There are reasons why you might need to add a reference to “System.Core” to your Microsoft Visual Studio project. (For example, if you wish to compile/build both inside the IDE and from the command-line with MSBuild.exe.) However, if you try to do this through the IDE, it will barf at you: “A reference to ‘System.Core’ [...]
Posts under ‘bugfix’
Why is Port 21 apparently open on my firewall?
Scenario: You set up a server somewhere on the public Internet. You lock down its ports to the minimal subset you need using firewall(s). Yet, somehow and for some strange reason, nmap reports that port 21 (FTP) is open on your server! Sure enough, you do a “telnet myhost.cxm 21″ and it connects! Shit-damn, what’s [...]
secedit for setting security policy in windows server 2008 r2 server core
in which our hero beats his head against secedit and the Windows security policy documentation until you are served up a tasty skull-pulp of useful and hard-won knowledge.
Web.config and App.config file gotchas
If you try to use idiomatic .NET, and you have even modest configurability architecture requirements, you will almost certainly want to use the *.config system (App.config or Web.config). According to old hands at Win32 programming, this is quite a step forward from *.ini files or registry manipulation. Perhaps so. However, the *.config regime is extraordinarily [...]
iTunes “Sound Enhancer” Considered Harmful
I have now on two occasions, with two separate, quiet background, vocal-heavy songs, noticed significant and highly distracting audio artifacts introduced by the default “Sound Enhancer” on iTunes for Mac (specifically, iTunes 9.2.1 (5) on Mac OS X 10.6.4, on a Quad-Core Mac Pro with an embarrassingly large amount of RAM). The two songs were [...]
RubyGems assorted errors, mutating APIs, and fixes
If you’re trying to use a newer (e.g. 1.3.6) version of the ruby “gem” system to install ruby packages (like rails, rake, etc.) on a legacy system with an older (v. 1.9.0) ruby installed, you might find yourself running into problems like this: $ gem install rake ERROR: While executing gem … (ArgumentError) illegal access [...]
Concentrating in History and Science at Harvard
This post was originally at my Harvard Law / Berkman Center blog, but has since been removed. Though it is certainly outdated with respect to the current practices and personalities of the History of Science department, it still may hold some value for prospective students. I originally wrote it as advice to my younger self, [...]
SWI-Prolog from MacPorts on OS X 10.5
Tried installing the binary of SWI-Prolog (swi-prolog-5.8.2-leopard-intel.mpkg) on my Mac OS X 10.5 box. For whatever reason, it was bombing out with some nasty errors (Libary not loaded … image not found). Read about others’ troubles and decided to try MacPorts. Couldn’t get SWI-Prolog to install using a standard: $ sudo port -v install swi-prolog [...]
CGI.pm hangs in read_from_client under Catalyst / TT
Aahhh. The joys of a Monday evening with the Perl debugger. I have a quite simple Web front-end to a relatively complex back-end system. The Web app is written in Perl with Catalyst as a framework, and Template Toolkit (TT) as the templating engine. Since we are smart-asses, we aped the Ruby on Rails “link_to” [...]
Create blank objects in Perl’s Class::DBI
Perl’s Class::DBI is something I’ve had a bit of a love-hate relationship with. It’s definitely been useful. And, like with Ruby’s ActiveRecord, it can sometimes rocket-propel you 10x with a development task. However, it’s got a lot of weird gotchas built in. One of them seems to be the inability to instantiate an object with [...]