Category: Technology

Apache’s ForceType directive overrides AddCharset directives

Yesterday, after uploading a refreshed www.sicirec.org, some character encoding issues popped up because I had converted the website's content from ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) to UTF-8. (I wanted to be able to type and paste special characters from PuTTY into VIM without worrying about the particular encoding of each file.) Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on February 26, 2007, at 23:02 | Comments closed

Replacing the trunk of a Subversion repository with a feature branch

For the Sicirec website, I use Subversion to track all changes. When working on big changes which take more than a day to implement, I follow the Feature Branches branching pattern. This pattern means that the trunk remains relatively stable and usable for everyday updates while I can climb in a feature branch whenever I want to work on the big new feature(s). Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on February 25, 2007, at 13:02 | 3 comments

Nested hashes derail Rails’ url_for helpers

While working on the Sicirec PostgreSQL database front-end today, I had to pass a lot of nested parameters to a link_to helper in Rails. Software being what it is, this didn't work. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on February 19, 2007, at 19:02 | Comments closed

Automatic resizing of an HTML <textarea> element

Today, while improving the Rails GUI for the Sicirec database, I was struck once again by how annoyingly small <textarea>s can be when having the user type lots of text. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on February 18, 2007, at 20:02 | 4 comments

Using an outgoing SSH tunnel from behind a NAT for incoming VNC

Laurelin is working as an Au Pair for a Greek family in—where else than Greece. Her hostess has arranged for an Internet connection through Vivodi Telecom to allow Laurelin to maintain some form of contact with her friends and family at home. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on February 17, 2007, at 23:02 | Comments closed

Using the standard HTML link colors

Occasionally, I have to foray into web design. From the look of this blog you can deduce that I'm not really into the design part of web design. First and foremostly this is because I suck at graphics and colors. But another reason is that I assume that people visit my blog to read some text and not to look at the fancy graphical borders and background of that text. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on February 02, 2007, at 23:02 | 1 comment

Unique constraints and indexes in PostgreSQL

This afternoon, I had to add a unique index for some table in the Sicirec PostgreSQL database. I had already assumed that I needed to use CREATE UNIQUE INDEX to create my new unique index until I noticed, thanks to pgAdmin's clear GUI, that some tables clearly had unique constraints and unique indexes while one table lacked a unique constraint and only had an unique index defined. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on February 02, 2007, at 23:02 | 2 comments

Rowan Rodrik van der Molen

About the author. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on December 23, 2006, at 03:12 | Comments closed

Wiebe Hedde Cazemier

If you're into Open Source software, 3D modeling or Do It Yourself audio, you may already know Wiebe under his on-line alias, Halfgaar. Personally, I've known him since I was 10 and he was 9. These days he's still a very good friend, and even a colleague. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 decade ago, on September 18, 2006, at 19:09 | Comments closed