Posting From Emacs

Today marks at least my 10th attempt at making Emacs my main editor. I’m trying harder this time however. For example, this entire post was composed and submitted directly from Emacs.
A co-worker has been using Emacs exclusively for 1 year and I’m drawing on his knowledge and experience to improve my conversion.
One element that was [...]

OpenSUSE Meanderings

At work we debated adding OpenSUSE 11 as
an officially supported platform[ 1]. In the past, when doing this, I’ve
preferred using the targeted platform exclusively for an extended period. For
various reasons, this hasn’t been feasible this time. While testing time has
been devoted to it, that doesn’t give one the same familiarity as using it for daily [...]

From Tech Support to QA

Resolve the issue and move to the next one. This is a common mind set among the Tech Support personnel where I work. This is certainly commendable from the customer’s view point as the customer certainly wants the issue resolved and in a timely fashion. However, what benefits the customer more:

Resolve the immediate problem; or
Resolve [...]

Xen to the process

For two years now my testing platform has consisted of half a dozen physical machines (running a mixture of CentOS Linux and FreeBSD) and two powerful servers running VMware server. During that time I’ve had a couple instances to introduce Xen into the mix, but never on a permanent basis, usually due to time constraints. [...]

Securing PHP in Shared Hosting Environment

One of the problems inherent to using an Apache Module in a shared web hosting environment is the fact Apache modules gain all the permissions of Apache. Hence, using something like PHP as an Apache module can create serious security vulnerabilities. Since the PHP scripts run in the Apache context, users can easily cause problems [...]