The Dude abides.

Culture Matters

The mid-week sojourn to Thailand gave me an opportunity to finish “Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress“, a collection of essays by reknowned scholars (Francis Fukuyama, Nathan Glazer, David Landes etc) on the impact of culture on human societies. It was slow reading at the start, until I came across a fantastic paper by [...]

ganymede.gathani.org running Ubuntu

I reinstalled 1420.gathani.org with Ubuntu 7.04 yesterday, and rechristened it to ganymede.gathani.org. It was difficult to decide which operating system and distribution I should have installed. The choices were:

FreeBSD - useful for package hacking work I’ve been involved in recently. However, I already have access to several FreeBSD machines at this point in time, one [...]

Setting up Signal Handlers in PHP via the PCNTL extension

When running PHP through the CLI SAPI, it often becomes necessary to be able to trap UNIX signals and execute appropriate action. For example, Umgubular Slashkilter (Um-Sk) runs a parallelized crawling engine, achieved by forking itself be as need to empty out the queue. When testing Um-Sk, it was necessary to be able to gracefully [...]