A year ago, I started an experiment. I wanted to quit gmail and gtalk services and prove me that I could host my emails and my IM myself. It went quite well but I decided to stop and subscribed to fastmail.fm and to hosted.im.

Installation

A year ago, I spent some days installing a fully functionnal mail/web/jabber server. Hopefully, I had some good tutorials about setting up a mail server. On the jabber side, it was quite easy even if sometime, my WTF-o-meter level was really high. I blame my totally absent knowledge of erlang and mnesia here.

Yesterday, I lost a significant amount of time dealing with cross-domain AJAX requests and I thought I might share a bit of what I learned.

1. jQuery 1.5.0 is BROKEN when it comes to cross-domain AJAX requests. Upgrade to at least jQuery 1.5.1.
2. Access-Control-Allow-Origin WON’T accept a wildcard value if your XHR’s withCredentials option is set to true. Also, it won’t accept a list of origin. If you want to accept requests from a lot of domains, you can match the Origin request header against a set of domains and set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin accordingly.
3. Access-Control-Allow-Headers and Access-Control-Allow-Methods CORS header does not support * as a value. You have to be specific, even during your prototyping phase.

Yesterday during the SOPA Blackout, this website was on strike. The billions of readers of this blog had a static page explaining why this website was offline instead of the normal content. As a good nerd, I turned this operation into a technological one and instead of serving a static html with nginx, I decided to use varnish.

Yes, varnish.

I never wrote anything about the absolutely amazing architecture of this blog but basically, static files are generated from RestructuredText, served by nginx and cached by varnish.

I’m now back to my daily work at SensioLabs after some days spent at Cologne, mostly for the Symfony Day 2011. It was truly great to be there. I had the chance to put faces on twitter nicknames and to talk in front of the crowd. I was a bit nervous and wasn’t as relaxed as I would liked to be. I will try to work on my english pronunciation for the next times.

Kids. Backuping your data is great. But assure you that your backups also contain your database. I’ve lost all the posts of this blogs and much more. Nothing to say that I was really pissed off.

I wanted to recreate this blog from scratch but got distract by other things. After a few months of procrastinating and slapping myself for not having a place to write, I found a great theme based on twitter bootstrap for wordpress and decided to give it a go. I’m pretty happy with that.