Feed Info - Brandon Purcell's Blog

I was running out of space on a server the other day and was wondering what directory was full and what files I could clean up. There is a simple command that is helpful to identify usage by directory. This works from within any directory so you c...

We use PostgreSQL for SpatialKey and because of that I have learned a lot about system administration with PostgreSQL. While debugging an issue with tables that had ballooned up I ran into this article which has some great tips for isolating db an...

There is nothing more frustrating than taking 30 minutes filling out some text in a long form only to submit and have your session reset and lose all of your data. Here is a simple solution to keep a session open on forms where users may need an e...

James Ward and Jon Rose recently published the latest episode...

This issue drove me nuts today for several hours today, to be honest I was pretty close to breaking something! Earlier in the day I had the NFS mount working fine then I created an AMI and booted up another instance from the newly created AMI but ...

I often need to copy code from a SVN repository to a location where I have files deployed or I may pull code from an SVN repository on the web and want to check it in locally. Both of these actions require the stripping out of all .svn directories...

I ran across this today. Examples are great when trying to understand JQuery selectors.

In recent months I have been using PHP to extend functionality inside of WordPress for the SpatialKey site and working with JQuery as well. After working with ColdFusion for so long I have gotten spoiled by the CFDUMP tag . Here are a few options ...

One challenge I have encountered with Amazon Ec2 is the sending of email from our web applications. If you try to send directly from sendmail or postfix then you might as well forget about guranteed delivery. A large amount of your email will end ...

This is common knowledge if you have been using Linux for a while but I still find it a helpful resource to understand how you set what programs are running when Linux starts. This is mainly specific to Red Hat or CentOS which I use on a regular b...

I ran across this article while debugging some .htaccess issues on our SpatialKey server and found some helpful information on .htaccess.

This is a good article on some monitoring tools for Linux. I had already used several of them before but found 'htop' and 'atop' in the comments and they are ...

I had been looking for a simple way to get a thread dump from JBoss to see what was happening on each of the SpatialKey servers without actually logging onto any of them. After all reading through thread dumps is one of my favorite past times. I f...

I found a helpful command today to help me search through many different file in linux. I have a bunch of log files and want to find a certain occurrence of an error.

for i in `find ./`; do grep -H "string to search" $i; done

Excel is a powerfull tool for sorting and analyzing data but what if you want to look at your data from another angle. What if you want to see the geographic aspect and understand the trends both over time and geographically? Geocoding your data c...