Tales of hacking and stomping on things, by Lee Hutchinson
A long time ago in late February 2001, on the 18th floor of Three Greenway Plaza in the sweaty bayou city of Houston, a frustrated Tier II desktop support technician copied and saved a bunch of screenshots of the worst helpdesk tickets he d ever seen. (The fact that this was his first IT job necessarily ... Read more
This blog uses GeneratePress for its theme, and I ve been very happy with it for many years. However, I ve been wanting to add a dark mode version of the theme for a long, long time—and, with some cribbing from other sites and about 147,000 tokens burned on Claude Code, I ve finally got one! I started ... Read more
After flirting with the idea for a month or two, I ve switched Bigdinosaur.org (and the sites I m hosting) over to a t4g.medium EC2 instance, which means we ve finally left the universe of x86 and x86-64 behind—at least, for the hosting stack. This serves as a great trial run for next May or June, when I ll ... Read more
After having absolutely no end of unexpected performance issues over on Space City Weather during the Houston deep freeze event of 2023, it seems likely that the core problem comes down to OpenLiteSpeed (or its PHP implementation) being unable to handle the traffic rush with the resources I m willing to give it. This is disappointing, ... Read more
I described in a previous post the 2022 changes in the BigDino web stack, with the biggest change being that we re now using OpenLiteSpeed ( OLS ) as our web server application. There are a whole buttload of how to install Wordpress on OLS posts on the web and I ended up reading most of them during ... Read more
Over the past month or so, my Valve Index has been registering an annoying amount of tilt—when I put it on and start up SteamVR, the floor in VR-land is about five degrees out-of-whack with the actual floor. No amount of room setup re-running or view re-centering would touch the issue. The only fix I ... Read more
Nginx and I have a long history. BigDinosaur.org first went online some time in 2010 with a little Apache-powered homepage, and it didn t take long for me to switch over to Nginx—probably to be contrary, more than anything else, because Nginx was a fascinating underdog that was steadily winning web server market share with its ... Read more
So, hey, it turns out that while the grass is indeed a little bit greener over here on this side of the blogging fence, Wordpress still does a couple of things I don t like and that need correcting. This gives me an opportunity to do that most overdone of blog posts—the here s how to add ... Read more
For all my bitching about Wordpress as my personal blogging platform, I don t think I ever actually ended up using it. I went from Grey Matter to Octopress to Ghost to a pure static site, and I thought I d stay that way. I thought we were done with change. And yet, here we are. On ... Read more
It s been some time since I ve done a good ol infrastructure post, and the Bigdinosaur.org web stack has evolved a bit over the course of 2018. We re still using HAProxy, Varnish, and Nginx, but the way these applications connect and how they communicate is very different from my 2017-era config. Let s dive in! The front ... Read more