Another blog bites the dust

Twitter’s Kestrel is a cool scala based queue server (based on Blaine Cook‘s (@blaine) Ruby based Sterling). The two main features I like about Kestrel are: Sort-of-transactional – If I take an item I can make sure others can’t get it. If the connect drops it will go back on the queue. Read behind mode – If a certain queue reached a maximum pre-configured amount of RAM or items it will stop storing messages in RAM and will write it directly to the queue log file. [Read More]

Below are the steps necessary to connect your iPhone / iPad or any other computer via a PPTP VPN. Why would I want to do this? For various reasons such as allow you to access information and servers that are behind a firewall, or maybe you just need to route traffic through different servers. I’ve tested this on a 256mb Rackspace Cloud instance running Ubuntu 10.04 and with an iPhone and an iPad. [Read More]

If you are using Varnish version >= 2.1 and experiencing an ever increasing CPU usage up to a point where you need to restart the service to force CPU usage to drop you may want to add the “-h classic” argument to the command line. This will revert to use the older hashing method instead of the newer “critbit” that was first introduced in version 2.1. You can read a little bit more about it on the Yedda Dev Blog. [Read More]

At my day job we use Disco, a Python + Erlang based Map-Reduce framework, to crunch our web servers and application logs to generate useful data. Each web server log file per day is a couple of GB of data which can amount to a lot of log data that needs to be processed on a daily. Since the files are big it was easier for us to perform all the necessary filtering of find the rows of interest in the “map” function. [Read More]

Installing ies4linux on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala by just running “./ies4linux” might show some warnings such as: IEs4Linux 2 is developed to be used with recent Wine versions (0.9.x). It seems that you are using an old version. It’s recommended that you update your wine to the latest version (Go to: winehq.com). In my case it showed the above text, which seems to be a warning, and run the UI but then got stuck and didn’t complete anything. [Read More]

Launching a startup is like sending a message in a bottle. If the message is not clear, no one will come to visit your lonely island or send you a postcard back. When you launch your startup, your online presence (i.e. website, twitter account, facebook page, etc) and the buzz you manage to create online via the online official and unofficial press are the message you are passing to your users. [Read More]

I was just reading over at TechCrunch about Google quickly hiring Don Dodge after he was let go from Microsoft. It seems Don will be doing what he used to do at Microsoft – Developer Evangelism (good for him, and Google!). I’m very happy to see that Google is putting their stock options and cash where their mouth is to evangelize their APIs, platforms (Android, AppEngine) and tools to developers. [Read More]

Whenever a new programming language appears some claim its the best thing since sliced bread (tm – not mine ;-) ), other claim its the worst thing that can happen and you can implement everything that the language provides in programming language X (assign X to your favorite low level programming language and append a suitable library). After seeing Google’s new Go programming language I must say I’m excited. Not because its from Google and it got a huge buzz around the net. [Read More]

If you are getting the error “”issubclass() arg 1 must be a class”” with Google App Engine SDK for Python on Linux its probably because you are running Python 2.6 (and will probably happen to you when you run Ubuntu 9.04 – 2.6 is the default there).

Just run the dev server under python 2.5 (i.e. python2.5 dev_appserver.py)

If you are getting the following error while adding a Samba based network printer to Vista: Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation could not be completed (error 0x000006d1). And you have a Samba server (version 3.0 and above) consider using the following technique to add the printer: Add a local printer (not a network one!) Select “create a new port” Select “Local port” as type of port In the port name enter the printer’s SMB path, i. [Read More]