adrift on a cosmic ocean

As I've previously mentioned, I've been doing a lot of work recently with various aspects of AWS on a daily basis (or close to it). My primary language these days is still Ruby, but I've been labouring through the excellent Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book in the hope I can broaden my horizons somewhat. I'm fairly comfortable with Python, somewhat familiar with Javascript now after playing with…

I've been using S3 a lot in the last couple of months, and with the Amazon SDK for Ruby it really is dead simple to work with (as well as all of the other AWS services the SDK supports currently). So simple in fact, that you could quite easily delete all of your objects with very little work indeed. I did some benchmarks and found that (with batch operations) it took around 3 minutes to delete…

As you may or may not be aware, I work at SoundCloud. I also write music from time to time, but outside of sharing on Facebook I don't tend to make any of it public. So far I've missed the opportunity to promote any of it, and I thought I'd test out our embedded player widgets so enjoy the following tracks :)

At $employer today, we had our bi-weekly tech talk session and one of the lightning talks given was on tmux. Tmux is an excellent piece of software (although I gave up on it and started using iTerm2) but that's not what I wanted to talk about. One of the other participants in the session noticed the presenter's shell prompt had a little smiley/frowney face which changed both expression and colour…

Some ideas I want to share that I wish had shared with me prior to Motherhood... It will ALL BE OK  - TRUST YOUR INTUITION AND YOUR INSTINCTS!!! This child is yours and yours alone so Fuck what people say, it is usually their incorrect and often unfounded opinions that make you question your own, when you know what is best for you and your  child. It will get much easier, and much much harder…

OK, the content of this post is not nearly as melodramatic as the title - I'm attempting to do some log analysis with Hadoop and Pig (yes, I'm several years in the past, just barely catching up to all of you folk who have been using Hadoop for a long time). As the logs are coming from a webserver and are not that far from standard "combined" format, it is most logical to use the time-saving UDFs…

A couple of things of note have happened recently. Firstly, I managed to conquer the #10-level Currywurst at Curry & Chili, rated at a (literally) eye-watering 7.7 million Scovilles - not a performance I care to repeat. Secondly, I recently changed employer from Nokia to SoundCloud. This is a big change for me, and in some ways hard since it was working with Nokia that allowed me to anchor here in…

Just a quick note since this tripped me up yesterday. If you take a look at the changelog of RSpec between 2.6.0 and 2.6.1 you'll see that it now "intelligently" senses when being used with RCov and requires the autorun file (which basically just sets the tests to start automatically after they have been set up). At some point for one of our simple apps I upgraded all of the Gems in use to the…

It's a little-known fact that Phusion Passenger, the awesome Rack webserver module, can also competently talk WSGI as well as fit into the Rack ecosystem. This means that not only can you run your Rack and Rails applications through it using Nginx or Apache (or in fact independently, using a cut-down version of Nginx) but also your WSGI-compliant Python applications. This has been touched on in…

So I was going to post a comment on the original blog post which I linked to from here but Facebook connect was broken and I don't feel like setting up yet another account ... but there was a slight development. I attempted to use the same methodology we had already followed with the first app, to another app so that this one was also packaged using Bundler and RPM. Needing to…