A Startup Reality Check

In 2012, I made a tweet about how excited I was to have found a new home for my 50GB photo collection.  SnapJoy had a “life raft” tool which pulled your photos out of Flickr–a service widely viewed as a sinking ship at the time.  SnapJoy was also the first US site to be listed on the now venerated Beta List.

Why gmail@isnoop.net is your recovery email address

Each year I receive angry or confused messages from a person who  found gmail@isnoop.net as the recovery email address in their Google account.  This post is intended to explain why.

Massive DB Conversions in AWS MySQL RDS

We recently had the need to perform a massive DB conversion to move all tables over from a mishmash of encodings to UTF-8. We had many large alters and character conversions to perform. The entire operation was about 24 hours of work, so we couldn’t afford to take the site down during the whole thing.

Jira + Mysql = Error importing data? Two simple solutions.

Many versions of MySQL will throw a fit if you try to insert four-byte UTF-8 characters. If your find yourself importing a ticketing system into JIRA and run into an error that looks like the one below, there is hope!

"cd: 1: can’t cd to ~"

Are you seeing messages like the following in your web server’s error logs?

cd: 1: can't cd to ~
cd: 1: can't cd to ~
cd: 1: can't cd to ~
cd: 1: can't cd to ~

Let’s Both Pretend I Read the Agreement

The EULA. It’s an interesting beast. On one hand, software makers have the right to say you cannot decompile their code and resell parts of it on your own. On the other hand, the rights granted to software makers and the limitations placed on end-users are often egregious, ludicrous, contradicting, and at the very least inscrutable.