By devin, 2 October, 2014

I've used Ubuntu on a daily basis since version 8.04 in 2008. I used to follow the new releases religiously, reading up on the new features and getting excited. I used to install beta versions, then moved to installing the version on the day it came out, then to waiting a month after release. Nowadays I use LTS releases only and I wait the extra month.

By devin, 23 September, 2014

I've been trying to access the Canada Post Sell Online API (if it's even still called that, in 2014) and I'm having lots of trouble. I'm using an Ubercart module (uc_canadapost) and it doesn't seem to work or something. It looks like you used to get a Merchant ID when you used Sell Online, and with Canada Post's new APIs you get a username and password as your API key.

It took me a good 2 hours to figure out how to successfully use curl to access the REST API. I'm now going to document the examples of successful curl commands that have actually worked.

By devin, 26 April, 2014

I have a problem with moral outrage. 

On the one hand, I often believe in the causes people are outraged about. On the other, I get so sick of the way they treat the causes as God's own truth. Let's pick an example cause: people being angry because they want a higher minimum wage.

I think the best salespeople truly believe in what they're selling. So it's a good thing that people really believe that there should be a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, the argument that a higher minimum wage would lead to less jobs has its merits too.

By devin, 13 April, 2014

I just found out about "Parkinson's Law", which simply stated says that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". Students, take note! You could spend hours in the library procrastinating on Facebook and saying you don't have time to hang out with your friends, or you could hang out with your friends and then do the work on a deadline and get it done decisively.

By devin, 13 April, 2014

Re:If you make this a proof of God...  (Score:4, Insightful)

by marcello_dl (667940)  on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:52AM (#46724593)

Let's simplify.

Conway's game of life creatures became sentient.

They discovered they are made of cells.

By devin, 19 March, 2014

One of the things I noticed when I started university was that my peers started signing their emails like this

Jane A. Student

Honours Bachelor of Aviation and Biochemistry

Class of 2020, part time student

jstudent@uwaterloo.ca

There is a lot of hilarity hidden inside this signature, and most of it isn't mine. 

Why do people love titles so much? Probably has to do with identity, grumble, grumble, grumble...

By devin, 18 March, 2014

In the same vein as my Drupal permissions setup script, here's a script that should set up a Wordpress install with file permissions that are secure, except Wordpress will allow editing of the files through the admin backend. Permissions are locked down in the same way as with Drupal, except wp-content is set up like Drupal's files directory with write permissions for the webserver.

By devin, 8 March, 2014

People love complaining about YouTube comments, and I do too. I disagree with lots of people in YouTube comments.

People also love hating democratically elected leaders; which is their right. Among the people I know, it's common to hear people saying "Stephen Harper doesn't do anything right" or "Rob Ford should never have been elected". I'm not really in a position to evaluate these claims and probably agree based on what I know.

By devin, 6 March, 2014

My two favourite CMSes and my two favourite web servers. Here are four config files for the same website. Let's assume we have a user devin with two directories in his public_html folder:

/home/devin/public_html/drupal
/home/devin/public_html/wordpress

And then has already created the following logs folders (nginx and Apache have a habit of crashing when you try to specify a non-existent logging directory):

By devin, 6 March, 2014

vsftpd is a simple and secure FTP server, I hear. I've used it to set up an FTP server quickly. Rather than fighting with TLS and FTP, I just use SFTP now - it's much simpler.

You'll need to download and install vsftpd and openssh-server at least. Also, I usually use AllowUsers in my /etc/ssh/sshd_config to whitelist  which users are allowed to ssh in like so: