Posts

All the articles I've posted.

• How I Read, Eight Years On

  18 May, 2026

  practice

  Eight years on from the 2018 "How I Read" post: same practice, different tools, and still no way to prove which one's doing the work.

• How I Read

  21 Jan, 2018

  practice

  Codifying how I read several books concurrently—short bursts per book with practised recall between sessions, plus a 'readability' formula for ordering the stack.

• Using Memcached with MediaWiki and WordPress

  3 Feb, 2011

  how-to

  Pointing MediaWiki and WordPress at a remote memcached takes one LocalSettings.php block and one sed against W3 Total Cache's config file.

• Using APC to Speed Up PHP

  3 Feb, 2011

  how-to

  APC caches PHP's compiled bytecode so it isn't recompiled on every request, which speeds up an application without touching a line of its code.

• Using rdiff-backup: Backup Remote Clients With Ease

  3 Feb, 2011

  how-to

  A cron-driven rdiff-backup recipe that pushes incremental backups over SSH from a NAT'd client to a remote server, wrapping the SSH call through --remote-schema.

• Best Practices: Bind Mounts and chroots

  31 Jan, 2011

  how-to

  Bind mounts make a chroot jail quick to assemble and set a trap: whoever tears it down later reaches for rm -rf and takes the host's /dev, /lib, and /usr/lib with it.