Recent Posts

Finding deleted files that are still opened by a process

Recently my server ran out of space, but my checks (via du) reported that only about 60GB was actually being used. That's because if a process has a file open that is then deleted, the space is still claimed, but the file doesn't appear.


Deleting local git branches with a missing remote branch

I have about 100 git repositories at $job, and of those, about 90% of them have branches that were created locally that were set as tracking branches, but never pushed to a remote. It makes looking at the output of git branch very annoying, so I wrote the script below to clean up those branches.


Enabling Apache basic auth to work with proxied apps

Recently, I needed to make some changes to a Sinatra based app to support multiple users. I already had basic auth set up, but it wasn't being passed to the unicorn-based Sinatra app that was being proxied behind Apache.


Simple Text Agenda

Yesterday, I got tired of not having a simple way of seeing an agenda for the upcoming days of all my calendars. Between work using hosted Exchange, using a joint iCloud calendar, and still using Google Calendar quite often, getting all of the information in one place is a pain.


MySQL monitoring script

A commenter recently asked if I could publish the script that I wrote to handle monitoring master-master replication. It's been almost two years since I wrote the code, and I no longer have access to the original, but I've reproduced the general code here.


Allowing access to a Rails URI with CanCan and Devise

We're migrating capabilities to a centralized location, which happens to be Rails based. All of the resources are protected with CanCan and Devise, but I needed a single controller method to not be protected.


Finding the source of a feed

I've been concerned for a while that Feedburner was going away; with Reader's disappearance, Feedburner seems like the next obvious choice to be put out to pasture. I needed to make sure that the feeds publishing aren't using Feedburner (I fixed that a while back), but also that the feeds I'm reading (that are currently pointing to Feedburner) are pointing to the right location.