Posts - Ian's Tech Notes

Posted on October 8, 2015
Vice:Motherboard carried a story two days ago titled “Reddit Is Working on an Entirely New Front Page Algorithm”. It covers recent dissatisfaction among Redditors with perceived changes in how articles reach the front page. It’s a fine title, but I think...

Posted on August 11, 2015
So you have a Rails app, and you wrote some tests because you’re a responsible developer. You want these tests to run quickly, so you want to use database transactions to handle database cleanup. Yes, really, you do.
Using transactions instead of deletion or truncation is the biggest and easiest performance win you will find in your test suite. I’ve seen this change shave off 5 seconds per test on a database with a very ordinary number of tables. Savings of 5 seconds...

Posted on July 20, 2015
Somehow, and I know this is hard to believe, my exposé of SiteKey’s failings six years ago wasn’t the final stake through its heart like I had hoped. SiteKey is still very much alive and just as useless as ever.
I hate it, and I hate putting up with their useless security theater1. But there is one bright spot: most Sitekey installations can be coaxed into giving you some gloriously weird pictures as your “secret image”. And if your institution makes use of...

Posted on February 25, 2015
fortune is a venerable Unix utility with a simple purpose. You call it and it returns a random quotation picked from a set of files. You can set this up to run when a terminal is opened, and this way you get a nice quote-of-the-day thing. fortune ships...