December 2009
1 post
August 2009
1 post
Experience with 1and1...
I recently received an invoice for a domain renewal from 1and1.com — however, I never asked for the domain to be renewed, nor had any expectation that it would be. In fact, when I first purchased the domain, I specifically was purchasing it for a single year and didn’t get the impression that my billing information would be stored on their servers.
I’ll freely admit that they...
April 2009
1 post
4 tags
Tab Completion for EC2 Domains
Little-known unix command: complete At least for the bash shell, this command controls the programmable tab-completion, allowing you to configure certain programs so their tab-completion only matches files, dirs, some arbitrary set of terms, etc. A common example is to set up “svn” so that bash knows its commands, and tab-completes them for you. A very simplistic version would be...
December 2008
2 posts
Finally!
Google Labs Gmail features are finally integrated into Google Apps for your Domain accounts! Yay! Yay!
October 2008
1 post
More Backtracing
Related to the earlier post on doing backtraces, I figured out how to make some portions work on the Mac version of ruby and/or gdb, so you can do it even when you can’t easily capture stdout…
$ gdb -p <process_id> call (int)rb_eval_string(“$_old_stdout, $stdout = $stdout, File.open(‘/tmp/ruby-debug.’ + Process.pid.to_s, ‘a’); $stdout.sync =...
August 2008
5 posts
“Your mind is precise and discriminating.”
– Fortune cookie…
A Tale of Two Batteries
We all know that laptop batteries lose some of their capacity over time. Apple generally warrants them for a year, if I remember correctly, but after that you’re on your own if the battery barely holds a charge. But how do you get real info on your battery, other than doing time comparisons? Luckily the Mac provides some fairly detailed info. There’s an application called...
Photos of the LHC →
via http://simonwillison.net/2008/Aug/1/lhc/
Sending specific traffic over a VPN connection on...
For a while I’ve had to go back and forth between using the “Send all traffic over VPN connection” setting and not using it. Generally I want the setting off, so that all my network traffic doesn’t get slowed down as it bounces through extra servers. However, sometimes I need to access computers in the office that aren’t on the default VPN subnet.
Recently I found...
July 2008
4 posts
"top" for filesystem usage...
Does your mac sometimes slow down to a crawl due to hard drive usage, and you can’t tell what’s causing it?
I whipped up a little ruby script to act like “top” for filesystem usage.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
data_read = ''
process_times = Hash.new(0.0)
# Clear screen
print 27.chr + '[2J'
# Open a pipe to fs_usage for file calls.
data = IO.popen('fs_usage -wf filesys')
while...
I'm just sayin'...
Cheetahs Never Lose: 8 Ring of Fire: 9
http://www.sandlotsports.biz/leagues/teamview.asp?teamId=1254&leagueid=144
:)
Ruby 1.8.5, REXML, and You
In my previous post, I mentioned that I was trying to track down why our mongrels (running Rails) at work were spinning out of control for no apparent reason. However, finally being able to generate a backtrace from those mongrels led right to the issue.
The relevant portion of the backtrace looked like this:
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/encoding.rb:59:in `check_encoding’ from...
Backtraces from Live Ruby Processes
We had some out-of-control mongrel processes at work recently… They wouldn’t respond to anything except a “kill -9”, were taking 100% cpu time, and spinning for hours before responding to any new requests.
Unfortunately we had no idea what could be causing it, either. Loading up gdb and printing out a backtrace only gives a bunch of “rb_call” type entries,...