February 15, 2014

Lessons learned tuning TCP and Nginx in EC2 at Chartbeat

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/

October 12, 2011

NRPE returning no output?

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*

September 4, 2011

Useful C Debug Macro

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.

April 11, 2011

My Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Moment

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.

December 28, 2010

Determining my most used focal length in photos with python and dcraw

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.