Open Source

Crap that’s happening in the open source world.

For the longest time I’ve been using a tiny piece of hardware to run littlesvr. I loved it. Low power consumption, very unlikely to break due to a hardware failure, and fast enough for anything I wanted to do on it. But now I want to run MySQL and insert gigabytes worth of rows into …

Continue reading New littlesvr.ca

I’m generating a new certificate for myself, and I still remember the frustration I ran into a long time ago where the problem was my certificate expired needlessly and completely unexpectedly. So this time I figured what the hell, I’ll set it to expire in 100 years. I thought that was the end of it, …

Continue reading Year 2038 problem, in 2012

Christian Perrier from the debian-i18n list has done me a huge favour. He created a tarball with every translation in every language for every piece of software in Debian! You may imagine it’s huge as did I, but I was shocked at just how big it is. Almost 2 GB of gzip-compressed PO files from …

Continue reading Lots of translations

andrew@littlesvr:~$ uptime 13:26:34 up 1104 days, 10:14,  4 users,  load average: 0.61, 0.31, 0.21 I guess 1100 days doesn’t sound like a lot but 3 years does :) It’s still the same machine I mentioned a year ago. It’s been running and running and running, and not crashing! Theoretically 3 years is not a lot, …

Continue reading Beat my uptime: 3 years!

Here’s an OSTD feature I was really excited about and looking forward to implement: allow the user to put in some version control info for a project so that I can run a nightly cron job and pull any new translations that have been added to that project. Would have been a great feature, and …

Continue reading Oh, you Git!

I’ve started to run into serious performance issues with my SQL queries. I mentioned my concerns earlier, but now (still long before production time) I’m already experiencing clearly unacceptable performance. I’ve added a couple of thousand translated strings to the database, and uploaded another PO file for the record. That would run the following query …

Continue reading Good query bad query

Back in 2009 I wrote a post complaining about the needless complexities plural forms introduce to the i18n process. Now I ran into them again. Working on the OSTD I have to make sure I work with all kinds of PO files, and that has to include PO files with plural forms. The format of …

Continue reading Plural forms, again

A long long time ago I decided to do an experiment. I ported my open source application ISO Master to Windows, and kept the port as proprietary software. The experiment paid off, and I definitely made enough money to pay myself for the porting work, but that was then. In december last year my webserver …

Continue reading Shareware bandwidth

There are a number of articles and blog posts out there trying to explain scope and closures, but overall I’d say that a majority of them aren’t crystal-clear. No sh**. I’ve been trying to figure out how scope works in JavaScript on-and-off for the last several years. I was never a committed JS programmer though …

Continue reading Scoping in JavaScript