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Posted by scottk on Jul 3, 2009 in Ramblings
St Joe House: Need to get out there this weekend
rest_client not equal to rest_client
Posted by scottk on Jun 16, 2009 in Ruby on Rails, Sysadmin
Note when a Ruby setup, Sinatra in this instance, says it’s missing rest_client it is missing the gem rest-client.
Parental Trolling
Posted by scottk on Jun 15, 2009 in Ramblings
Need to save this one for a few years xkcd.com
YouTube – Magnum v. Solo, sequence comparison
Posted by scottk on Jun 8, 2009 in Humor
YouTube – Magnum v. Solo, sequence comparison.
It’s been brewing
Posted by scottk on Jun 8, 2009 in Ramblings
Being in the syndication business as a techie, the state of the newpapers is of constant concern. As the people that feed the newspapers the news it’s not a very good sign when the people that are supposed to be purchasing your product look like they might start lobbying for the next bailout package coming out of Washington.
In my opinion it doesn’t look as bad as many think for the newspapers. Oh there are still going to be a lot of newspapers that go out of business. The ones that remain though are going to have strong business models, tight staff and will be technologically enabled. Essentially those that will live will become News 2.0 organizations and the traditional structure that has been maintained will go away. Syndicates will face (are facing) the same challenges and are going to need to not only find new ways to deliver content to a digitally enhanced world with a leaner crew, but to also change pricing models and do more self marketing of the talent they represent. There will be some awesome synergies (ack used a buzzword) between the content and news delivery that both move forward.
News organizations can’t continue to put their news in places they can’t monetize or where they allow someone else to monetize it over them. Dropping a full story into an RSS feed that Google can grab and parse is a sure way to stop millions of views from coming to a site where you can drop a few ads and possibly make a few dollars to go back to the expenses generated in chain of getting that content there. On the same note the syndicates need to really look in depth at the CPM system. A portal such as Yahoo, MSN or Google has a news story looked at billions of times. How does that fit into the pricing structure compared to other digital subscribers? Even if you are the AP and charging them 10x the fee of other subscribers it’s a sure fire bet that any content they have their hands on is probably being seen 100x more often than the larger newpapers you have on the list.
The deal is that news organizations are just starting to really grasp digital and they’ll either latch on and start building fresh or might save themselves for a few years by pulling back from it all together. In either case those that flurish are going to find the new routes to people, it’s going to involve a screen and a way to do a “content view = revenue” calculation. The pieces are there and waiting.
Hate it when
Posted by scottk on Jun 7, 2009 in Ramblings
I was asked a question that on Friday I dropped the ball on, I just straight up couldn’t line up the things in my mind. I floundered and flailed when it’s normally the sort of thing I would have a good answer for. I REALLY hate when that happens and I’ve been stewing on it most of the weekend. Those things never seem to happen at a convienent time. Someone had asked me what would happen if I was situation A, the problem being situation A was something that would be damn near impossible in the world I’ve constructed for myself. The problem being that I then took what was asked and tried to apply it to my specific world rather than interpet it in a more general sense. Live and learn though and the next time I’ll remember to keep my head out of my own world.
RabbitMQ – 1.5.5 Denied – 1.5.3 Rock On
Posted by scottk on Jun 3, 2009 in Sysadmin, Technology
No sooner had I got my RabbitMQ up and running did I find out that there wasn’t a perl module out to talk AMQP, so wrong. So google and twitter high jinx ensued and I found that there is a STOMP perl module and it seems a decent amount of people are talking STOMP with ruby. Awesomly enough there is a STOMP addon module you can compile up for RabbitMQ available from the RabbitMQ group itself. Unfortunately the 1.5.5 release of RabbitMQ doesn’t seem to play happily with the last version of the STOMP addon, suck. I did find out that the 1.5.3 RabbitMQ and STOMP addon are all good to go though. So I ended up backing my install down a couple version and once I grabbed the corresponding STOMPer it was back up and running. I’ve tested it with perl Net::Stomp and another developer has hit on it with a java AMQP implementation and I believe he’ll be giving it a go with ruby tonight.
I’m REALLY looking forward to messing with AMQP to pass things around. There’s more than a few places where I see we could have had a much smoother implementation/systems running with a decent message queue or broker running on the backside, especially a language independant one. I’m not a proponent (in my world anyway) of everything having to live on the BUS. It’s my belief that getting this component in our aresenal is going to allow us to make an evolutionary step forward in our systems.
RHEL5 RabbitMQ Install
Posted by scottk on Jun 2, 2009 in Sysadmin
Just did a RabbitMQ install on a RHEL5 server and it was insanely easy.
- Get the RabbitMQ rpm from rabbitmq.com (here at time of this post)
- Become EPEL enabled if not so:
su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm'
- yum install erlang
- rpm –install rabbitmq-server-YourVersion.rpm
- /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server start
- open up port 5672
That’s all there is to that. If it’s going to be in the wild make sure to change the default user ‘guest’ using
rabbitmqctl add_user username password rabbitmqctl delete_user guest
PSA – Crimes of Carelessness
Posted by scottk on Jun 1, 2009 in Humor
Watch Crimes of Carelessness on CollegeHumor
GoDaddy Cert, Safari and the BigIP
Posted by scottk on May 25, 2009 in Sysadmin
Ran into and issue after our deploy with Safari not thinking our secure cert for Gocomics.com was valid. It took some searching but I ran across a post on F5 DevCentral which show how to go to Verisign or the GoDaddy repository and download their intermediate certificate and add it to your chain. The steps are essentially import the certificate:
1. Log in to the Configuration utility.
2. Click Local Traffic.
3. Click SSL Certificates.
4. Click Import.
5. Select Certificate from the Import Type menu.
6. Click the Create New option.
7. Type intermediate for the Certificate Name.
8. Click Browse and navigate to select the intermediate certificate or chain certificate to import.
9. Click Open.
10. Click Import.
and then add it to that Client SSL Profile
1. Log in to the Configuration utility.
2. Click Local Traffic.
3. Click Profiles.
4. Select Client from the SSL menu.
5. Select the Client SSL profile to configure.
6. Select Advanced from the Configuration menu.
7. Select intermediate from the Chain menu.
8. Click Update.
Cake.. once you figure it out.
