Matt's Blog

I have very little money invested in either account, but this isn’t actually about money for those of you who are just skimming the article. 401(k) plan over the past year: A good investment. (Sort of.)   Actively-traded brokerage account I opened with a small amount of savings as an experiment after realizing my bank [...]

Like any good geek, I locked down my wireless network a bit after I set it up. I’m running WPA2, and the password/key was generated with pwqgen, for something sufficiently secure but semi-memorable. I disabled SSID broadcast. My router automatically generated a weird name, which I presume to be two random dictionary words mashed together. [...]

Protip: Don’t accidentally delete the Apache config file for a site. It took me 90 seconds to fix and 24 hours to notice. Oops… :-[

I was just pretty stumped by the following Apache error, in /var/log/httpd/error_log: [Thu Dec 08 21:53:28 2011] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] (13)Permission denied: file permissions deny server access: /var/www/html/aml/i ndex.html The error implies it’s a filesystem permissions issue, and the Apache site explains that it’s almost always related to filesystem permissions, not Apache configuration. But this [...]

I just happened across something nifty: you can use the VerifyHostKeyDNS option in your SSH configuration to fetch the host’s public key fingerprint over DNSSEC-secured DNS (with a “SSHFP” record type). This is defined in RFC 4255, Using DNS to Securely Publish Secure Shell (SSH) Key Fingerprints if you’re looking for some light reading.

We’re now running on a faster virtual machine hosted in Boston, which seems to have excellent uptime. I’ve also taken this opportunity to upgrade to the latest WordPress. The main page is gone for now, but it avoids the total lunacy of a Ruby on Rails application running for the main page, with PHP for [...]

Don’t ask why I was spending my Friday night this way, but I was just reading about Juno, the ISP that I assumed went out of business a decade ago. It turns out that they merged with NetZero (another ISP I forgot all about), and formed United Online. (The interesting thing about their merger is [...]

I think most geeks get a ton of email. I’ve been rather selective in what lists I join (and what mail I just auto-delete at the server level), so I only get perhaps a couple hundred emails a day now. For various ridiculous reasons, searching a mailbox is hard. Most of my mail clients will [...]

There are a lot of things in politics that I believe but don’t feel too strongly about. But one thing that makes absolutely no sense to me is trying to ban gay marriage. North Carolina has become the latest state to put forth a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. So first of all, the concept [...]

On Aeolus Conductor, we’re using Rails 3. Although I’ve been using Rails for years, some part of Rails 3—namely, Bundler—are still relatively new to me. The problem I ran into is that we have a :development, :test group defined, but it’s being installed in all environments. This is as described, but inconvenient when you’re trying [...]