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*

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. As part of looking into what new lens to get I wanted to know what focal length I shot with the most over the previous years. A quick look with

find . -type f -name '*.CR2' | wc -l

shows I have 4697 RAW images in my photos folder, so I’ll need some sort of automated solution to figure this out.