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Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.

Microsoft Excel is one of the most commonly used tools for reporting, analysis and "what if" scenarios, with over 250 million users worldwide. This paper will discuss the steps involved in understanding the requirements for an automated solution. It will also introduce a solution for automating the generation and secure distribution of spreadsheet reports.

as well as use hundreds of applications written to Salesforce's Force.com API via the Apex development language. However, this highly proprietary model means customers can run only Salesforce.com (including any customization they have done to the pages they use within the application) on the Salesforce platform.

I recently discovered memcached which is a distributed, object caching system originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal fame. You can think of memcached as a giant hash table that can run on multiple servers which automatically handles maintaining the balance of objects hashed to each server and transparently fetches/removes objects from over the network if they aren't on the same machine that is accessing an object in the hash table. Although this sounds fairly simple, there is a lot of grunt work in building a distributed object cache which handles data partitioning across multiple servers and hides the distributed nature of the application from the developer. memcached is a well integrated into the typical LAMP stack and is used by a surprising number of high traffic websites including Slashdot, Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Wikipedia. Below is what C# code that utilizes memcached would look like sans exception handling code

HTTP Compression is a wonderful technology that accomplishes a lot of different things. It allows faster page serving to clients and lower server costs due to lowered bandwidth (these two being enough for me to implement). There are a handful of articles out there that explain how to implement HTTP Compression in Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0, but I haven’t been able to find a nice step-by-step article, so I decided to set one up. In this how-to, I’ll briefly explain what HTTP Compression is and how it works in IIS 6.0, and then provide step-by-step instructions on how to implement it because it’s not as simple as flipping a switch. In fact, there are many things in multiple places on the server you have to properly configure to implement HTTP Compression.

This article walks you through the process of setting up an authoritative time server for a Windows Server 2003-based network running Active Directory. The article outlines procedures for syncing to both an internal and external time source, and also lists additional resources for configuring the Windows Time service and troubleshooting time synchronization problems.

Instrumentation allows you to determine the running state of a system once it has been deployed. This is crucially important today since the people supporting systems are unlikely to be the same people who developed them. Like good error handling, instrumentation is best done at development time. A sound instrumentation policy must be established at the beginning of the development process to determine what should be instrumented, why, where, and how.

Many new admin or Linux users get frustrated when their remote Linux box is not accessible dues to network connectivity. In this article I will try to provide tools and information about how to diagnose network configurations. You can try these tips/tools to diagnose an issue of Linux network connectivity to remote or local servers.

The Windows Server 2003 Security Guide provides specific recommendations about how to harden computers that run Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) in three distinct enterprise environments—one in which older operating systems such as Windows NT® 4.0 and Windows® 98 must be supported, one in which Windows 2000 is the earliest version of the Windows operating system in use, and one in which concern about security is so great that significant loss of client functionality and manageability is considered an acceptable tradeoff to achieve maximum security. These three environments are respectively referred to as the Legacy Client (LC), Enterprise Client (EC), and Specialized Security – Limited Functionality (SSLF) environments throughout this guide.