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Getting the current interpreter in PHP
Recently a friend of mine asked if there is a way to dynamically find out the path of the PHP executable. The working scenario was: running some scripts (from the command line) which would spawn other scripts and rather than hardcoding the path to the PHP interpreter he wanted to use the same interpreter when…
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Why isn’t my GIN index being used in Postgres after I install the _int contrib package?
While working with some GIN indexes (to speed up the && and <@ / @> operators) I was very surprised to see that after the installation of the intarray (_int) contrib module the query planner stopped using the index. After some poking around it came to me: The contrib module is defining its own operators…
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Postgres Rocks!
It really does!
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The hard edges of Python
I’ve been playing around with Python (mostly because pefile is written in it) and got very annoyed with the whole white-space as a control structure. In theory it all sounds great: you write beautiful code and it just works. However in practice I find this approach lacking in at least two ways: When moving code…
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How can you find out if a site is affected by ThePlanet outage?
If you haven’t heard: The Planet a big, big hosting provider from the USA had some unfortunate incident at one of their hosting facility (involving fires, explosions, etc). Fortunately it seems that no actual computing gear was damaged, however it will be some time until they get back 100% online. In the meantime, if you…
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Multi-threaded Visual C rand
I was helping out a friend who was trying to generate random numbers in several threads and he was expecting those numbers to be (at least somewhat) different. After getting the obvious problem resolved (you must call srand to initialize the seed – using for example the current time), we were still getting threads which…
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Stop thinking in stereotypes!
Stereotypes may help you form a quick opinion about matters, however you almost certainly would be wrong. Romania has a few such associated stereotypes (like orphans), but the one related to IT security is East-European criminals. In-line with this perception we have the latest F-Secure blog post Romanian Whack-A-Mole and Linux Bots (disclaimer: I work…
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The human aspect of security
The weakest link in security are humans. This is both good (when you have a system where the weakest link isn’t technology means that you succeeded from a technological standpoint) and bad (because you must learn new skills to try to mitigate the new threat). A couple of days ago I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.04…
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The new rm -rf /
There are many urban legends out there talking about n00bs asking a *nix related question and getting the answer just do rm -rf / from the terminal (by the way, you don’t want to do that – it tries to recursively erase all the files from your hard-drives – in general when you get advice…
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Kernel 2.6.24 + PostgreSQL != love?
It seems so. The sad thing is that at the moment Ubuntu Server 8.04 (LTS) comes with 2.6.24… Ouch. Hopefully the patches will trickle down quickly. Also, note to myself: newer is not always better. Update: back to the future – 2.6.24. Thank you Marcin for pointing it out. Also corrected the tags.