Once upon a time I knew a vi mantra for removing carriage returns from a DOS-formatted text file, thus transforming it into a UNIX file.It was something like :%s/^V^M//g. It has become such an ingrained habit that I can still type it without even thinking about it. Muscle memory.

But VIM knows more...

Recently I needed to start a server written in Node.js. This server was deployed on Ubuntu 12.04, and I wanted it to be started using the system's init system. Yet I also wanted the safety of Forever, a script manager for Node.js.

Ubuntu still supports the classic SysV init style, but it also now...

Gluster is a distributed filesystem that works well in the cloud. This post explains how to configure GlusterFS on an Ubuntu 12.04 image running in HP's cloud.

Using this setup, I gain all the benefits of a distributed and replicated (redundant) filesystem for my in-cloud services, and can back these...

A few years ago, I tested SPLObjectStorage and Arrays to see which performed better. My conclusion at the time was that SPLObjectStorage is the better performer.

One thing I did not examine there was the implications of size. I ran tests with a fixed size of 10,000 elements. The test was also run...

Forbes covered HP Cloud's announcement of the new Platform as a Service (PaaS) project.

This is my favorite quote from the article: With this announcement HP’s Cloud grabs a potentially big technological advantage. Expect other cloud providers to do the same by quickly following HP’s lead of an...

On Linux (and UNIX), to open a port with a number less than or equal to 1024, traditionally a program must run as the root user. This impacts web applications, which use ort 80 (HTTP) and port 443 (HTTPS) to do business. Many programs (Apache being a great example) use this by running a master process...

To add the Go language (golang) plugins to Janus-flavored VIM, it's not enough to install the VIM plugins into your system's default location. So using, for example, Ubuntu's vim-syntax-go package will not work.

The best way to install all of the Go VIM plugins is to do the following:

• Create a...

This post explain how to get data off of a curl_multi handle. Some time back I posted this snippet of code inside of a larger sample of code:

<?php
  $active = NULL;
  do {
    $ret = curl_multi_exec($multi, $active);
  } while ($ret == CURLM_CALL_MULTI_PERFORM);

  while ($active && $ret == CURLM_OK

In its minimalism, Node.js does not have libraries to perform some common tasks. One such task is taking a string (or Buffer) of data and interacting with it as if it were a Stream. Here is a simple StringReader implementation that illustrates a no-nonsense way of exposing a string as if it were a...

The new pre-1.0 version of Pronto.js has been released. This is the first release of the 0.3 branch.

Pronto is a high-performance asynchronous framework for Node.js.

Here are the big new changes:

• Pronto.js now has an HTTPS server.
• The Pronto logger is considerably more sophisticated. While cxt...