Recent Posts

How CVE-2014-0160 let us show the power of puppet

CVE-2014-0160 which recently made headlines because of it's massive impact across the large majority of Internet-based services has allowed us to show that the return on investment with puppet is greater than 0. Here's how.


NewsBlur CLI

Yesterday, I spent a few hours and wrote up a perl application to allow me to use NewsBlur from the command line. I've been thinking about this for a while, and the problem finally overflowed yesterday when trying to read some feeds in Firefox actually crashed the browser.


Slim Framework, Route Groups, and Parameters

Yesterday, I was writing a new sub-endpoint for an API based in Slim Framework. For this API, the routes are kept in separate files for organizational purposes, but also because route groups didn't exist at the time; so I thought I'd give them a shot.


Zend Db and non-escaped strings

This is for my own edification in the future, but if you're looking for a non-escaped string as a parameter to a query, it's not Zend\DB\Raw that you're looking for, as that doesn't exist. What you're looking for is new \Zend\Db\Sql\Expression() to handle those raw strings.


How to fix strange characters in MySQL

I admit, I borrowed this from How to fix strange characters in MySQL database – Vinh Pham. But I also added a few more that were missing.


Make iPhoto show pictures with unnamed faces

I've got about 11k photos, and lots of them have faces of things like wax figures, or people I don't know in the background. I don't really care about those "people", and so I need to remove them.


2013: In Review

2013 was a good year for me: we bought a new house and I got a promotion. 2013 was a good year for this blog as well: 12,000 total page views, 4,300 unique visitors, 5,200 visits, 21 posts, and two new authors (who'll begin posting in 2014).