#Code

Ever since Redis Modules were released into the wild, I wanted to write something nice and short and see how easy and fun it is to significantly extend Redis.

It also helps that Dvirsky, my friend, works at Redis Labs and wrote RediSearch - a kick ass full text indexing and search engine that kicks all the other search engines’ performance ass (you should definitly try it out).

For a while now, to try out new languages/frameworks/whatever I’ve been using Twitter’s Snowflake. This case was no different as everyone needs unique ids at some point.

I’ve recently had the chance to write a new project on AppEngine.

It’s been a long time since I tried I was too lazy (as always) to setup servers just for that.

I’ve decided to use Python but just to be sure I won’t be vendor locked into various AppEngine services I’ve decided to use:

• Flask (instead of webapp2)
• Cloud SQL (instead of DataStore)

This will ensure that I can break out of AppEngine easily with minimal code changes.

In addition to my previously published (very early) project to stream NSQ messages directly to BigQuery, I am happy to presents a modified version of nsq-to-s3 that supports streaming NSQ messages directly Google Cloud Storage.

Grab it while its hot from the nsq-to-gs repo.

I do see a future for a merged version of these two projects that supports both S3 and Google Cloud Storage but this would have to be enough for now.

I’ve bene running a Tor exit node in the Netherlands since August 2013. I believe in the cause of Tor and it was only a matter of time before I started adding code in some for or another.

gonionoo is Go wrapper for OnionOO – the Tor Network Status protocol as is the first step in a slightly larger project I’m working on that I’ve been planning for a while ever since I’ve became a Tor exit node operator.

I’ve created a nice little bash script to take MongoDB backups that is replicaset aware.

It will only take a backup from a replica so if you have the classic master,replica,arbiter configuration you can setup the script via cron on both (current) master and replica and the backup will only run on the replica.

It will then tar.gz the backup and upload it to Google Storage. It can be easily adapted to upload the backup to S3 using s3cmd or the aws cli (aws-cli).

One of the things I found very strange is the fact that most operations that came with iOS prior iOS 5 which revolved around UIImage didn’t take into account the orientation of the image. This meant that if you want to read a picture from the camera roll and resize it, you’d have to roll your own code to correctly flip and/or rotate the image according to its orientation value.

I had to backup an S3 bucket so I whiped out a small script to clone a bucket.

It’s written in Python and depends on the excellent Boto library. If you are running Python < 2.7 you’ll also need the argparse library (both available also via pip).

View the gist here: https://gist.github.com/1275085

Or here below:

A while back Twitter announced the Snowflake service. Snowflake is a unique ID generator that is fast and generate 64bit integer unique ids that are “roughly sortable”. That is, newer ids are bigger than older ones, up to a certain point.

The service was originally written in Scala (which runs on the JVM) and has a Thrift interface, which means you can talk to it from almost any thinkable programming language.

For my latest venture, MyFamilio, I needed to know if a user’s Email address is a Gmail one so that I could show the user his/her contacts from Gmail.

Figuring out if the user is on Gmail is usually easy – the Email ends with @gmail.com. But what happens for all of those Google Apps for Your domain (like my own, which uses the @sandler.co.il domain) ?

Well, you can easily detect that by running a DNS query on the MX record.

I was searching an example of using Python Imaging Library (PIL) to extract the GPS data from EXIF data in images.

There were various half baked examples that didn’t handle things well, so I baked something of my own combining multiple examples.

You can get it here: https://gist.github.com/983821

Or see it embedded below: