1934 Ford Sedan, by Arcade Manufacturing Co.

Occasionally I sell stuff on eBay, usually antique toys. I’m excited enough about this car that I thought I’d share a few pictures of it before I put it up for auction. This car is both very hard to find and in very good condition (aside from the missing wheel).

“Using Relative URL Protocol Schemes” or “One Less Special Case for IE”

So the other day I was perusing through some of the RFCs, and came across RFC 1808. It’s called “Relative Uniform Resource Locators.” Of particular interest is section 2.4.3, “Parsing the Network Location/Login,” which says something like:

“Hey, remember the last time you were creating a web application that needed to run in both HTTP and HTTPS? Remember how you had to write logic to detect the current request’s scheme, because you had to generate URLs as https:// when you were secure? Remember that you never thought there was a problem until Jimmy in Marketing looked at your site in Internet Explorer 5.5, and he said to your boss, ‘It says, “Are you sure you want to display insecure items?”, what’s that mean?’

Yeah, you don’t have to do that anymore.”

Someone’s not thinking …

Ever run low on disk space? Ever try to free up disk space by deleting so-called temporary files? (After all, they’ve been abandoned by their programmer, might as well put them out of their misery.)

A few weeks ago I ran into this situation on a Windows 2003 R2 Server. This is what it told me:

Seriously?

F1 help in Windows [XP] Explorer

Have you ever accidentally hit the F1 key in Explorer when you meant F2 (or 1, or Esc)? Normally missing a key isn’t a big deal, but in this case F1 triggers the Windows help center. Help may be valuable sometimes (I wouldn’t know, I’ve never used it), but for me, the accidental keypress costs me 20-30 seconds of productivity while I wait for the thing to load and close it.

The slow demise of Cable TV

I’m officially calling out the end of cable television in ten years. It will be replaced by Hulu, or something like it.

On the Economy of Light Bulbs

On May 17th, 2003, I bought this compact fluorescent light bulb for $5.99. A couple days ago it finally stopped working, ending it’s 76 month career of generating photons.

Get your motherboard model in Linux

If you ever need to remotely determine the motherboard model of your linux server, try using dmidecode. This dumps the BIOS information, and that will usually yield the motherboard model.

Even Faster Django Unit Tests

Last year, I wrote about speeding up django unit tests. With this method, I’ve been able to significantly reduce the time it takes to run my unit tests.

But I still have a real short attention span. If anything, it’s shorter than it was last year. I also have an additional problem: I tend to create databases that have lots of preloaded data. This means that when I run tests or when I’m doing model development, I have to wait for all that data to load. Waiting sucks.

Workaround for Subclipse crash

A couple weeks ago I tried to setup Aptana on my Mac, but was quite disappointed to find out that whenever I used Subversion, the JVM would crash. It took a while, but this morning I narrowed down the problem.

The JavaHL native client for Subclipse adapter was blowing up the JVM. In retrospect, I should have figured this out earlier, since the JVM doesn’t really crash that often. Because the JavaHL is calling into the svn shared lib’s on my machine, it has the possibility to crash.

The workaround is pretty simple: uninstall the JavaHL client adapter and install the SVNKit client adapter. The SVNKit adapter is pure java code, so it doesn’t call into the libraries directly. Any bugs that may exist in SVNKit will just throw java exceptions instead of killing the JVM.

Grooglin

grooglin (n): A google gremlin. Often blamed for odd behavior with Google services, such as receiving a reply to an email before you sent the original.