Alistair Davidson | Miscellaneous musings of a multifarious man - mostly rants, raves and random thoughts on Coldfusion MX. And too much alliteration.
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Quick tech tip - if you're trying to access Amazon S3 from Ruby, even with the official aws-sdk gem, and you get errors like this: Errno::EPIPE: Broken pipe - when trying to upload, the issue is probably that you need to explicitly set the endpoint appropriately for the region of the bucket …
Recently I've had to work with PHP an increasing amount. I've not been enjoying it. A few recent IRC conversations also got me thinking - is there an entirely arbitrary but kind of fun (and hey aren't they all arbitrary, really?) metric of programming language FAIL / coder FAILs per-language ? So …
Using FeedWordPress to pull in aggregated feeds to a Wordpress blog? Also using the Wordpress MU Domain Mapping plugin to map an arbitrary domain to your blog? Seeing posts get duplicated? Then read on .... I've isolated the duplicate posts issue to some kind of interaction with the Wordpress MU …
We finally managed to get enough space in the schedule to take the plunge and port our monolithic Rails 2.3 app to Ruby 1.9, with a view to increasing scalability of our app. An upgrade to Rails 3 is also on the cards for later, but... one thing at a time. As ever, the path to true Ruby nirvana …
We had an interesting problem today. We were seeing very slow single-row updates (>30s) on our (innodb) scheduled_jobs table, and a large number of the update queries were failing with a LOCK WAIT TIMEOUT. The updates were using the primary key, so they should be pretty fast - but they weren't. …
keywords concurrency, database, few minutes, googling, heap size, jobs, locks, mysql, mysql server, optimisation, performance, primary key, queries, sleep, ssh, threads
There's been a lot of fuss recently about the new "EU Cookie Law", and what effect it will have on EU- and UK-based online businesses. The EU directive has been around and discussed with varying degrees of hyperbole for a while, what's caused the recent kerfuffle has been the adoption into UK …
keywords adoption, cookies, fuss, paragraph, privacy, storage, subscriber
The web server CPU was mostly idle, the 5 thin instances didn't seem to be doing much, but the requests were still taking forever to return anything. So what the flimmin' flip was taking so long? Nginx was configured to timeout requests after 60s, but it didn't seem to be working. In fact, the …
keywords 60s, configured, execution time, instances, interpreter, jruby, libraries, logs, nginx, operating system, operating systems, rails, ruby, single thread, timeout, virtual machine, web server
I've been having some trouble with an inherited MacBook Pro, on Leopard (OS X 10.5), trying to get RabbitMQ and the tmm1-amqp gem up and running. The annoying thing is that it was all working fine a few weeks ago, but I ended up having to completely remove MacPorts and do several sudo rm -rf …
keywords amqp, annoying thing, database files, dev environment, erlang, gems, googling, lib, mac, macbook pro, macports, os x, ports, rabbit, rb, rf, scratch
A frustrating problem cropped up this afternoon while trying to get a home-grown Ruby RabbitMQ client to talk to the broker on a MacBook. The client is based on the EventMachine and AMQP gems, and although for once it worked perfectly on Windows - (.... yes, frame that last sentence for posterity …
keywords gems, hosts, localhost, mac, mac os x, macbook, mappings, networking, os x, params, posterity, ruby, socket connection
There are only two hard problems in computer science - cache invalidation, and naming things Phil Karlton It's an oft-quoted truism that brings a knowing smile to most hardened programmers, but it's oft-quoted precisely because it's true - and during a recent enforced rush job to implement a …
keywords cache, collections, computer science, headache, memcached, memory, metadata, parameters, primary key, programmers, programming, queries, rails, ruby, smile, spike, stumbleupon
Techie, climber, footballer, northerner, cynic, stoic, sarky sod http://instantbadger.blogspot.com
RT @vbloke: A torrent walks into a bar and asks for beer. Everyone in the bar who has a beer gives him a sip of theirs@drsnooks
London, England
