Long story short, I use a Windows virtual machine on my workstation at work. I use qemu/kvm, and I use the user-mode networking stack for simplicity in setting up the VM. This trick should work with just about any virtualization package out there.

I wanted to be able to click a link inside the VM and have my browser on my host Linux machine open the link. I have no reason to run another browser inside the VM, and figured that it'd be nice to get this set up.

My host workstation is Arch Linux, and I use Firefox. From the command line, if I'd like to open a linux in firefox, I can run firefox <URL>, where <URL> is where I want to go. If firefox is running this opens the link in a new tab. This only works if two environmental variables are set: DISPLAY ...

Shared hosting, no matter how their packages are painted, have limits. Staying away from hogging too much CPU, memory, and other resources can ensure the longevity and performance of your shared hosting account. If you are just looking into how to build a site, or if you already have a very busy site on shared hosting, these guidelines can help you get the most out of your shared hosting account before making the switch to more expensive hosting. One of the goals in this post is to encourage "good neighbor" practices that will ensure you aren't disrupting fellow users on the server that hosts your account. This also ensures that you won't get any of these principles also apply to other types of hosting, but this is written with shared hosting in mind.

Common bottlenecks

With modern shared hosting, you generally have plenty of available disk space and ...

Something I've had on my todo list for a very long time now was to get my notes from School published automatically on my website. They are already stored in ReStructured Text, and they are already stored in git repositories, so my use of smug already had me 95% of the way there. (I have a write-up about my note taking method: here)

I spent my day off, and finally found some better approaches to the problems I had, and I now have automatic sharing of my notes on my website.

The thing that was holding me back was the fact that smug couldn't do everything I wanted it to. I also store other things, such as homework, papers, and other assignments in the same git repository. Also, the way that I would organize a website is different than I would organize my personal files.

Here is an ...

So, I want to move away from mod_php for the obvious security reasons.

FastCGI is a good alternative. I want to make the transition as easy as possible for my users. The transition on my Bluehost account from the regular PHP handler to the fastcgi handler is quite easy. All I do is add AddHandler fcgid-script .php to my .htaccess. Here are the requirements that I am looking for in transitioning to fastcgi for php:

1) Easy Transition - little or no user intervention required. I'd prefer that no intervention is required. 2) fastcgi scripts should be run using suexec for security and potential tracking purposes. 3) No scripts should be run when adding/removing users from the system. I want this to "just work" with the mod_userdir setup that we have.

Ideally, this change could be made during scheduled maintenance, and everyone could be automatically using the new fastcgi ...

I never thought that my personal blog would be useful to anyone except myself. I've not put a lot of effort into attracting traffic, but it's been trickling my way.

I never really finished the templates and CSS for programmerq.net, so I spent a little time here and there over the past few days and added some CSS, and updated the templates to make the blog experience a bit nicer.

I haven't added the template tags to turn on the calendar view in the sidebar, but I don't know how useful it would be anyway.

I really enjoy the Django templating language. I was able to add the gravitar functionality to the comment system without modifying the source of the blog app that I use. All I did was create an app that had the template tag snippet, and a template for rendering. To get ...