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One of the most common concerns people have is how to ensure that their application is safe, secure and available in the event of an emergency. Often I have found that people are mistakenly believe that they are protected when in fact they often have ignored potential scenarios. The principles explained apply equally well in …

Where have all the good databases gone? Perhaps you’ll recognize these words, “About five years ago I started to notice an odd thing. The products that the database vendors were building had less and less to do with what the customers wanted. … So, what is this growing disconnect?” Those words were written in 2004 …

One of the most frustrating things about bash scripts is how challenging it is to create unix style executibles. You know, the ones where you can pass in -h or –help and see the set of options for the program. Up until now this has been a very manual process in bash, but no longer. …

Earlier today RackSpace announced that they are releasing their Cloud technologies as Open Source under the newly formed project OpenStack. RackSpace is the second largest cloud provider, behind cloud computing pioneer, Amazon. They have partnered with some of the largest names in the industry to create Open Stack including NASA, Dell, Citrix, AMD, Intel, Right …

Image via Wikipedia Every self respecting linux, mac os X or *nix user should have a solid handle on managing jobs in unix. The following will explain how to run tasks in the background, bring tasks to the foreground, background already running tasks and keeping a task running while logged out.

Image via Wikipedia du is the *nix command for disk usage. It tells you how much space everything in the given directory is taking up. GNU du introduced a handy option -h making it human readable, or showing sizes using K, M, G rather than bytes. Unfortunately this makes it not sortable numerically. Here’s how to sort …

Image by HeyThereSpaceman. via Flickr Today I was visiting a friends office and like many offices in NYC they have a shared bathroom in the hall for the entire floor. In this building it had five buttons on the door that when pressed in the correct order unlocked the door. A simple password. In our …

Image via CrunchBase Amazon has done it again bringing another computing service to the masses. This time it’s the Content Delivery Network or CDN. Cloudfront is a direct competitor to other popular CDNs such as Akamai. While Akamai requires a fairly substantial amount of traffic to become a customer, Cloudfront doesn’t. It follows all of Amazons, pay …

Image via Wikipedia Someone asked me a question today “Why would anyone choose SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) instead of REST (Representational State Transfer)?” My response: “The general rule of thumb I’ve always heard is ‘Unless you have a definitive reason to use SOAP use REST’”. He asked “what’s one reason?” I thought about it …

Some of this may seem like a broken record, yet every single time you hear about a bank losing millions of customer data, or a company having a security breach they consistently have failed to implement and enforce the most basic security practices. Here are 7 simple security practices that you cannot afford to not follow.