Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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Securing MAMP
MAMP is a really easy way of running recent versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL on your Mac for development purposes, something that can take quite a lot of effort if you attempt to set things up on your own. There is one major drawback, however: the default install is really rather insecure, with Apache serving pages up to all and sundry, including the configuration sections of the install, meaning that anyone who happens to spot that port 80 is open can do things like drop databases at will, which would be somewhat irritating to say the least. This tutorial from Eric Keil covers some techniques for securing everything, but I went about it a little differently. (more…)
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Death Notes
Rational Fear is a splendid website which allows you to search a database of causes of death by age, sex and nationality in order to ascertain what you should really be scared of in this world. It throws up some enlightening results. For example, were I to die tomorrow, it would most likely be because I had hanged myself. My wife is perhaps more likely to die from epilepsy, but given that she’s not a heroin addict her next most likely immediate exit route is the same. It is pleasant to know that neither of us is likely to be rubbed out by a random axe murderer.