Category Archives: Technology

A Complete Noobs Guide to Hacking Nginx

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Michael Schurter

At Urban Airship our RESTful HTTP API uses PUT requests for, among other things, registering a device. Since the application registering the device is the HTTP Basic Auth username, there’s often no body (entity body in HTTP parlance). Unfortunately nginx … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Technology | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Less Pagination, More More

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Michael Schurter

We live in a brave new (to some) world of databases other than a relational database with a SQL interface. Normally end users never notice a difference, but the astute viewer may notice the slow demise of an old friend: … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL, Technology | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Making Server-Side MongoDB Functions Less Awkward

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Michael Schurter

I’ve recently switched my project at work to use MongoDB for the user database and a few other datasets. Currently I don’t use many JavaScript functions, but when I do I like to store them on the server so that … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Python, Technology | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Web Developer Contractor Rates

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Michael Schurter

We just happened* to start chatting in the #pdxdjango IRC channel on Freenode about what the rates web developer contractors charge today, and I wanted to post my experiences after leaving the contractor world a few months ago after 2 … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Personal, PHP, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Ubuntu 9.10 on a Thinkpad T400

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Michael Schurter

I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 on my Lenovo Thinkpad T400 about a week ago, and thought I’d write down some of my impressions. Good news ATI graphics card with proprietary binary driver – just works (much better than … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

lxml vs. ElementTree

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Michael Schurter

While lxml has some excellent benchmarks about the speed of lxml.etree vs. ElementTree, I wanted to run some tests that were as close as possible to my own use case (fairly simple multi-megabyte XML files). Here are the results of … Continue reading →

Posted in Python, Technology | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments