nginx + SSL reverse proxy tutorial
If you have an existing HTTP application that you want to enable SSL for, nginx provides a convenient reverse proxy mode. In this mode, nginx is just respon...
Recent Posts
Migrate your Python app to Facebook OAuth 2.0
Facebook recently started enforcing OAuth 2.0 on app developers. Supposedly this was slated for Oct 1, 2011, but in practice it seems to have not started un...
jQuery hashtag input control
This jQuery snippet will turn an INPUT element into a hashtag input control. For example, if the user type "jobs business networking", it will translate it ...
Ubuntu 11.10 Lock Screen - Suspend Monitors
Whenever I get up from my desk, I reflexively lock my workstation. Ever since upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10, this has failed to put my monitors into suspend mod...
Python/Django: disk based caching decorator
One of the great things about Django's caching framework is that you can cache complex objects. Say you have a list of dictionaries representing favorite mo...
Running a JAR as a service (Linux/upstart)
Running a java JAR as a daemon in Linux is fairly easy, but it took me some digging to figure out how. This is using the new upstart init script functionali...
Backing up gmail to Dropbox using getmail on Linux
What if gmail went away tomorrow, or at least deleted all your mail? It may not be as far fetched as you think. It's always prudent to have a backup.
Nagios check for Varnish Backends
We recently starting using Varnish to cache un-authenticated requests to our web farm. It even has this great feature called grace mode, where it will keep ...
Reduce javascript UI code with Django forms
Typically, I try to implement a dynamic UI feature without javascript on the first pass. Then, I layer in a little javascript goodness to make it more respo...
Profile and reduce memory use in Django with .iterator()
For the most part, objects allocated by Django are short-lived, and are eligible for garbage collection when the request ends. In our case, we also have som...