MonogramRonald's Scribblings

Posts

  • Apr 22, 2012

    Running Pow on OS X with Apache and RVM

    Update: Expanded Troubleshooting section to include the most common RVM error.

    Update 2: Changed certain sections for Pow 0.4.0.

    Update 3: Updated .powrc to support .ruby-version in newer RVM versions

    Recently, I came across this wonderful Ruby web development tool called Pow.

    Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X.

    It is so awesome. To have your Rack app setup, just add a symlink to ~/.pow and it’ll be available at http://myapp.dev/. myapp is the name of the symlink you have used.

    It is super easy to install, but there are some catches if your setup falls into one of the following:-

    • You use RVM to manage your Ruby installations.
    • You want system Apache to continue functioning. (By default, Pow takes over port 80.)
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  • Apr 22, 2012

    Custom 404 Error Pages with Sinatra.rb

    In the process of porting my blog to Octopress/Jekyll, I wanted to implement a custom 404 error page. Blogs around the internet suggested that I drop a 404.html into my source directory.

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  • Apr 18, 2012

    Make Your Email Hacker Proof

    Jeff Atwood:

    Your email is the skeleton key to your online identity. When you lose control of your email to a hacker – not if, but when you lose control of your email to a hacker – the situation is dire. Email is a one stop shop for online identity theft. You should start thinking of security for your email as roughly equivalent to the sort of security you’d want on your bank account. It’s exceedingly close to that in practice.

    I think it bears repeating again and again: Your email is your online identity. If you lose control over it, you lose it. So, save yourselves the trouble and get a strong pass-phrase and turn on 2FA authentication.

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  • Apr 16, 2012

    How Computers Boot Up

    Gustavo Duarte:

    Booting is an involved, hacky, multi-stage affair – fun stuff. Here’s an outline of the process: An outline of the boot sequence

    It’s quite fascinating how this process has remained unchanged for decades in the PC-world, with all sorts of workarounds and hacks applied to the BIOS, just to accommodate the advancement of disk drives and memory capacities.

    Macs on the other hand are on EFI (the successor of BIOS) ever since 2007 when they transitioned from PowerPC to Intel processors.

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