Programming

Update: Mosso was rebranded as The Rackspace Cloud in June 2009.

Update 1 Jan 2010: It looks like Rackspace has fixed the problem with Mosso's Scheduled Tasks. Anonymous' comment tipped me off that you can now set the command language to http, then enter your site's cron.php as the command to run.

Drupal can be a pain. After a whole day of development, we started getting 'Access Denied' errors on all content that should be accessible by the anonymous user. The cause turned out to be something to do with a module incorrectly altering the node_access table.

Running this query fixed it:

A lecture by Neil Daswani, a Google security engineer and author of “Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs to Know“

Joel Spolsky on the myth of web standards, IE 8 and pragmatists vs. idealists.

Fluidesign on why you don't always have to cram content above the fold when designing websites: Demystifying “Above the Fold”

freelanceswitch.com lists the 12 most useful Firefox extensions for web developers.

Here's a summary (just in case the page disappears).

1. FireFTP
2. ColorZilla
3. IE Tab

"Tersely put, SimpleDB is hugely disruptive. It will take some time to evolve the new thinking patterns and new design disciplines that this technology forces us to consider. To do so, consider this breakdown of the similarities and differences between SimpleDB and conventional relational databases..."

Full article: Amazon SimpleDB 101 & Why It Matters

We've recently been asked by a client to look into creating a Drupal installation that can cope with heavy load. Here's some useful instructions from johnandcailin.com.

I'll post a follow-up in the near future explaining what we ended up doing and how successful it was.

• Scaling drupal - an open-source infrastructure for high-traffic drupal sites

Here are some tips for removing those troublesome carriage return characters from Mac OS text files:

Using perl

perl -pi -e 's/\r/\n/g' <filename>

PHP (or non-ASP) developers: if you ever need to create a redirect script on an IIS server using ASP, just create a file called 'index.asp' or 'default.asp' and add the following line:

Full article: Basic User Authentication in Rails.

Full article: 10 Steps I Took to Learn Ruby on Rails.

Chapter 1: Quick Introduction to Linux
Chapter 2: Getting started with Shell Programming
Chapter 3: Shells (bash) structured Language Constructs
Chapter 4: Advanced Shell Scripting Commands
Chapter 5: Essential Utilities for Power User

"Over the last few months I have analyzed a number of Rails applications w.r.t. performance problems ... . The applications targeted a variety of domains, which resulted in enough differences to make each performance improvement task challenging. However, there were enough commonalities that made it possible to extract a number of areas where each of these applications fell short of achieving good performance."

Full article: A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails.

Martin Fowler has an article on Writing Software Patterns.