Don't Try This at Home, Kids

As a general rule I don't like to push changes to a client's .htaccess file during business. If you've ever had the pleasure of working with regular expressions (regex), you'd know why. This is largely a holdover, however, from my earlier days as a developer--when regex seemed about as intuitive as ancient Chinese.

I often squirm when confronted with the mysticism of my clients: to them, an .htaccess redirect might as well be black magic. Clients will come to you ask you for an edit having really no idea what's at stake. What's funny is that even as an experienced developer, I occasionally fall victim to the same kind of mystic-idolatry: somewhere deep down I still harbor a fear that some cog, far beyond my reach, will simply decide to give out and an entire website will fall apart. There are a lot of moving parts to a website--yes--but things don't just happen for no reason. Sometimes, you need to channel your inner Agent Scully: "there's a perfectly logical explanation to every mystery the universe throws at us".  Websites don't just mysteriously stop working. Sometimes you need to trust the cold logic of the system and just push forward. It doesn't actually matter whether it's the middle of the day or the middle of the night: the fall-backs for an .htaccess edit gone awry are the same: back-up your code and be ready to revert. If you make a mistake, know how to undo it; and for God's sake, don't edit an .htaccess file in the middle of business hours unless you're confident the risk of failure is at an absolute minimum. 

Encrypted Drives Across Multiple Ubuntu Users

I may put together a post on this one. I recently stumbled across an odd issue with encrypted drives when using them on a Ubuntu laptop with multiple users--seems like if you format a password protected disk under one user profile, the other user will need to constantly re-authenticate the disk even after they successfully mount it. It looks to be a disk permissions issue; changing the ownership of this disk looks like one work-around; currently looking to see if adding the second user to the same group as the first will work as well. Weird...

Xubuntu Password Manager?

Where the frack is it? Xubuntu asks whether you'd like to store an encrypted drive's password, but now I can't seem to find where it's stored... hoping this one doesn't turn into a post.