Author Archives: carson

Example Git pre-receive and post-receive Hooks to Avoid a Signal 13 Error

By | Published: October 22, 2010
Git has a very nice set of example hooks that you can find just by creating a new repo. The following is an easy way to see them all: If you do that you will end up with a list something like this: I recently did this thinking I would create a pre-receive hook. Since [...]
Posted in system administration | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Getting Started with JRuby Webapps using Rack and Sinatra

By | Published: October 7, 2010
Going to JRubyConf inspired me enough to expand my knowledge of JRuby. This is a quick guide for anyone looking to see what can be done with JRuby and Sinatra. Of course the first step is to install the Java JDK. Download, install and then set it up in your path. I'm using JDK 6 [...]
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Minimal EC2 Linux Install Using TTYLinux

By | Published: September 14, 2010
If you have ever wondered how to get a Linux EC2 node down to the bare minimum this post is for you. I have been wanting to do this for a long time but it wasn't possible until pv-grub support that was added recently. To make this even more exciting Amazon now offers EC2 micro [...]
Posted in system administration | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

How to Build and Compile a Custom Linux Kernel for EC2

By | Published: September 9, 2010
I have a long running goal that I'm trying to reach with all these pv-grub for EC2 posts. That goal is to find the smallest/tightest usable node that can be created for EC2. The next step in that path requires a custom Linux kernel. What follows is how to build the latest Linux kernel so [...]
Posted in system administration | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Using a HTTP Proxy to Debug JAX-WS and SOAP Over HTTPS

By | Published: September 7, 2010
Every once in a while I run into something I need to debug from the network up. Most of the time I can do this using Wireshark but there are a few instances where what I'm really looking for is a man in the middle proxy. I usually find an alternative way to debug what [...]
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Converting from VirtualBox or VMWare to EC2 now Easier than Ever

By | Published: August 25, 2010
The new PV-Grub ability introduced by Amazon for EC2 has opened the door for more than just custom kernels, it also makes it a lot easier to turn VirtualBox and VMWare instances into EC2 instances. In the past I have written about transfering VirtualBox images to Xen but to do that with EC2 required a [...]
Posted in system administration | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Installing Cent OS 5.5 on EC2 with the Cent OS 5.5 Kernel

By | Published: August 10, 2010
Amazon recently introduced the ability to boot a custom kernel using pv-grub on EC2. This opens the door for all kinds of interesting ideas that I've been thinking about for a while, like seeing if I can boot right into a web server and skip all that extra junk that comes with Linux distributions, but [...]
Posted in system administration | Tagged , , , | 24 Comments

Compiling WebM into FFMpeg for Windows

By | Published: July 13, 2010
I have updated this post with a newer version of the VP8 patches to FFMpeg and support for libvorbis instead of the built in vorbis support. Google has released source for the VP8 codec as the WebM project. The WebM project will be an open alternative in the HTML5 video tag codec space and being [...]
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Upgrade to Fedora 13 from Fedora 12

By | Published: May 27, 2010
After a week delay Fedora 13 has been released and it is time to upgrade of course. As always there are a decent number of features in this release but here are a few that stand out to me: boot.fedoraproject.org – A small bootable image to start the install from. IntelliJ IDEA – IntelliJ IDEA [...]
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Faceted Search With Sphinx

By | Published: May 18, 2010
I decided to use the Sphinx search engine for the GeeQe iPhone app I build last year because it was fast and had a very small memory footprint. Recently I wanted to experiment with a search interface that had facets and wondered if I would need to move away from Sphinx to something like Solr. [...]
Posted in programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment