What is Meatbot? Meatbot is a HipChat bot for managing status updates for our growing team of Evangelists at DataStax. It’s built in Python 2.7, utilizing the Will library. The status updates are stored in Cassandra using cqlengine. Yep, it’s up on github.
There’s a few simple commands. First, you tell Meatbot about each project you work on.
Once you’ve got your projects, you can list them with lsproject or delete them with rmproject.
python
- When I started learning Python, there’s a few things I wish I had known about. It took a while to learn them all. This is my attempt to compile the highlights into a single post. This post is targeted towards experienced programmers just getting started with Python who want to skip the first few months of researching the Python equivalents of tools they are already used to. The sections on package management and standard tools will be helpful to beginners as well.
- I have grown increasingly frustrated with the world as people have become more and more convinced that “schema-less” is actually a feature to be proud of (or even exists). For over ten years I’ve worked with close to a dozen different databases in production and have not once seen “schemaless” truly manifest. What’s extremely frustrating is seeing this from vendors, who should really know better. At best, we should be using the description “provides little to no help in enforcing a schema” or “you’re on your own, good luck.
- I’m happy to announce that cqlengine is now using the Python Native Driver. For the most part, this should be a trivial upgrade. See the notes below on upgrading. The Good News Significantly less code to maintain in cqlengine itself. We no longer need to maintain connection pools, deal with fail over, dead servers, server discovery, server removal Native driver multiplexes queries over each socket, so less sockets stay open Notifications can be sent back to the client from the server.
- In this post I’ll walk through the process of setting up cloudwatch alarms programatically in Python through Boto. We’ll be setting up a single alarm for a metric StatusCheckFailed, but you can configure other alarms as well. Check the AWS alarms console for the full list. This post assumes you already have an instance, instance_id, AWS, and your boto config set up. Also assumed is that you’ve created a SNS Topic already.
- As of Sunday, August 25, rustyrazorblade is now powered by pelican. So far, no complaints. It was easy to get started. Installed through pip into a virtualenv and up and running in just a few minutes. It was a significantly better experience than my attempt at using octopress, which mixed theming, code, and my content all into one mess of a projct. The new blog is just a folder of content (markdown), my theme, and a Makefile.
- Cassandra is a BigTable inspired database created at Facebook. It was open sourced several years ago and is now an Apache project. In cassandra, a row can be very wide and is identified by a key. Think of it as more like a giant array. The data is stored on disk sorted by the key you pick, meaning if you pick the right sort option and key you can have some really fast queries.
- I got really excited at the notion of having IPython built into MacVim (vim-ipython), so over the last few days I’ve spent some time mucking around trying to get this whole thing to work. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of documentation on how to fix the issues that might pop up, so hopefully this will help some people. (spoiler - MacVim download is 32 bit zeromq is 64) First, your prerequisites.
- Splitmytab.net is finally for the public to check out. Splitmytab is a bill splitting and IOU system for friends. It uses facebook’s login, so you won’t need to put in anyone’s emails, names, or get people to sign up for an account. It’ll automatically keep balances of who owes who, so you can keep a running tab with friends and always know who’s buying the next case of beer. Please note: I’m not a designer, so there’s a few rough corners, but what’s there is simple and it works.