Andrey Mikhalchuk's Blog

I’m watching Stargate (nostalgia) and just couldn’t resist …

I tried to figure out how rails reacts to the fact that memcached goes down. Unfortunately there is no god documentation about this besides saying that everything will be fine. Also there are couple misleading posts in different forums saying that rails will never rediscover memcached server that went down…

Ever used default_scope in RoR? Ever regretted you had ever read about this feature after you wrote tons of code and later realized you can’t access the records you need in a convenient way when necessary? Try googling “how to override default_scope” and you will find tons of advices how…

On some linux machines when you run wireshark you may notice that a lot of packets are marked as invalid (highlighted as black). The contents looks perfectly correct, but for some reason checksum is brkoen and wireshark suggestes that the reason for such unpleasant event is “TCP checksum offload”. Let’s…

I was recently compiling some Arduino code with NewSoftSerial and got hit by infamous “Error: register r24, r26, r28 or r30 required” error. NewSoftSerial is a great library and those using older avr-gcc compiler enjoy it alot. Problem is the newer gcc doesn’t like one nasty error in the code…

Hi!
I’m sitting here at the Rails conference (has nothing to do with trains) and watching at the presenter struggling with the equipment. This leaves me couple minutes to start this post about how to do great presentations and not to do bad ones.

Just watch it. Then read under the cut line.

I started posting instruction on how TMHRITWE was built. The first three parts are overclocking, serial interfaces and “POE”. I especially recommend reading the “POE” part as all “POE” hacks I saw before contain one mistake potentially fatal for your router.

I just published a new video and a new article about “The most hacked router in the world ever” project. The idea behind this project is obviously to hack router to the extreme. I searched the Internet, found all known hacks about routers, added a few I never seen implemented…

So imagine you have this super-duper cool quad-core 4Gb RAM dual nvidia raid 5 computer running Vista. You’re browsing the internet enjoying/hating the ultra-sweety-psycho-aero interface and when you go to flickr/twitter/some_other_your_favorite website the entire system freezes instantly. You can’t move mouse cursor or type on keyboard and your computer gets…

Recently I’ve got a worldlock cable lock for my bike. Skimming thru the guide pictures included with the lock I tried to understand how do I open it for the first time and didn’t find anything saying “default password” in big bold red font. Quick google search also gave…