Sean’s Obsessions


  • I'm a happy Linode customer. This is a Linode 540 VPS. Linode periodically increases RAM and disk while keeping costs steady, which makes them the natural choice.
  • Archives

Archive for the 'Linux/Unix/OpenSource' Category

07 Sep

Nagios paging using Twilio

иконописI use Nagios to monitor the health of a few servers, and would like to be paged if something goes wrong. When I set it up a couple of years ago, I used SMS Gateway which was $10 for 100 SMSes. I was able to page with a simple curl command. However I’d get the [...]

04 Mar

"cd" tricks to increase your efficiency

ПодаръцивикI was doing some work that involved moving between several directories. Remembering about pushd and popd, I googled around to try and find out how to use them properly. I found this article which was helpful, but what was even better was one of the comments talking about “cd -”. [root@host tmp]# pwd /tmp [root@host [...]

16 Feb

Telling your wordpress environments apart

I am doing some work with WordPress, where we have a development server and a production server. The development side is set up as a git repo, and the production side pulls from the dev repo when we want to pull in changes: git pull origin master I move between the two environments using the [...]

16 Jan

Starting the beanstalk worker from capistrano

I recently changed SmallPayroll to use Beanstalkd instead of delayed_job for background processing. delayed_job is an awesome tool and makes asynchronous processing so simple. However I wanted to have multiple queues so that I could have different workers processing different queues, and have some upcoming needs to process the jobs quicker than the 5 second [...]

09 Dec

Installing ExceptionNotifier for Rails 3

I was just fighting with this, and being new to the Rails 3 way of things, the docs didn’t quite make sense. Step 1 – Install the plugin rails plugin install https://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git Step 2 – Edit config/application.rb: module MyApp class Application < Rails::Application # ….. # somewhere in this block put the following: config.middleware.use “::ExceptionNotifier”, [...]

19 Nov

EPEL nginx rpm and upgrade from 0.6.x to 0.8.x

I just upgraded my nginx rpm and my site refused to start. /var/log/nginx/error.log reported the following: 2010/11/19 09:30:08 [emerg] 27885#0: eventfd() failed (38: Function not implemented) 2010/11/19 09:30:08 [alert] 27884#0: worker process 27885 exited with fatal code 2 and can not be respawn It turns out the new nginx rpm was compiled with –with-file-aio which [...]

27 Sep

Fun with git

трапезни масиI’ve started using Git instead of svn. Like many other people, I tried it out to get easier branching, but found it’s just a pleasure to use in general. One great feature is that git can work with an SVN repository. You use git to check out some SVN code into a local git [...]

07 Apr

Piping with the find command and dealing with spaces

I often use the find command as such: grep foo `find . -name \*.php` which looks for foo in all the PHP files. If the list of files gets too long for the shell, then xargs is the better option: find . -name \*.php | xargs grep foo /dev/null This breaks up the command into [...]

15 Nov

Top 1 best database management tool – and how to use it

I’m noticing that more and more of the items that pop up in my feed reader are of the “Top N” variety. Some are decent, where the author breaks the topic down into subgroups and then shows one or two tools for each purpose. However some of them are just silly, such as the “top [...]

27 Aug

svn merge

(this is one of those “so I remember it” posts that might help others) Edit: See below for a more accurate way to merge the trunk back into HEAD I’ve got some code that I’m storing in SVN. In traditional SVN form, I’ve got my repo set up as /trunk /branches So my work is [...]

© 2012 Sean’s Obsessions | Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)

Powered by Wordpress, design by Web4Sudoku, based on Pinkline byGPS Gazette