It is widely known that, if virtual hosts in Apache (httpd) are configured to permit vhost administrators override specific configuration options at the directory level using htaccess files, the web server consumes valuable time in order to check whether an htaccess file exists in every directory included in the requested path and parse it. On the other hand, many popular web applications utilize htaccess files, especially those residing in the DocumentRoot, in order to implement pretty URLs or HTTP redirections, which is extremely convenient since the virtual host owner does not have to edit httpd’s configuration directly. So, I had the idea to include the htaccess file of the DocumentRoot directory on the filesystem into the virtual host’s configuration.
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I have been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix (version 0.5). I’ve witnessed all the effort that has been put into making this web browser a success. It is still the only web browser I can fully trust. Suddenly, earlier this year, the Mozilla Foundation decided to change the release strategy of the project for obvious marketing reasons and release several major versions within a short period of time. It was inevitable that such a change of release cycles would introduce numerous incompatibility issues with the available extensions. Such problems should have been solved before switching release strategies.
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The first time I used WordPress back in September 2005 I considered it to be the content publishing platform of choice as far as a personal or business website was concerned. It was easy to set up and publish content and, also, easy to customize, even with ugly hacks. read more… »

It’s been a while since the details of an SSL/TLS vulnerability have been released to the public. Since then, security experts have worked on the issue and have released a whitepaper describing how to mitigate the attack, known as BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS).
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Mozilla Thunderbird is of those pieces of software I could say I am a fan of, but since I upgraded from TB3 to TB5 and recently to TB6, I’ve been experiencing various problems with the application’s overall speed and responsiveness. Using Thunderbird almost felt as if it was reading its data from the internet. Working with it had become an unpleasant experience, until I found some tips about how to make it more responsive. It seems that versions 5 and 6 try to use hardware acceleration to render the application’s user interface and, apparently, this does not work very well with my hardware. Anyway, here is what you have to do in order to restore Thunderbird 6 responsiveness to that of version 3.
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Today I realized my web site had been serving an empty HTML document for the last 2 days on every HTTP request no matter what the path was. When I initially noticed the issue, I was a bit worried, but, after taking a closer look at the Apache error log, I found out about a PHP syntax error causing the issue. A couple of days ago I had edited a WordPress plugin on my live web site and, apparently, I made a typo which led to a syntax error and an empty document being served on every request. But, I recall I had checked the website after the modification of the plugin but I hadn’t noticed any issues! Actually, this happened because I had forgot to clear the cache, so when I checked the site after the modification of the plugin, it seemed OK. My modification didn’t change the visual representation of the web site, so, having forgot to turn off caching, there was no way for me to find out about the typo. Lesson learned: never modify the code of a live web site, but, if you have to do it, always turn-off caching before doing so.

More and more I realize that there is a misconception about free software. Many people tend to believe that free software actually means software that should not cost any money. They somehow find natural and fair the fact that some people may work voluntarily in order to produce software, which the rest can use to make money without having any legal obligation to contribute either money or effort back upstream.
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It’s been a long time since the last time I checked the available software for managing long running processes. Software in this particular area has evolved and, after some research and testing on a virtual machine, I tried to install supervisord in a CentOS 5.6 box. Unfortunately, no RPM package exists for the latest 3.X version, so I decided to go through the procedure to rebuild the supervisor RPM from the Fedora development tree, since v3.X has some really cool features I cannot do without.
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The fact that the developers of two projects with common goals decided to get along together is news in the Free Software world. What we usually hear are the announcements of new forks. I was very glad to read that the developers of two projects, ntfs-3g and ntfsprogs, which are open source tools that can be used to access and maintain the NTFS filesystem, decided to combine their efforts and made their first merged release. The merge has many benefits: no duplicate effort, easier code maintenance, more focused and coordinated effort and probably the most important one, common and more confident user base. I hope more projects follow their example.

I just discovered the Read-It-Later addon for the Firefox browser. This is one of the most fantastic plugins I’ve seen in a while. From what I see, there have been about 4 million downloads already. This means I am too late, but as they say “better late than never“! This extension makes it possible to maintain a queue of unread content locally or remotely. It is also possible to save the text locally and read it at a later time even if you are offline. Really cool.
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