Articles

I've resisted calling this section a blog primarily because I know I'm not likely to post to it on a regular basis. However I occasionally have an idea or tutorial that seems worth sharing with a larger audience. Hopefully you'll find them useful.

Memcached Cheat Sheet

I use Memcached as a back-end cache for a lot of my PHP projects. The performance is great, but the administration tools leave something to be desired. I've compiled a short list of common administrative commands that I find useful.

How to Make Professional Labels for Homebrew Beer

Adding labels to your homebrew beer is fun (if a bit time consuming.) It lets you play around with label art (I'm sure there's a museum of beer labels somewhere), and keeps you from accidentally serving unlabeled chili beer to an unsuspecting friend.

Setting up OpenID using a Google Account

Setting up an OpenID identity (http://http://openid.net/) is a great way to reduce the number of usernames and passwords you have to remember (and remember to change.) Google makes a great OpenID provider (since most of us have a Google account and are logged into it most of the time), but it isn't the friendliest system out of the box. This article shows you how to set up an easy-to-remember ID (your domain name) while still using Google as the authentication provider.

Greenhouse/Cold Frame for a Square Foot Garden

I started a Square Foot Garden this year, and wanted to start the season early for a some frost-sensitive plants. I built a simple bed cover / greenhouse over one of my three 4' x 4' beds to see if it would allow me to plant about 4 weeks prior to our average last frost.

Understanding METAR files

METAR - aviation weather report - data sets are available on an hourly basis from stations all over the world. They're a great way to get current weather conditions for a region. The format is very terse, so I've put together a short guide to understanding them:

RAILS_ENV with mod_fcgid and SuEXEC

Getting Ruby on Rails to behave itself running under FastCGI (as provided by mod_fcgid) and SuEXEC can be challenging. One subtle problem is that Rails expects its environment (production, development, test, etc.) to be specified within a environmental variable called 'RAILS_ENV'. Unfortunately, SuEXEC will not allow that variable to be passed into its environment.

Creating Hierarchical Web Sites with Drupal 6

One of the first questions I had when I started working with Drupal for a client project was "How do you emulate a traditional hierarchical site structure?" i.e. tree menus, logical paths, and other such niceties.