Watch Your Logs! Stop the Bad Guys!
If you’re running a WordPress site with the Apache web server and haven’t looked at your server logs, it’s time you did. Unless you’ve installed some fairly heavyweight server and network protections you’re going to see that probably most of the traffic to your web site are hackers looking for vulnerabilities they can exploit. Log…
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So maybe I’m not a horrible designer after all
I’m just not a very good one. When you’ve worked with designers as good as Michael Pinto at VeryMemorable I would at best describe myself as graphically challenged. A little relevant background: I began my techie life as an 8088/86 assembly language programmer, a skill that’s all but disappeared with today’s incredibly faster processors and…
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Slow downloads for MacOS updates? Try this.
I discovered a nifty trick for those excruciatingly slow Apple Update downloads. My friend left his broken 2008 Mac Pro with me last week. It turned out that he just neglected to plug in the display power supply. The computer has been down for a year(!) because of that. Since the machine hadn’t run since…
- wifi ·
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How NOT to provide tech support
I won’t get into the details of installing the Ubiquiti access point hardware. There are plenty of videos and how-tos on the web for that. Instead, this article is about the troubles I had installing this hardware. I finally got it working, no thanks to Ubiquiti’s crack tech support channel. My Unifi purchases: Security Gateway…
- postgresql ·
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Database Meets Revision Control
Any developer who has worked with HIPAA compliancy knows that the law is murky at best and the fed doesn’t publish a programmers’ guide to make your life any easier. However, one of the cardinal rules is the requirement to keep track of who sees HIPAA data, who modifies it and when this was done. …
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Setting up a hybrid Google Apps mail account
I’ve run my own mail server since, well, the UUCP days. I used to host a lot of mailiing lists so over the past 20+ years I’ve run Sendmail, Exim, Qmail and Postfix. They’re all different but they share one thing in common: unless running mail servers is your hobby, they’re not fire-and-forget applications, especially…