Using Monit to…monitor stuff

Tuesday 11/25/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

Monit is a useful tool that lets you monitor your server and run commands based on certain variables (ex: restart your mongrel instances if they grow > x MB).  Plus, it comes with a nice web interface to quickly see your load averages and memory usage (easier than logging in and running top).

nginx+mongrel vs apache+passenger (+wp super cache)

Sunday 11/23/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

I’ve liked using Phusion Passenger as a stupid-easy deployment solution for Rails (and now merb) apps, but running three Rails apps and one Merb app on a Slicehost 256slice, things got kind of crowded.  I had to set the PassengerMaxPoolSize variable to 2 in order to keep my free memory at an acceptable level, and [...]

Where does my time go?

Friday 11/21/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been using RescueTime for awhile to track my usage trends and see how (un)productive I am over a certain period of time.  Their web interface is pretty easy to use and it shows pretty graphs (see ma, I really do work!)
But part of me feels kinda weird having an app push updates to a [...]

Lost?

Thursday 11/20/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

Is anyone else seeing this on the top of their Facebook home page?

Please reset your email notification settings.
Unfortunately, your email notification settings have been lost. You can reset them on the Notifications page. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
I’m wondering how Facebook goes about losing things…perhaps someone accidentally dropped a table?  Whoops.

Finding distance and time between two places with Google Maps

Wednesday 11/19/2008  –  Category: Uncategorized

Instead of doing ghetto (and inaccurate) coordinate math, let’s use Google Maps to do the work. This is a bit obscure, but you can append &output=kml to any search query and it will give you output in KML (XML for Google Earth) which makes scraping just a tad bit cleaner.
Instead of parsing the XML, [...]