Niall's Weblog

I started using tmux today. Its a terminal multiplexer / task switcher for UNIX-likes, very much in the same vein as GNU Screen. However, its a from-scratch implementation, designed to be clean, sane and easy to configure. The more liberal 3-clause BSD license is a plus also, since it means that [...]

I read today that Turbo Gears 2.0 has been released – at long last! I used Turbo Gears 1 briefly in 2007 for a small project then switched to Pylons.
Pylons is pretty neat because its really a framework for building a framework. You can pick and choose WSGI middleware and slot it [...]

I’ve been playing with the recently-released HTTP API for accessing the Best Buy product catalog. While its a little strange to use at first, its actually pretty useful. One of the things I am interested in is online retail, specifically how to make Internet shopping easier. Lets imagine I am looking for [...]

On ORMs
It so happens that I end up dealing with the Python ORM SQLObject pretty often. I don’t really like ORMs very much, since in my experience they make those 80% of database things that are already easy to do with plain SQL easier, while making the other 20% of database things which are [...]

Lots of people have a small home network. Usually you have a combo box which acts as a router/firewall/file server. Then you have a couple of other machines hooked up, and you share the Internet using NAT. A private DNS server is helpful in this kind of scenario for two reasons:

Recursive resolver [...]

Have you ever tried to run a very network-intensive P2P application on Windows XP SP2 or higher? If so, you may have encountered very strange behaviour with the Windows TCP/IP network stack. Specifically, you won’t be able to open any new TCP/IP connections, so web-browsing, email checking, SSH, etc will all be basically [...]

I often use Windows as a terminal to my various UNIX systems. Sometimes its helpful to run proprietary software – and I don’t have time/inclination to mess around with half-baked emulators/ports/binary blobs/whatevers under Linux. I either run a completely open system like OpenBSD or I run Windows.

Anyway, I never use Windows to do [...]

A few weeks ago I needed a designer to produce some HTML/CSS and Photoshop templates for a web project I’m working on. While I have good working knowledge of HTML and CSS, I am not very interested nor efficient at working with it. And even worse, I’m quite poor at coming up with [...]

My C BitTorrent implementation, Unworkable, used to be hosted on an anonymous CVS repository I had running on my server at home. This was fine, until I reinstalled the machine from scratch and didn’t feel like setting up the whole anonymous CVS access again. Its a pretty painful process, unfortunately, although there is [...]

OpenBSD 4.5 was released the other day. I upgraded one of my servers and workstations to the new release, from 4.4-current and 4.4-release respectively. Mostly, things have gone pretty smoothly, as is usually the case with OpenBSD. The new release has plenty of incremental improvements, with the developers gradually polishing and refining [...]