Setting up a hybrid Google Apps mail account

I’ve run my own mail server since, well, the UUCP days. I used to host a lot of mailiing lists so over the past 20+ years I’ve run Sendmail, Exim, Qmail and Postfix. They’re all different but they share one thing in common: unless running mail servers is your hobby, they’re not fire-and-forget applications, especially…
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SSH Tunnel for PostgreSQL Connection on AWS EC2

AWS has become a fairly ubiquitous hosting option for small companies.  But developers typically work on local dev setups outside the host and occasionally need access to the main dev and staging databases located on AWS.  How do you do this and still run in a secure environment?  One thing you don’t do is poke a hole in AWS‘ firewall and run PostgreSQL’s port…
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SMB+SSH: Ubuntu server and OSX client

The title above is pretty close to the Google search query I used in vain to find a recipe for tunneling an OSX Samba client to an Ubuntu 14.04 server. Hopefully this post will save someone the hours I spent trying to set this up. In the end, like so many Unix projects, the answer turned out…
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Optimizing a Result Set Pager

It’s ubiquitous on data driven web sites: the result set pager.  We’ve all used them whether we built them from scratch or used one provided by the framework. Pagers are by nature performance suckers because we’re asking the database to re-run the same query for each “page”, slicing off just one set of contiguous rows…
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Remote SSH Filesystems on OSX

Developers, particularly web developers, have a need to work on external computers, often not within their local networks.  Over the years I’ve employed everything from FTP to SFTP/SCP to Samba to NFS to VPNs to cranky Novell networks.  All have their downsides, particularly with regard to security. I have a MacPro and originally ran NFS to connect to machines on my LAN.  But as…
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Did your wallpaper suddenly turn grey?

This can occasionally happen when OSX recovers from a deep sleep, particularly on dual-monitor systems where there already issues with the cabling. The fix: Open up Terminal and type the following: sudo killall Dock That should restore the wallpaper for both terminals. I ran into another problem with my Viewsonic secondary monitor related to recovering…
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