Truncated Pages
Not too long ago I mentioned that I'd setup and installed Nginx on this server. All seemed well to start off with, then on certain occasions I started to notice that some pages were being served truncated while I was at work. I thought that the issue was work-related, as they have a fairly draconian security policy in place and I thought that it had something to do with severing the connection.
This assumption was proved false a few days ago when I received an email about my Trac/Mercurial/SSH post not rendering properly in someone else's browser. Dammit!
So this time I actually did a bit of research by delving into the log files (yes, I know.. genius isn't it!) and determined that there was indeed a problem. Thankfully it was fairly simple to resolve. For some reason the fastcgi instances were failing to function periodically when attempting to access a folder on disk. In short, some of the temp folders were owned by the right user, and some of them weren't. After modifying the ownership of the appropriate folders, everything seems to be running nicely.
Yet more proof that the admin is an idiot.
If after I post this you notice any truncation at all across the site, please let me know! Cheers!
Now Running Nginx
For the last couple of years, the server which has powered this site (and a few other sites) has been running the free version of Litespeed web server. After feeling the resource burden of Apache, Litespeed was a breath of fresh air! The fact that the "full" version wasn't free didn't bother me, I was happy to stick with the standard edition as it seemed more than capable of handling the meagre traffic that this site generates.
Setting up Trac, Mercurial and SSH on Windows
WARNING - This blog post is long 
This post has been edited since it was published. Please see the end of the article for any notes/modifications
Some Background Info
I had the need to do this for work recently. It was nothing short of a right royal pain in the butt. It was such a pain, in fact, that I have decided to document what I had to do to get it working so that other poor unfortunates will feel less pain if they have to do this themselves.
Almost regardless of the company and the software I'm working on, I use Mercurial for source code control. For the work I am doing at the moment, I was also using hg because the company I am involved with is relatively new and they hadn't yet sorted out a plan for version control or ALM. It was working quite well and I was pushing all my changes to my NAS box to make sure I had other copies backed up, etc. I was living the dream
Damn you, Crystal Reports!
I've had Visual Studio 2008 installed for quite a while. When I first installed it I decided not to install the Crystal Reports components because I was fairly certain that I'd never need them at home.
Well, the worm has turned! On my new gig, I have the joy of working from home. It just so happens that I also need to use Crystal Reports. How silly of me to not bother installing a few extra components the first time so I didn't have to go through the pain of going through another VS Setup.
On the surface this doesn't sound like a painful experience right? WRONG. It's a lot more painful than you think.
The Admin is an Idiot
Yes, and that admin is me!
I usually do a fairly decent job of keeping the server patched, up to date, and clean. Over the Xmas period where I wasn't really looking at anything online, something went wrong.
I logged on this morning only to find that the server wasn't responding. I could connect via SSH, but nothing was being served via HTTP. So I tried to reboot LiteSpeed to see if that would resolve it (as you do 
). The service stopped, but failed to restart!
Websites are Hard to Build
"It's just a small site, how hard can it be?"
"I thought you could do it for me as a favour. It's not a complicated site."
"This would take me an afternoon, but I don't have time, can you do it for me?"
Have you ever heard these comments before? Have you heard ones that are similar? I've been hearing them a lot in the last few weeks and it's starting to get to me.
I have just had a chat with a mate who is also suffering this pain, and that conversation is what inspired me to write this, the first random rant in a while.
Be Part of a World Record
Get yourself a copy of Firefox 3 on the day it's released from this site and you'll be doing your bit to get Firefox downloads in the world record books.
Yup, you'll also be falling for a huge marketing gag designed to get Firefox installed on as many machines as possible, but it's a damned good browser anyway, so no harm done!
Preview Feeds in Google Reader
Here's another reason why I find Google Reader a excellent choice for reading your RSS feeds.
Most of us have a collection of feeds that contain similar subject matter. As a geek, most of my feeds are geek-related. As a geek who likes to stay up to speed, I also like to know what other blogs and feeds are good to read.
This is where Google Reader's Top Recommendations come in. Google do a great job of throwing other feeds in your face that you might like to read based on the kind of stuff that you've already subscribed to.
Get with the Times – Use a Feed Reader
Regular readers of Dilbert are currently kicking and screaming about the site's new Flash-based design. Personally I don't mind it, but at the end of the day it matters not.
Why?
