Technology

I’m a big fan of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. When it comes to effective organization you could probably read this book and be done, it really is that good. One issue I have with the book though is that it’s very paper centric. As a Yard-O-Led fountain pen and Rhodia notebook loving scribbler I have to say I can dig that. I really can. But the thing that irks me with a paper based workflow is that eventually, at some point, I know I’m going to have to type my paper notes up!...

When it comes to your infrastructure, whether in the home or at work you really don’t want to mess around with storage. It’s where your precious pictures, media and business files reside. Commonly storage has resided on the computer’s internal disk. This has always been a risky proposition with little in the way of protection should the internal disk fail. External storage had a brief surge of popularity with plasticky USB drives for $99 sprouting everywhere....

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Or so the saying goes. When specifying and buying computer hardware it saves time and money knowing the level of performance you get with your existing equipment and the performance you can expect from your new purchase. There are numerous metrics to measure but in order to obtain meaningful results (relatively) quickly I personally focus on CPU, memory and file and network I/O....

As part of refining my Apache web server which runs multiple sites I’ve create a user account, database account and home folder per site so for example the site example.com has a user account example, a database account example and a web folder located at: /home/example/public_html The corresponding Apache VirtualHost for this site is: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@example.com ServerName www.example.com ServerAlias example.com ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.example.com.log LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.example.com.log combined DocumentRoot /home/example/public_html <IfModule mod_suexec....

In the early days of our startup, bubblegum and duct tape seemed to be the order of the day as we struggled to keep things running on cheap as chips computers bought off ebay and a ragtag bunch of borrowed Dell Optiplexes. Developer files sat on their individual machines, source code was scattered across the place and the concept of centralised document storage was a share on one of the developer machines called Common in which everyone dumped their stuff....