GREAT ARTICLE BY THE VARNISH ARCHITECT
It’s been a while since I wrote any C, but I still appreciate reading posts about it. 6 years ago the architect of Varnish wrote an excellent post on how people are still managing their memory incorrectly. It reminds me of a post I wrote 5 years ago called Stop Trying to be Clever. Original post by Poul-Henning Kamp
MAKING BETTER USE OF YOUR .ACKRC FILE
Many command line utils have a . file that people rarely use. Ack is one of them. For a project I’m working on, there’s a var folder (ignored in git) where all the logs go. When I perform an ack search, I have no interest in ack looking through the var folder every single time. By default, ack only checks your ~/.ackrc file for it’s default switches. You can have per directory...
NGINX PUB/SUB MODULE
A coworker pointed me to this Nginx module today. You can write a chat server without actually writing a server. The message thread below indicates incredible performance. If you’ve got more than 50K users and 9000 messages / second you might be able to upgrade your hardware, or at least load balance your channels between 2 servers. When I open 10,000 connections, it seems to behave quite...
COFFEESCRIPT, BOOTSTRAP, AND LESS ARE AMAZING
I’ve been doing backend development exclusively for a long time now. When I decided to build splitmytab.net, I had sourced the front end development to HTML burger. I got the design through 99designs. Both were fine, but I really didn’t require anything past a basic utility site. When I decided to add new functionality to the site, I realized I’d either pay someone to do front...
SPLITMYTAB READY FOR THE PUBLIC!
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...
JESTER WIKI UPDATED WITH TUTORIAL
I’ve updated the Jester wiki with a basic Tutorial featuring examples of creating rules and seeing how events coming into the system are processed. Enjoy!
'NEW PROJECT: JESTER'
I’ve started a new open source project called Jester. Jester is a rules engine for points and badges, also known as Gamification. Jester is written in Python, using Redis for storage. I’ve created a tiny Domain Specific Language for defining rules using the pyparsing library. A couple examples of rules: create rule on game_play award 5 points create rule on game_play award badge...
OPEN NEW TERMINAL TIP
I tend to open up several terminals when working on a project, so I usually want them to start in the same directory I’ve been working with. Stick this in your ~/.bash_profile to have your new terminal windows automatically cd to the directory you last used. export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo `pwd` > ~/.lastpwd' cd `cat ~/.lastpwd ``
INSTALLING MYSQLDB ON MACOS LION
I ran into an issue installing the MySQLdb module. >>> import MySQLdb /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.py:3: UserWarning: Module _mysql was already imported from /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.pyc, but /Users/jhaddad/Downloads/MySQL-python-1.2.3 is being added to sys.path...
HEADLESS VM SERVER USING UBUNTU 11.10
In this tutorial I’ll be guiding you through setting up a headless Ubuntu 11.10 box that you’ll manage using virt-manager, accessed via X11. My main machine is a Mac running OSX Lion. You’ll need the Ubuntu CD, and for the first part of the tutorial, physical access to the box with a keyboard and monitor. **Install Ubuntu on your server. ** I installed Ubuntu Desktop so I could...