Adventures in IT

This is a bucket policy that you can use to allow the whole world the ability to read files in your s3 bucket. You might want to do this if you're serving static web content from S3 and don't need the fine grained control that the Amazon documentation details. You will still need to set up permissions on the bucket but this policy will let people read the files you're storing on S3.

Memcached saved my users a minute per query I'm working on a business intelligence tool that requires as an intermediary calculation a list of UK postcodes that are within a radius of a user supplied postcode. It currently takes about 7 seconds to query my Postgres database to get this list out.  Unfortunately I need to do this several times as part of a goal seeking function so I need to greatly improve this lookup speed. I'm already using the Postgres earthdistance module and have properly indexed my table so I realized that I needed to look for a caching solution. Memcached places limits on the size of the value you can store.  The default setup is 1meg and I'm reluctant to change this because it adds to the deployment burden.  My result sets were sometimes up to 4 megs large - searching on a 20 mile radius in London yields a lot of postcodes! My idea was to split the large piece of data into several smaller pieces and to place an index referencing the pie...

I'm using Varnish to cache a fairly busy property site.  Varnish works like a bomb for normal users and has greatly improved our page load speed. For bots that are scraping the site, presumably to add the property listings to their own site, though the cache is next to useless since the bots are sequentially trawling through the whole site. I decided to use fail2ban to block IP's who hit the site too often. The first step in doing so was to enable a disk based access log for Varnish so that fail2ban will have something to work with. This means setting up varnishncsa.  Add this to your /etc/rc.local file: varnishncsa -a -w /var/log/varnish/access.log -D -P /var/run/varnishncsa.pid This starts up varnishncsa in daemon mode and appends Varnish access attempts to /var/log/varnish/access.log Now edit or create /etc/logrotate.d/varnish and make an entry to rotate this access log: /var/log/varnish/*log { create 640 http log compress ...

There are so many different problems that people have with the Doctrine error message: exception 'Doctrine\ORM\ORMInvalidArgumentException' with message 'A new entity was found through the relationship 'App\Lib\Domain\Datalayer\UnicodeLookups#lookupStatus' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Searching through the various online sources was a bit of a nightmare.  The best documentation I found was at  http://www.krueckeberg.org/  where there were a number of clearly explained examples of various associations. More useful information about association ownership was in the Doctrine manual , but I found a more succinct explanation in the answer to this question on StackOverflow . Now I understood better about associations and ownership and was able to identify exactly what sort I was using and the syntax that was required. I was implementing a uni-directional many to one relationship, which is supposedly one of the most simpl...