The Codebelay Blog

Month: July 2009

  • Monitoring Websites on the Cheap: Screen and Sitebeagle

    If you don’t fail fast enough, you’re on the slow road to success.

    One idea that I recently failed was using a screen and sitebeagle to monitor sites.

    It’s not a complete failure… it works okay.

    Due to budget constraints, I put my screen and sitebeagle set up on a production server.

    For some reason that production server ran out of space and became unresponsive. Screen no doubt caused this. I was alerted of the issue and did a reboot.

    After the reboot, although Amazon’s monitoring tools told me the server was okay, the server was not. The MySQL database was in an EBS volume and needed to be re-mounted.

    The solution I now have in place is still screen and sitebeagle. But I use another server with screen and sitebeagle on it to monitor the production server that gave me the issue in the first place.

    It’s a question of who will monitor the monitors… in a world of web sites with few site users the answers pretty bleak. In the world of super popular commercial sites, the answer’s clear. The wisdom of crowds will monitor the web sites.

  • Lone Coder in a Sea of Power Users?

    Hey folks, I might expand this into a larger article for either mashable.com or techcrunch.com .

    I was wondering if you folks who are coders feel that you’ve been put in a situation where you are the lone coder in a sea of power users?

    If so, is this situation ideal for you? Not ideal?

    How do you deal with job queues?

    How do you deal with working with power users with conflicting interests?

    I’m really interested in war stories where you feel you’re the lone expert.

    Cheers, Barce

  • Git: How to Cherry Pick Commits and Package them Under a Tag

    I’ve pretty much come to rely on git to pull me out of any bad jams in the chaotic environment I work in.

    One thing I’ve had to learn to do is cherry pick commits and package them under a tag in git.

    Here’s how to do it if you were working with my newLISP project called Sitebeagle:

    fork sitebeagle on this page

    cd sitebeagle

    git fetch –tags

    git checkout 8f5bb33a771f7811d21b8c96cec67c28818de076

    git checkout -b sample_cherry_pick

    git cherry-pick 22aab7

    git cherry-pick b1334775

    git diff sample_cherry_pick..master

    git tag leaving_out_one_commit

    git push origin –tags

    At this point, you should have a tagged branch that doesn’t have the commit with the change to the “2nd file.” The diff should look exactly like this:

    diff –git a/test.lsp b/test.lsp
    index 9cf1667..158b625 100755
    — a/test.lsp
    +++ b/test.lsp
    @@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
    #!/usr/bin/newlisp

    ; test tag test_a
    +; cherry pick test 2

    (load “sitebeagle.lsp”)
    (load “twitter.lsp”);