On July 3rd, I decided I was taking a break from social media. I deleted Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat from my iPhone, iPad and removed any links to them in my browser (I didn’t delete my profiles). A full month seemed like a good amount of time to detox from all of these and see what would change in my life without them. The first couple of days I was certainly fidgety, kept looking down at my phone and not knowing what to do with it. »
Over the last 9 years, I’ve had a few things in my life that have benefited me both professionally and personally that have all tied back to Flickr. In 2003, Canon had released the first sub-$1000 digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS 300D aka the EOS Digital Rebel. The 300D paved the way for entry level consumers to get involved with the world of digital SLRs, previously the cheapest option was the Canon 10D, available at $2,000. »
For a hack week project at Chartbeat, I hooked my Philip’s Hue light bulbs into PagerDuty so whenever I get paged my lights will start flashing. Read about the hack over on the PagerDuty blog »
I wrote a couple blog posts for work diving into what we learned optimizing our performance in EC2. You can read both parts over at http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/01/02/part-1-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/ and http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2014/02/12/part-2-lessons-learned-tuning-tcp-and-nginx-in-ec2/ »
command[check_recent_core]=PLUGINPATH/check_recent_core.sh --file="$ARG1" --freshness=$ARG2$ Spot the error? I only wasted an hour of my life and another 30 minutes of co-workers trying to figure out why I kept getting a "NRPE: No output returned from plugin" error in Nagios. The issue? $ARG1 is missing a closing “$”. *slams head on desk* »
Tonight I took the plunge to get back into some more C coding. In getting my environment setup I came across a useful debugging macro. This macro will output the filename and line number every time it’s expanded. I wanted to make sure I understood how the macro was working before just copying and pasting it into my source code so I’ve broken it down below for myself and others to understand. »
A couple years ago I was sitting at a poker table for my final interview for a sys admin position with . It had been a long day of mentally exhausting questions, and the interview was coming to a close. The person I was interviewing with sat for a moment and pondered his next question for me. “You’ve got a building across the street with a bunch of data on a server. »
For the holidays I got a new Canon 7D camera. I’ve been saving quite a few amazon gift cards over the last year that I was previously planning on using towards purchasing the camera but thankfully Santa delivered me one. My current lens collection consists of 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 70-200mm f/4 50mm f/1.8 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 (kit lens) The lens collection has been built over the last 4 years from when I first got my Canon Rebel XT and I’ve been fairly happy with them thus far. »
Lately I’ve been reading up on Django a bit in an effort to get back into programming. It seems the preferred way of running Django is inside a virtualenv environment. I try to stick to packages when possible for installing applications and saw that the python-virtualenv package wasn’t too far behind at version 1.4.5, where the latest is at 1.5.1. This appeared at first to suit me just fine until I discovered the version of pip that gets installed along with python-virtualenv is at 0.3.1, where the latest is at 0.8.1. »
At $WORK I’m currently working on deploying a pool of Varnish servers to sit in front of some Apache servers running Pressflow. On our current infrastructure we’ve been running Squid for the past few years with very good success , minus a hiccup or two along the way, one involving memory fragmentation (thank you tcmalloc). Varnish has a few nice features that Squid lacks. The ability to PURGE objects using wildcards Better support for multiple processors (Squid can benefit from multi procs when using AUFS) Grace period that can be configured to serve objects from the cache after they’ve expired while fetching the new content from the backend. »