Another blog bites the dust

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). [Read More]

It’s that time of the year and Seedcamp Tel-Aviv is back (for the forth year!). This time lool Ventures is part of the eventIn one of my hats I’m the CTO of lool Ventures and I’ll be there as a mentor to give advice and share from my experience in building a startup. So if you have a great idea and started to work on it be sure to apply now. [Read More]

Two days ago I’ve shut down the longest running electronics device I ever owned.Alcatel SpeedTouch Home - Image from isphelp.info The device was my an Alcatel Speedtouch Home ADSL modem which I got circa 2001 when I was lucky enough to get an ADSL line at home. It was only turned off when there was a power failure or when I moved an apartment. It survived 6 PC, 5 Laptops, 4 routers, 6 apartments spanning 4 cities and about 10 different cell phones. [Read More]

I had the pleasure of reading Scott Berkun‘s newest book – Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds. I was also forunate to get it for free in the short period of time where Scott gave it for free on his site, but this is not a guilty book review of getting the book for free. Mindfire is a collection of 30 essays which Scott wrote in various places, mostly on his blog. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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:

I know the title is a bit alarming, but that was my first thought after reading @bryce‘s latest post “The Rising Generation“. Briefly, he mentioned a 25 y/o asking a question on Quora about how was life before everyone had a cell phone and no one talked a lot or texted in public areas. Bryce also say that the new entrepreneurs, like the ones in yesterday’s Y Combinator Demo Day have different expectation, understanding and perceived value of technology than any other that has come before them. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

I’ve started a new technical blog which talks about the cloud. It’s called Forecast: Cloudy and it will feature thoughts, ideas and some code driven mostly from my experience running services on cloud infrastructure.

The first post (after the traditional “Hello World“) already has some code :-)

Check it out and don’t forget to tell me what you think about it.