Arrival in Auckland for honeymoon with reflections on United Airlines service, 22-hour LAX-Auckland flight, and customs wait. Mentions nice gestures from passengers, rugby team sighting, and meeting friends before honeymoon trip.
Preparing for a 22-hour flight to New Zealand and Australia by loading up on ebooks from ThriftEBooks. Focusing on Manning Publications' "Groovy in Action" and "Grails in Action" to gain expertise for demonstrating rapid web application development with Grails at work.
A music recommendation for cellist Zoë Keating, whose soothing classical compositions are ideal for focus while working. Discovered through a Wired video, with albums available directly from her website in multiple formats and samples on Amazon MP3 and iTunes.
A Groovy port of Java code for generating website screenshots. Uses JTidy to convert HTML to XHTML and the Flying Saucer renderer to output PNG images, demonstrating how to programmatically capture thumbnails of websites for archiving or preview purposes.
A Ruby example demonstrating how to interact with Lyris ListManager's SOAP API using HTTP POST instead of built-in SOAP libraries. Shows how to manually construct the SOAP envelope XML, set proper headers including authentication, and parse the response for adding members to mailing lists.
A brief personal update explaining a hiatus from blogging due to busyness with work and wedding preparations, including a photo of the Friendship ship at Derby Wharf in Salem, Massachusetts, taken during a break from the computer.
A guide to protecting SSH servers on Linux from brute force attacks. Covers disabling root login, changing SSH ports, using iptables rate limiting rules to temporarily block aggressive IPs, and installing DenyHosts for permanent blocking with optional synchronization to a community blocklist.
Two Python scripts for managing ZFS snapshots. The first script creates timestamped snapshots of all filesystems in a zpool. The second script automatically removes snapshots older than 30 days by parsing the timestamp in snapshot names, useful for automated backup cleanup.
A Groovy function demonstrating how to replace high-level Unicode characters with their HTML entity equivalents. The entitize function iterates through a string, converting characters with code points above 127 to numeric character references like € for the Euro symbol, useful for HTML/XML output.
An exploration of ZFS send and receive commands for filesystem management and backup. Covers taking snapshots, outputting to files, combining with gzip compression and OpenSSL encryption for secure storage, using zfs receive to restore filesystems, and copying filesystems securely over SSH between systems.