A day in the life of…

Most developers who are working at the command line on a Linux system know the “basic” commands: ls, cd, cat, tail, head, sort, grep, find and others. More “advanced” users will know how to deal with the ‘sed’ and ‘awk’ beasts, or even prefer perl-oneliners. Have the knowledge of bash (scripting) and you find yourself [...]

During this blog post I will talk about creating your own custom package repository. However, before you can setup a repository, you need packages. This previous post talks about setting up your custom packages.

At almost every software company I’ve been involved in, used custom-made tools for various tasks. These tools range from simple shell-scripts for search&replacing data to large deployment-script or even programs that take care of administrative tasks like monitoring, log aggregation and so on. At the good companies, these tools are maintained inside a software repository [...]

A friend of mine posted a tweet about problems with Zend Guard just the other day. My friendly advise was: try using another encoder. Which he kindly ignored :) Which on my turn again made me wonder: how many encoders are out there, and more important how easy are they to work with?

Today i was reading upon this wonderful article about writing a trace-route program in Python in 40 lines. Even though trace-route is one of the many tools i use on day to day basis, i never really got into writing a version myself (something I like to do just to gain knowledge how things works). [...]

Caching is THE magic solution when it comes to optimizing your web applications. There are a lot of caching strategies and applications outthere. Some prefer MySQL query caching, others use memcache to cache either queries, objects, html or other data. However, one of the biggest problems that a lot of people tend to ignore with [...]

Although you probably never need it as much as a C-programmer would, it’s not a bad idea to know how bit manipulation works. This post will tell you a bit about what bit manipulation is, why you could use it and how you are using it already (with or without knowing)

Nowadays most lowlevel functionality like reading or writing graphics are taken care of 3rd party libraries and that’s ok. It’s way to complicated to do things right and you probably want to focus on outputting or sending a PNG instead of construction one from scratch. While reading and writing these kind of binary data was [...]

Normally you would develop against a test-database. It probably contains about 10 people so you can do your programming and testing.. Once it’s done and QA’d, it will go live and people start to visit the site. After a year or so,.. the site is too slow. Adding more db servers is of no use, [...]