David - Musings of an SRE

Quick protip: If you’re having trouble finding the ip addresses of your devices that is connected to your local area network.

Borrowed a couple of books the other day at the library after work.

Ruby require used to annoy the hell out of me.

One of the problems I usually have is that rubygem’s rdoc generator is so slow.

You’ve probably seen this in your capistrano deploy script. # /config/deploy.rb set :ssh_options, { :forward_agent => true } SSH Agent Forwarding is a great way to keep SSH keys manageable as it allows the deployment server to use your own local private k…

Been doing quite a bit of spring cleaning on my MBP lately and found a couple of articles hidden away in the corner in one of my bookmark folders that I thought I should share.

When doing a rescue_from in your controller, note that: # controller rescue_from Exception, :with => :do_this rescue_from SomeOtherException, :with => :do_that def ...

One of the common gripes I have with using Tmux (even though its super awesome) is that its so difficult to copy text out of your tmux session into your system clipboard.

Found this nifty snippet today which would allow you to tail your production logs without leaving your local terminal. # capistrano desc "tail production log files" task :tail_logs, :roles => :app do trap("INT") { puts 'Interupted'; exit 0; } run "tail -f…

Note to self: Creating subdirectories under the spec/ directories in Rails, is alright.

openssl::ssl::sslerror: ssl_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=sslv3 read server certificate b: certificate verify failed Getting the above error when running some gems?

Tired of instantiating a def setup that logins a user for ever rspec controller that will require devise logins?

So yesterday there was another major downtime on Zerigo and its about the last straw I had with the service.

Updated my deploy.rb gist.

If you’re always building APIs and often need to test your outputs, why not use the Chrome extension POSTMAN.

If RSpec for some reason doesn’t generate your spec files when generating models and controllers, add this to your config/application.rb. config.generators do |g| g.test_framework :rspec, :fixtures => true, :view_specs => false, :helper_specs => false, :r…

SSH Keys have been helping developers and system administrators quickly manage their servers without having to remember pesky passwords.

If you’re into testing, you know about test coverages.

One of the nice features of a forking workflow is that your repository is always clean and you can pick and choose features from other forked developers’ repository to merge with yours.

Undo a git commit.

To start testing your Resque: Use the awesome ResqueSpec # Gemfile group :test do ... gem 'resque_spec' ... end In your spec testing, play around with “have_queue_size_of” and “have_queued”.

When testing an action that performs a redis-rb command on RSpec, you may run into an error: Redis::InheritedError (Tried to use a connection from a child process without reconnecting ...

This is a personal note to self.

Security and Infrastructure issues often intrique me.

Make sure you have a server.

We all have this problem before.

If you’ve been using Heroku, you probably have already seen taps at work. $ heroku db:pull $ heroku db:push Looks familar?

Something that I’ve just figured out after tinkering for a couple of hours.

When working on files where you want to commit specific line changes into separate commits, there is a way to individually select lines of the changes that you want to commit.

Background: ActiveMerchant’s BogusGateway class which is usually used in a Test environment, does not have setup_purchase/setup_authorization method which is used in Paypal’s Express Checkout.

OSX doesn’t load bashrc when you open up Terminal.

Make sure RSpec is already running.

The other day on a single-day internal hackathon, together with Ernest and the rest of the One Cent Movement guys, we decided to do up an internal check-in mobile webapp where we can see where each of us were at anytime of the day.

RVM Ruby 2.0.0-rc1 installs giving you problem?

Created a new AMI image.

If you’re deploying non-Rails apps/websites, this snippet may be useful to you as it was to me.

Google Reader is dead.

LTA seems to be sincere in trying to engage the development community to find out how best they can help to empower developers to build more mobile apps around their dataset.

Note to self: After installing s3cmd, and configuring it, if you’re getting “[Errno 32] Broken Pipe” errors when putting a file into your non-US S3 buckets, modify your ~/.s3cfg: # in ~/.s3cfg # modify host_base and host_bucket to the proper endpoints hos…

So yesterday, Sung and I decided to ’launch’ our one-day hackathon Pomodoro Timer project onto HN.

Note to self: For some better practice, handle custom exceptions by: Declaring a custom exception module. # In /lib/exceptions/app_exception.rb module AppException class AnyExceptionName < StandardError end end Do try and keep to the relevant exception su…

Note to self.

Note to self: If you're going to use address_picker_rails (0.2.1), make sure your jquery-rails gem is set to <= 2.1.3.

Played around with Pusher today.

Attended Lean UX Week 2013 Day 3 held at Microsoft’s offices today.

Source: ActiveMerchant and Recurring Payments Paypal Express Checkout Payment Actions Paypal Express Integration Guide Paypal Website Pro Integration Guide ActiveMerchant rdoc

Reference: GilesBowkett So I ran this problem the other day on a project where the db/seed.rb file couldn’t run due to mass-assignment protection.

Learnt something new today.

This is an update of my previous blog post, “How to get Paperclip and AWS S3 Singapore and European Buckets Working”.

Being a freelancer for the past 8 months had been one of the most exciting and simultaneously scary thing that have happened to me in a long time.