This weekend I got a chance, or rather was forced, to try out the SSH client I’ve had sat on my iPhone for the last few months.

I got an email from my boss who had just been tipped off about problem with our Sphinx configuration. The usually very helpful stemming that Sphinx performs on search queries was causing “Live music” and “DJ music” events to come up when a user searched for “musicals”.

At this point I was in a cafe on Broadway Market with a coffee eyeing up the ample selection of vegan cakes. Getting to the point I whipped out my iPhone and logged into our webserver using Touchterm. I was relatively easily able to edit the Sphinx config file with vim (the command line editor that’s better than emacs), restart the server and reindex all our events, I later realised that changing the stemming config only requires a restart of searchd to take effect.

Thanks to the convenient shortcut overlays I could access the crtl, esc and arrow keys and also perform key shortcuts like ctrl+a to get to the start of the command because I forgot to type sudo.

Now I’m totally sold I’m going to shell out a £2.99 quid for the pro version.

Some browser cache mythbusting ensued.

A quick google search revealed only a few references to this phenomenon posted on out dated forum threads. After browsing our development version of our site with Opera 9 and Safari 3.1.2 and tailing the apache access log it was clear that this is not at all true. Given the correct expiry and cache control headers both Opera and Safari will cache content with a query string.

While a most of people completely ignore proper management of their users’ browser caches others make wild assumptions and generalisations about the behaviour of these strange beasts. They all behave slightly differently and the only way to know for sure if a particular browser is caching your content is to open your access log and check. One trick I have used in the past is to put sleep(5), or your language’s equivalent somewhere in the script execution, but this can get tiresome!

Hitting refresh in most browsers certainly all the ones I tried on my mac will re-request most if not all content regardless and also emptying your cache, clearing your private data or whatever does not always do as is promised. A quick tip to finish make sure your test browsing is clicking through links and not hitting refresh, or your tests wont be accurate.