kvz.io

Stages of grief in AI development

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A personal reflection on accepting AI's disruption to software engineering, and the new puzzles that emerge once you get past the grief.

Cursor: an AI dev starter guide

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

After three months of daily use, here's what I learned about getting the most out of Cursor for AI-assisted development.

Setting up macOS for JS development

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Three years ago MacBooks were in a pretty bad spot for me and I switched to Ubuntu, later Pop!_OS. It was a fun ride. While coding I felt very productive because the OS is so low in distractions and just feels incredibly responsive. Installing the world via apt beats brew 10x, and native Docker on Linux is so much faster it isn't even funny. We had to abandon Docker because we had folks with macOS on the team. But, other tasks (email, conference calling, scanning, word, upgrading without breakage) came with more friction, and those tend to fill up ever larger shares of my day.

Steps to Convert JavaScript to TypeScript

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I've been slowly falling in love with TypeScript. I have a thousand little JS projects. Small prototypes with minimal tests and documentation. Often just to help me get a thing done. Typically when I revisited those after some months, I would be a complete stranger with no mental map of all the components or constraints or decisions that led to things being as they are.

And Now for Something Completely Different (NL)

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

So far I have not used my writing for advertisement. Even (or especially) when I'm reviewing products, I've never taken free equipment, cash, guest/sponsored content, or anything of that nature. I may link to my own company but that's about it.

Going from macOS to Ubuntu

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

It's not the first time I'm switching to Ubuntu. I've been, as they say, around the block when it comes to operating systems. I started out on MS, from DOS to XP, then Ubuntu from 5.10 Breezy to 9.10 Karmic, then on Apple from OSX 10.5 Leopard to macOS 10.14 Mojave. Both in terms of productivity and delight I had my best years on Apple and I didn't think I'd ever look back. But here we are.

Freewrite

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Today I've unwrapped an Austrohaus Freewrite. Half a year ago I was feeling a bit overworked. I'm privileged in that I love my work a lot - so much that if I don't restrain myself it can eclipse the private life. As a result I was looking for new hobbies. Hobbies that wouldn't involve computers so much. At the same time, I enjoy myself the most when I'm doing something useful-ish. I thought I'd really enjoy writing more. However, sitting behind a laptop it's easy to fall into the trap of checking email, Slack, or doing research. Before I know it I'm lost on Wikipedia, or Facebook. Those activities have their time and place but I didn't want them leaking into my hobby. I wanted to enjoy some quiet time with just my brain. You're thinking: "So, use pen and paper". They too, have their moments, but I'm so spoiled by tech that I can't stand the inefficiency of my deplorable handwriting, nor the thought of having to transfer that writing to my blog somehow. I wanted to remove barriers to encourage writing - not add new ones.

How (not) to become a programmer

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 03 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I recently answered a [question on Quora](https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-programming-is-not-for-everyone/answer/Kevin-van-Zonneveld): > Is it true that programming is not for everyone? And thought I'd elaborate my take on this here..

Introducing Lanyon

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

> This project also has its own homepage at [lanyon.io](https://lanyon.io).

The Universal Makefile for JavaScript

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

> TL;DR The world is moving from Gulp and Grunt towards npm scripts. This seems like a place we could stay for a long time. But there's one shortcoming with npm scripts, especially when compared to Makefile: it's a sub-optimal command-line experience. So I wrote Fakefile: a universal Makefile that you can save into any Node project to offer your npm scripts as Makefile targets. This makes operating npm scripts ten times faster, and offers a polite language agnostic way into your project to people coming from non-js backgrounds. Just type npm install fakefile and profit instantly.

Introducing Airbud

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Retrieving stuff from the web is unreliable. Airbud adds retries for production, and fixture support for test.

Watch Your Language (Automatically)

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I was writing internal documentation on how I set up automated language checking at Transloadit. Halfway through, I thought this could be useful to the rest of the world :earth_americas: as well, so I rewrote it in a more generic fashion. I'll attempt to first give a high-level overview of the problem, then I will drive all the way down to the low-level nuts & bolts of solving it. I hope you'll enjoy, here goes!

tus 1.0-prerelease

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've mentioned tus, but there have been some cool developments so we'd like to refresh your memory.

Introducing Ratestate

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Ratestate is a ratelimiter in the form of a [Node.js module](https://npmjs.org/package/ratestate) that can transmit states of different entities while avoiding transmitting the same state twice, and adhering to a global speed limit.

Introducing Environmental

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 17 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Some people feel that shipping .json / .yml / .xml config files is an upgrade over using archaic environment variables.

Git Hour Tracking

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I was asked to estimate how many hours I worked on a project. Since I hadn't really tracked them I decided to use the Git history to get an indication.

Fixing Heartbleed

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Four days ago the news about the Heartbleed got every sysadmin's attention. Renowned security expert Bruce Schneier writes: > This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to assume that it is all compromised. All of it. > > "Catastrophic" is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.

GitHub Spring Cleaning - the Deprecation Hack

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Almost spring here! Birds are chirping and we start cleaning out our kitchens and backyards and closets and GitHub accounts. Let's trash some legacy! Why? Because - We're ashamed of old code - We want to save money by having a lower (private) repo count - We want to improve the signal-to-noise on our profiles before a job interview - Spring But wait, what if your co-worker wants to access some of those commits again? You probably don't feel like peeling archives from crashed backup drives in the basement of your previous building. Renan and I faced this at true.nl and we started looking for simple solutions.

It's Almost 2014 and We Are Still Committing Broken Code

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Despite testcases, syntax errors still find their way into our commits. - Maybe it was a change in that bash script that wasn't covered by tests. Too bad our deploys relied on it. - Maybe it was just a textual change and we didn't think it was necessary to run the associated code before pushing this upstream. Too bad we missed that quote. Whatever the reason, it's almost 2014 and we are still committing broken code. This needs to change because in the - Best case: Travis or Jenkins prevent those errors from hitting production and it's frustrating to go back and revert/redo that stuff. A waste of your time and state of mind, as you already moved onto other things. - Worst case: your error goes unnoticed and hits production. Git offers commit hooks to prevent bad code from entering the repository, but you have to install them on a local per-project basis. Chances are you have been too busy/lazy and never took the time/effort to whip up a commit hook that could deal with all your projects and programming languages. That holds true for me, however I recently had some free time and decided to invest it in cooking up ochtra. One Commit Hook To Rule All.

Make Your MySQL Tables Strict

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT

When you're upgrading to MySQL 5.6 you may notice strict mode is turned on by default. You can disable it, but now might be a good time to get your schemas strict, to ensure smooth upgrade paths in the future.

Best Practices for Writing Bash Scripts

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

> This project now has its own homepage at bash3boilerplate.sh.

File Uploading Without a Server

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

More and more sites are written in flat HTML. Hosted on GitHub pages, S3, etc. The advantages are clear: ridiculously low to no hosting costs, it can hardly ever break, and with things like Jekyll and Octopress it can still be fun to maintain. And with JavaScript frameworks such as Angular you could build entire apps clientside. The downsides are clear too: no central point of knowledge makes interaction between users hard. However with services like Disqus, and (my own startup) Transloadit, it gets more and more feasible to just run a flat site and have external services cover for not running serverside code and a database yourself. In this post I'm going to show you how easy it is to make file uploading possible even if your site is just a single page of HTML.

Yesterday I Wrote My First Firefox OS App

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I wrote my first Firefox OS App.

Fix Vagrant Box Hanging at Boot

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes it happens that vagrant hangs during boot of your virtual image. Right after typing: ``bash $ vagrant up ` It hangs for a long time and then finally throws: `bash [default] Failed to connect to VM! Failed to connect to VM via SSH. Please verify the VM successfully booted by looking at the VirtualBox GUI. `` If you open VirtualBox you'll see that the virtual machine preview shows a black screen with kernels to choose from. This is GRUB requiring user input to boot further. Here's how to fix that.

Deploy to a Dynamic Serverlist With Capistrano

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

At our company we use Capistrano for deploys. It reads Ruby instructions from a ./Capfile in the project's root directory, then deploys accordingly via SSH. It has support for releases, shared log dirs, rollbacks, rsync vs remote cached git deploys, etc. It can be run from any machine that has access to your production servers. Be it your workstation, or a Continuous Integration server. So all in all pretty convenient but typically it assumes you know what servers you want to deploy to at the time of writing your Capfile. What if the composition of your platform changes often? Will you keep changing the Capfile right before every deploy? Seems like effort ; )

Prefix Streaming stdout & stderr in Go

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

If you are writing code in Go and are executing a lot of (remote) commands, you may want to indent all of their output, prefix the loglines with hostnames, or mark anything that was thrown to stderr red, so you can spot errors more easily. For this purpose I wrote Logstreamer.

Loosely Typed Code Deserves Triple Equality

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In loosely typed languages such as JavaScript or PHP, using `==` to compare values is bad practice because it doesn't account for type, hence `false == 0 == '' == null == undefined`, etc. And you may accidentally match more than you bargained for. If you want you can limit unintended effects & bugs this may lead to, it's often wise to use `===`. In the process of converting legacy codebases to use these triple equality operators, I find that as a rule of thumb you can almost **always force triple equality** in case of comparing variables against **non-numerical strings**. There's just never a case where you want the text `'Kevin'` to pass for the boolean `true`, or the number `3`. And if that can still happen in your legacy codebase, you'll want to limit those risks rather sooner than later. Even if that breaks things that now accidentally, work.

Scrape All Text From a Domain

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Here are some commands to download the most important pages of your site as plain text (determined by `MAX_DEPTH`), and save it into one big `DOMAIN.txt` file. This could come in handy when you want to have everything checked for grammar & spelling errors. After the spellcheck you'd still have to search through your codebase / database to find & fix the culprits, but this should already save you some time in discovery.

Migrate Redis Keys Without RDB Files

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Recently we moved the Transloadit status page from an unmanaged EC2 instance to the Nodejitsu platform. We kept status uptime history in redis, and obviously I wanted to preserve that data. For the new setup I did not have access to the filesystem, I only had a redis port to talk to. So instead of rsyncing the .rdb file I used Redis replication to migrate the data between instances.

Let's Make DNS Outage Suck Less

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Unfortunately the Linux DNS resolver has no direct support for detecting and doing failovers for DNS servers. It keeps feeding requests to your primary resolving nameserver, waits for a configured timeout, attempts again, and only then tries the second nameserver. This typically means nearly 30s delay for all request as long as your primary nameserver is unreachable. It doesn't learn to directly target your secondary nameserver so long as there is trouble. Even with the most optimal configuration, the delay will still be measured in seconds per request. For many requests, that's many more seconds. I wanted to solve this.

Find Duplicate Input With MySQL

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Back to basic, let's brush up on some `SQL` :) At my company we have employees creating customer accounts every day. Sometimes we make mistakes, for instance, we forget to check if the company already was a customer (maybe 10y ago they may have had a product). Duplicate accounts can cause all sorts of problems, so I wanted way to detect them with `SQL`. The problem was, the company names may have been entered with different punctuation, whitespace, etc. So I needed similar names to surface from the depths of our database, not just exact matches (that would have been too easy :)

Introducing BASH3 Boilerplate

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

> This project now has its own homepage at bash3boilerplate.sh.

OSX Productivity: Dropbox Your Screenshots

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I often share screens with co-workers by Campfire, Github, or mail. Visualizing something can save you a lot of typing. Show people what button shade doesn't look quite right, instead of explaining in 1000+ characters. Share a load graph without saving & attaching images, or handing out basic auth credentials. The list goes on & on. Once you make it a joy to share, you'll find use-cases on a daily basis, and it is my believe you'll lose less time on typing and miscommunication.

Too Many Authentication Failures for Root

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I recently had an annoying encounter with the error message: `Too many authentication failures for root`. I found out this can be caused because you've hoarded too many SSH keys :) So serves me right, but let's see what happens exactly.

Keep Mounted Network Drives Alive on OSX

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I love my NAS but because I tried to save a little money it does not [run SABnzbd](/blog/2011/02/28/optimize-your-synology-for-downloading/) very well. I've tried different approaches but find myself ending up downloading on OSX as it writes to a network share on my NAS. Too bad, but I'm archiving this one under the section first world problems. The challenge I have now though, is when my Mac goes to sleep, my mounts disappear, and SABnzbd writes to the local filesystem instead. Cause as far as my downloading program could tell, it was already writing to a local filesystem, so it will just keep on doing that until my Mac's disk is at 100%. I wrote a little script to prevent that. You may not be running SABnzbd, but there are obviously many other use cases where you want a network mount to persist. Especially if you are automating something outside of the GUI. With some small adjustments this could work for Linux/NFS/SMB as well.

Vagrant Tip: Sync VirtualBox Guest Additions

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Quick tip. If you lose your Vagrant mounts after kernel upgrades in your virtualbox, you'll need to reinstall your VirtualBox Guest Additions. Same is true when you upgrade Vagrant, etc. It's just a real pain and people usually avoid it by never upgrading. Or delve in once they accidentally do. But there's actually a nice & automated way of keeping your VM's guest additions in sync with virtualbox.

Lock Your Cronjobs, Enjoy Your Sleep

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

If you use EC2 you may have heard of Tim Kay's aws commandline tool. It provides access to most of Amazon's API and is less cumbersome than Amazon's own CLI utilities in day to day use. A lesser known tool by Tim Kay is solo. It's basically one line of Perl, but it's incredibly useful to defeat a common problem with cronjobs: overlap.

Installing Hubot on Ubuntu

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

We used to run Hubot on Heroko until it crashed, not sure what happened exactly but we didn't bother to bring it back due to more pressing issues within our company. Then I saw one of the most gorgeous presentations ever, Intergalactic Javascript Robots from Outer Space, and it got me excited to run a Hubot again.

Highlevel Testing With CasperJS

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

If you've written a webapp and you want to ensure that critical parts such as the signup process stay working, the best would be to have an actual user go through that process every time you change your codebase. But since that's both tedious & expensive, the second best thing is to automate a chrome browser (webkit engine anyway) to do this for you, and upload screenshots if anything unexpected happens. Welcome to CasperJS!

Reverse a Multibyte String in PHP

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

PHP's strrev is not safe to use on utf-8 strings because it reverses a string one byte at a time. So if a character consists of multiple bytes it cannot be preserved as an entity in the reversed result. There is no Multibyte String alternative to strrev either.

Quick Server Debugging With WTF

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

If something weird is happening, you want to know everything that's going on on a server, as fast as possible. At these times, you will be very happy to have a simple alias `wtf` installed that you can type immediately after logging into a server, and see all that it's busy with.

Revisiting Faster PHP Sessions

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

> "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." [Edsger W. Dijkstra](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html) As our experience grows, we learn from past mistakes and discover what's truly important in reliable systems. When designing systems, simplicity is an often heard mantra, but it isn't getting applied nearly as much as spoken of. I'm guilty of this too. I think it's mainly because engineers love to, well, engineer :) and will naturally try to [outsmart problems by throwing more tech at it](https://teddziuba.com/2010/12/the-3-basic-tools-of-systems-engineering.html).

Revisiting Spaces and Tabs

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This article in 50 words: I used to prefer spaces vs tabs, now I don't care so much, think it's more important that you can easily switch on a per-project basis. Have some thoughts on how conventions should be established, and I'll demonstrate bash code that can convert your codebase to a new standard.

Optimize Your Synology NAS for Downloading

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I recently bought a NAS so my data is safe & available, with the benefit of being low power / noise / heat. I've considered Netgear, QNAP, but decided to go for a Synology as it was affordable, still had a big community, decent reviews & Time Machine support.

Install SABnzbd, Sickbeard, Couchpotato on Your Synology DSM 3 NAS

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The Synology ships with a Download Station but it's not remotely as advanced as [SABnzbd](https://sabnzbd.org/). What I mostly miss is automatic par & unpacking of its downloads. Here's how to fix that.

Sync Vim Config Across Workspaces

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT

As a Vim newbie, I'd like my Vim plugins & configuration to stay in sync between machines at home, office, my servers & a laptop. I found that a (free) Dropbox account works like a charm.

Learning Vim

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In an attempt to familiarize myself with the unfamiliar, I decided to build a fun side-project in Ruby and Vim. Effectively learning a new language, framework, and editor. Coming from Nano, Quanta, Eclipse PDT, TextMate, Netbeans; I found (Mac/g)Vim is big a step, and first two weeks you should not expect to be productive.

5,000,000 Visitors = Free Beer for Switzerland!

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

When I started this techblog in 2007 and got my first 500 real visitors, I was in the clouds. If you told me then I'd hit the 5,000,000 visitor milestone 3 years later, I would have probably slapped some sense into you. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine my little side-project would take off like this.

Running Ruby on Rails on Nginx

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

If you want to set up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Lucid from scratch, there are quite some articles online to choose from. I found most of them involve compiling, only highlight 1 aspect, or are a bit outdated. On top of that, getting it right can be hard as there are a number of issues related to Ruby and Debian/Ubuntu. This is an attempt to put all the sweet info in 1 place.

HAProxy Logging in Ubuntu Lucid

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

At Transloadit we use HAProxy "The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer" so that we can offer different services on 1 port. For instance, depending on the hostname, a requests to port 80 can be routed to either nodejs (in case of api.transloadit.com), or nginx (in case of www.transloadit.com). HAProxy has been good to us and setting it up was a breeze. But getting HAProxy to log on Ubuntu Lucid was harder than I thought. All of the tutorials I found either didn't cover logging, or had deprecated information on it. Google suddenly stopped being my friend.

Announcing transloadit.com

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Today we are very happy to announce the commercial availability of [transloadit.com](https://transloadit.com).

Notes on Dutch PHP Conference 2010

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Here the notes I took during the Dutch PHP conference 2010 (#dpc10). They're not a representative summary of the event's highlights cause I could only attend 1 of 4 talks at any given time. I also filtered out things that didn't interest me personally.

Analyze HTTP Requests With TShark

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

When you're debugging a tough problem you sometimes need to analyze the HTTP traffic flowing between your machine and a webserver or proxy. Sometimes you can use firebug or chrome inspector for that. But here's a lowlevel alternative that I'm pretty excited about. Meet Tshark.

Convert All Tables to InnoDB

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Some time ago I was in the situation where I was looking at 200 MyISAM tables screaming to get converted to InnoDB for performance reasons. You probably know that MyISAM is better at full-text searches and such, but what I needed was this database stop locking entire tables when I was just doing row-level interactions. Here's how I did **in one go**.

Redis PHP Introduction

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Don't know Redis? Think Memcache, with support for for lists, and disk-based storage. You can use Redis as a database, queue, cache server or all of those combined. Let's see how you can use this power in your PHP apps.

Access MySQL Without Password

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

If you want to do command-line MySQL administration like restoring databases or dumping statistics, you need the root account and its password. Or do you?

CakePHP and Nginx

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I still got sites running Apache, but all new projects are launched with Nginx. I don't need many of the features that Apache offers, and the speed gain of Nginx is just tremendous. Once you've experienced it, I doubt you'll want to go back.

CakePHP REST Plugin Presentation

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

At our company we have a lot of uses for a solid API. We can use it to distribute config files, have servers report in, let customers edit DNS records using their own interface, etc.

Run Node.js as a Service on Ubuntu

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The core of our new project runs on Node.js. With Node you can write very fast JavaScript programs serverside. It's pretty easy to install Node, code your program, and run it. But how do you make it run nicely in the background like a true server?

Git Migration - Remove Passwords From History

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

When migrating projects over to GitHub, I found there were still some passwords inside my SVN repositories. Obviously it's not good practice to store your passwords in a code repository - let alone at a remote location, so I wanted to replace all passwords. Not only in the current version, but in all commits that have been made over the past 3 years. Luckily with Git - you can.

Generate HTML With PHP

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Hi. Have you met KvzHTML? It's a standalone PHP Class for generating HTML. It's been hiding deep inside the caverns of my secret GitHub repo: kvzlib - a collection of code snippets too small or unfinished to deserve their own repository. But I find working with this class so pleasant, I thought I'd share the fun.

Svn to Git

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Today I've moved all of my SVN repositories over to GitHub. 5 private reps and 4 public ones. Two of which you may know: PHP.JS and System_Daemon.

Flush Memcached Using Bash

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

If you store application data in memcache, you may want to invalidate it once you deploy a new version to avoid corruption or weird results. There are several ways to do this but I recently tried one using nothing but Bash, and I like it.

Prepare for PHP 5.3

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

PHP 5.3 is a big leap forward for PHP and brings of a lot of neat features. However, big leaps can also mean big changes and potentially big breakage when it comes to backwards compatibility.

Notes on CakeFest 3

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Looking back at a great CakeFest in Berlin, I learned a lot about CakePHP and met many nice and inspiring people. Here are some conference notes I took that were particularly useful or new to me.

Create Youtube-Like IDs With PHP/Python/Javascript/Java/SQL

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

IDs are often numbers. Unfortunately there are only 10 digits to work with, so if you have a lot of records, IDs tend to get very lengthy. For computers that's OK. But human beings like their IDs as short as possible. So how can we **make IDs shorter**? Well, we could borrow characters from the alphabet as have them pose as additional numbers.... Alphabet to the rescue!

Install the Best Coding Font

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very good one. It can make your work (typing ; ) just a little bit more pleasing.

Fix Flash Problems on Ubuntu

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I had some difficulties playing Flash videos lately. Problems ranged from lagging sound, to ugliness, to idling black screens, to strange gray Play buttons that didn't do anything. The following solved my Flash issues on Ubuntu.

Have Fun With Google Chart

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Pictures say more than a thousand words. This is true for your data as well. With Google Chart you can now easily generate charts of your data. No expertise required. Just make sure you format your data correctly, add it to the Google Chart URL, and it will return a nice graph.

Boost MySQL Performance by 1200%

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Sorry folks, this article was based on flawed benchmark results, I will soon post [an update](/blog/2009/03/31/improve-mysql-insert-performance/)!

Improve MySQL Insert Performance

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes MySQL needs to work hard. I've been working on an import script that fires a lot of INSERTs. Normally our database server handles 1,000 inserts / sec. That wasn't enough. So I went looking for methods to improve the speed of MySQL inserts and was finally able to increase this number to 28,000 inserts per second. Checkout my late night benchmarking adventures.

The Pragmatic SQL Style Guide

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Code spends more time being [read than being written](https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000684.html). I think naturally this is true for queries as well. So it might help if we teach ourselves some guidelines as how to nicely format them. I've searched but at the time of writing, could not find a public Style Guide for SQL formatting. I'll try to keep this guide short and pragmatic, so that it has a chance of actually being read & stuck to : )

7 Steps to Better PEAR Documentation

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

If you've written a PEAR package, it's probably a good idea to submit some end user documentation. Here's how to do it.

Post Flood

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Hello everyone. Two days ago Feedburner offered me to merge my account with Google. I thought: why not. But apparently now the URL of my feeds changed. This messed up my stats, and your RSS reader has marked all of my posts as unread. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.

A DRY Piece of Cake

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

So I've been learning CakePHP the last few days. Bit by bit I've been trying to port a legacy administration app to Cake. 'Secretly' linking menuitems to finished Cake parts as we go. And I must say: I'm pretty excited. I did run into a disturbing conclusion though. I estimated the legacy app will have over 300 Models & Controllers once finished. That could easily add up to (300 x 4 =) 1200 views. And here I am, creating a maintenance hell while trying to solve one!

Create Daemons in PHP

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Everyone knows PHP can be used to create websites. But it can also be used to create desktop applications and commandline tools. And now with a class called System_Daemon, you can even create daemons using nothing but PHP. And did I mention it was easy?

My New IDE: NetBeans

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Writing code requires two important things: _creativity_ & _discipline_. The **creativity** to create the unknown, unexplored, exciting parts of software. And the **discipline** to create the dull & all-too-well-known parts of software / documentation.

Search for a Package With apt-file

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I needed `ogg123` on an Ubuntu server to convert some media. Naturally, I wanted to use `aptitude` to install it, but I didn't know what package it was in. Now, you can always google of course, but you can also use system commands to find the package you need.

org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util.EcoreEMap

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

One error that has bugged my Eclipse PDT for a long time, was \_org.eclipse.emf.ecore.util.EcoreEMap $DelegateEObjectContainmentEList. \_A vague error, not much to go on, not many hits on google either. Turned out it had to do with the version of my Java Runtime Environment I was using.

Rescuing my Messed Up Eclipse

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Hi folks. As you may or may not know, I have a [love/hate relationship with my IDE: Eclipse PDT](/blog/2008/04/11/my-new-ide-eclipse-pdt/). For times and times we get along well. But once every while it gets messed up, and it's a pain to straighten it out again. Or at least, it was.

How Virtualization Will Improve Your Code

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Good testing will result in better code. If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. This has to do with: patience, creativity flow, will, and of course time. Constantly being interrupted breaks concentration. If there's one thing I've really learned, it's **invest in a good testing environment**. Rapid review of code results will pay off (I promise).

PEAR Coding Standards Changed!

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

In another article I've told you about how I would like to see one rule removed from the PEAR Coding Standards. This rule would allow developers a bit more flexibility, while staying true to the convention.

Virtualization Compared

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I've been experimenting with Virtual machines for my development environment. The goal was to create a Virtual Machine that resembles our main production server, and have that Virtual Machine mount my workspace project directory as its DocumentRoot. This way, my code could be served & tested after every save in my IDE. So no more building / committing delays. And all I could mess up was a Virtual Machine.

PHP Recursive ksort: ksortTree

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

## Working With Trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often they only go 1 level deep. Trees can count an almost infinite number of levels. Hence we need recursive replacements for our beloved array functions.

PHP Recursive str_replace: replaceTree

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

## Working with trees When working with tree data structures you often need to craft them in different ways. PHP offers a lot of functions to change the shape of arrays, but often they only go 1 level deep. Trees can count an almost infinite number of levels. Hence we need recursive replacements for our beloved array & string functions.

PEAR Coding Standards Change?

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Since a couple of months now, I've been involved with PEAR as a contributor. Contributing to PEAR means adhering to the PEAR Coding Standards. Their standards have actually been thought over, and using them for projects (also outside of PEAR), leads to consistency, and makes it easier for many developers to understand each other's code.

Enhance PHP Session Management

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

In PHP, sessions can keep track of authenticated in users. They are an essential building block in today's websites with big communities and a lot of user activity. Without sessions, everyone would be an anonymous visitor.

My New IDE: Eclipse PDT

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I've been programming a lot with Quanta which is a lightweight kdevelop based IDE. It did the trick for quite some time, but recent developments in my coding life like SVN brought me on a Quest for my new ultimate PHP IDE.

Better Performance With mod_deflate

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I used to use Dean Edwards Javascript Packer a lot to compress my Javascript sources. Libraries of 100kB could easily shrink to 30kB and that saves load times & bandwidth. A good [writeup by Julien Lecompte](https://www.julienlecomte.net/blog/2007/08/13/) made me realize that there were better ways.

Allow Windows Users to Restart Service

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Let's say you want your local restricted users to be able to restart specific services. On linux you'd probably type visudo. In Windows I found, you have to dig a little deeper into the system and really do your research. I needed several sites, programs and articles. So I thought it might be useful to others if I'd bundle all the required information in one place. Here it is.

Determine SID of Windows User

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes when digging real deep into Windows like I recently had to, you need to have the Windows SID (Security Identifier) of a local user. I wasn't able to find any standard way of obtaining this info, so I wrote this little VBScript. Might help some people, might not. Putting this online anyway ; )

Class 'Imagick' Not Found

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I tried to do some Image Magick with PHP recently on an Ubuntu Feisty machine, and even though I had the required package: 'php5-imagick' installed, and I updated my php.ini with imagick.so, I kept getting the error Class 'Imagick' not found. This is how I eventually fixed it.

PHP: tiff2pdf

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Or: **How to convert multipage TIFF to PDF in PHP.**

Disable Snapping Windows in Compiz-Fusion

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Running compiz-fusion for some time, one thing started to annoy me. Snapping windows. The first thing I obviously looked for was the Snapping Windows Plugin. But that was already disabled.

Convert Anything to Tree Structures in PHP

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I recently faced a programming challenge that almost broke my brain. I needed to create a function that could explode any single-dimensional array into a full blown tree structure, based on the delimiters found in its keys. Tricky part was size of the tree could be infinite. I called the function: explodeTree. And maybe it's best to first look at an example.

Fit More on One Screen Using DPI

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

A couple of years ago when everyone still had giant CRT monitors, resolutions of 1600x1200 were pretty common. Nowadays however 19" TFT monitors often cannot scale higher than 1280x1024. So how can we still fit more on one screen? DPI can help!

Login Automatically With SSH Keys

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

With SSH you can securely login to any Linux server and execute commands remotely. You can even use SSH to transfer and [synchronize files from one server to another](/blog/2007/08/16/synchronize-files-with-rsync/). Automating these tasks can make your life easier, but normally SSH prevents that because it requires you to login every time. Well, not anymore, in this article I will show you how to connect to SSH without a password.

Synchronize Files With rsync

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Synchronizing files from one server to another is quite awesome. You can use it for backups, for keeping web servers in sync, and much more. It's fast and it doesn't take up as much bandwidth as normal copying would. And the best thing is, it can be done with only 1 command. Welcome to the wonderful world of rsync.

Delete Files Securely With Shred

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Deleting a file or reformatting a disk does not destroy your sensitive data. The data can easily be undeleted. That's a good thing if you accidentally throw something away, but what if you're trying to destroy financial data, bank account passwords, or classified company information. What if you want to clean your computer before selling it for instance?

Restore Packages Using dselect-upgrade

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

It's always a good idea to backup important data. Your files and settings can easily be archived. But how can you backup & restore all applications that you've installed over the last couple of years? Here's an easy trick that works for both desktops & servers, and that can also be used to synchronize installed packages in a web cluster, making all the servers run the same software.

Make ISO Images on Linux

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

CDs and DVDs don't have the eternal life, so you might want to back them up as ISO images. All the files and properties of the original disc, stored in a single file. You can also create ISO images and store them on your network for easy distribution of software installations. Here's how to create and mount ISO images on Linux.

Speedup Your Website With Cache_Lite

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Every time a request hits your server, PHP has to do a lot of processing, all of your code has to be compiled & executed for every single visit. Even though the outcome of all this processing is often identical for both visitor 21600 and 21601. So why not save the flat HTML generated for visitor 21600, and serve that to 21601 as well? This will relieve resources of your web server and database server because less PHP often means less queries.

Survive Heavy Traffic With Your Webserver

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Recently two of my articles reached the Digg frontpage at the same day. My web server isn't state of the art and it had to handle gigantic amounts of traffic. But still it served pages to visitors swiftly thanks to a lot of optimizations. This is how you can prevent heavy traffic from killing your server.

Schedule Automatic Updates on Ubuntu

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Making sure your system is up to date is a key attribute to its security. Furthermore Ubuntu releases updates pretty often and you probably don't want to miss out on added stability and features. You could run updates manually, but why not schedule the updates in the background to make sure you are always running the latest stable versions, without ever having to worry about it.

Schedule Tasks on Linux Using Crontab

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

If you've got a website that's heavy on your web server, you might want to run some processes like generating thumbnails or enriching data in the background. This way it can not interfere with the user interface. Linux has a great program for this called cron. It allows tasks to be automatically run in the background at regular intervals. You could also use it to automatically create backups, synchronize files, schedule updates, and much more. Welcome to the wonderful world of crontab.

Block Brute Force Attacks With Iptables

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Since 2005 there has been an immense increase in brute force SSH attacks and though Linux is pretty secure by default, it does not stop evil programs from indefinitely trying to login with different passwords. Without proper protection your server is a sitting duck waiting for a bot to guess the right combination and hit the jackpot. But with just 2 commands we can stop that.

Make SSH Connections With PHP

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

!ssh phpNot everyone knows about PHP's capabilities of making SSH connections and executing remote commands, but it can be very useful. I've been using it a lot in PHP CLI applications that I run from cronjobs, but initially it was a pain to get it to work. The PHP manual on Secure Shell2 Functions is not very practical or thorough for that matter, so I would like to share my knowledge in this how to, to make it a little less time consuming setting this up.

Create Turbocharged Storage Using tmpfs

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Everyone knows that RAM is so much faster than a hard disk. To illustrate, while a current SATA disk has peak transfer rates of 375 MB/s, current RAM can do a mind blowing 12,500 MB/s! Normally only the system itself makes use of this ultra fast storage, but we can also access this space directly. And that opens a great window of opportunity.

Control Cache Expire Dates Using Htaccess

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

If you're running Squid to cache your website, you can use an htaccess file to control what kind of files should be cached, and for how long.

Install Squid & Apache on 1 Server

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Let's say your site is becoming a big success and as a result it's becoming slower and slower. There are several things you can do without buying additional hardware:

Use PEAR With open_basedir and safe_mode Restrictions

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

You want your website to be as safe as possible. So you'll typically want Open Basedir and Safe Mode to be on. When you're in a shared hosting environment, you'll find that any server administrator with a good sense of security will also have these restrictions in place. However security pretty much always limits functionality and this case is no different. Because what if you are caged in a restricted environment, and you would still like to use shared libraries like the ones provided by PEAR?

Beautify URLs

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Readable URLs are nice. A well made website will have a logical layout, with intelligent folder and file names, and as few technical details as possible. In the most well designed sites, readers can guess at filenames with a high level of success. Clean URLs are great because they:

Cat a File, Without the Comments

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I recently had to install a couple of squid servers to act as reverse proxies for a webcluster. You can teach the squid server to stand in between in the end users and the webservers, and to store all the static content ( .jpg .flv .css .htm for example ) in the RAM. This saves a lot of I/O and bandwidth on the webservers, and it can really speed up a site. At the end of the road the webservers' load dropped by 92%. But before all this worked, I had to run through a massive config file and since the squid config file is their manual at the same time, it's about 5000 lines long. So I had to find out a way to filter only the important settings from the config file.

Change the Default Editor

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Ever wanted to change the crontab of a server, but got an editor on screen that you're totally unfamiliar with? There are a lot of causes for this annoyance, but one is that somebody recently installed or used midnight commander (mc) which for whatever reason seems to override your session's default editor.

What's the Deal With php_value, php_admin_flag, Etc

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

I ran across php value, php flag, php admin value and php admin flag in a couple of .htaccess files, and I've used them sometimes as well by just pasting an example, but I've never really understood why there was such a great diversity. Couldn't php_setting X Y just handle it, and if not, what do the admin, value and flag attributes mean?

Hello, World!

kevin@vanzonneveld.net (Kevin van Zonneveld) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Hello World! In my day to day I do a lot of development & sysadmin research, often taking quick notes so I don't forget.