top)
  • Remote desktop work OK. There’s no more classic style but I think the new one (Modern UI) doesn’t use too much bandwidth (being flat and all)
  • WRT RDP, the 2X Client I usually use in Android doesn’t work with Windows 8. The good old Remote RDP Lite works though (and with CyanogenMod’s plain keyboard, the physical keyboard input works again)

I think that’s it for now.

Zeropaste – the featureless pastebin

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Tonight, when trying to compile Rubinius with Rubinius, I got some errors and wanted to report to relevant party. As usual, the log of what happened is required so I used my usual pastebin – pastie.org to send the logs. But then I noticed that the “Raw” link in it doesn’t provide an actual raw file anymore. What the fuck. It is now a html disguised as txt.

So I decided to whip up a new pastebin (because the world need one more pastebin) which doesn’t have any actual features (like tag highlighting, etc). I also learned the way to create shortest RESTful path possible (read: ‘/’).

There may or may not be more features coming. Developed in Rubinius because I can. Using mysql because of where it’ll be deployed at (see below).

I’ll get around deploying this soon after reinstalling VPS running this blog to Ubuntu or Debian. Running yum in a 128 MB box is suffering.

[ Source Code ]

Ruby 1.9, Rails, and UTF-8

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(main purpose of this post is to link this “server error” page of rubygems.org)

The relevant issue in Rails Issue Tracker (3789). AFAICT, there are few ways to “fix” (read: workaround) this:

  • Modify the relevant Rack code to handle this crap
  • Create additional middleware to intercept (how?) the request (tried, either didn’t work or horribly inefficient)
  • Extend rack before it is started

Well, they all sucks. Hopefully someone comes up with actual working solution for this.

Oh, there’re another solutions:

  • Use REE 1.8 (really?)
  • Use JRuby in 1.8 mode
  • Use Rubinius (rbx 2.0 where?) in 1.8 mode

Um, yeah.

Update: I figured out how to “fix” it. Check it out in Moebooru (requires this).

Rails: read_multi and dalli

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Be careful when using read_multi with dalli: it may return nil-valued key instead of the correct key.

The issue is tracked here and thanks to this I dropped the read_multi usage in moebooru and used the much simpler (and most likely slower) single fetch (per entry) instead. There’s alternative way to use it – do a read_multi and refetch whatever missing/nil-keyed but apparently I’m too lazy to do it.

Disabling Upstart Service in Ubuntu (11.04+)

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Took me few weeks to find out that this one-liner does wonder:

echo manual >> /etc/init/mysql.override

(the line above is to disable mysql, obviously. And must be done as root)

The answer is on first hit (as of this post’s writing) of googling “ubuntu disable service” but you need to scroll down a bit and ignore shitload of crappy, outdated explanations to find that small gem.

Unfortunately doesn’t apply to previous LTS. Or does it?