spike@stuff-things:~$
// posts, page 13 of 14
 ·  1 min read

It's in the Logs, Stupid

Yesterday, I was involved in a fire drill around the launch of a new Rails site on a very tight time frame. The site worked fine in development/staging, but the index was taking upwards of 10 seconds to render in production.

 ·  2 min read

Dynamic Keys for Strongbox

Previously, Strongbox, my gem for using Public Key Encryption with ActiveRecord, allowed only one key pair for encrypting all of the records for a given ActiveRecord model. I’ve had a number of requests to make it possible to dynamically...

 ·  2 min read

Building Emacs.App From Source on OS X Lion

As always, I like building Emacs for my Mac from source. It lets me live on the cutting edge and have tigher control of the version I’m running. If building software from source isn’t your thing then skip the rest of this article and con...

 ·  1 min read

Octopress Blog Re-Launch

After years of running on Wordpress, today I’m relaunching my blog using Octopress. Octopress is a blogging framework build on top of Jekyll which in turn is system designed for publishing static sites from source files, be they Markdown...

 ·  1 min read

Handling 403 Forbidden Login Pages with (Ruby) Mechanize

Instead of having a dedicated login page, some sites return a 403 Forbidden HTTP status code and include the login form in an HTML body of a custom 403 page. For example, Drupal admin pages work this way. While this may seem a little odd...

 ·  2 min read

Generating RSA Key Pairs in Ruby

I’ve given a number of examples of using Public-key cryptography in blog posts and in the Strongbox documentation, but I’ve always generated the RSA key pair using the openssl command line tool, i.e.