Socks and Sandals

Started a Posterous

2009-08-17T00:00:00-04:00

I recently started a Posterous and I’ve been using it a bit more than this site. Check it out! :)

EC2 Talk at PLUG North Tonight

2009-02-09T00:00:00-05:00

I’m giving my Cloud Cover talk tonight at PLUG North. If you’re in the area and are interested in EC2, come on out and join us! :)

Changing my OpenID

2009-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

After consolidating my sites the other day, I noticed that I could no longer log in to sites with my old OpenID. After a moment’s reflection, I realized that the traffic for the OpenID was being redirected to the new site and thus looking to an OpenID provider as if my OpenID was, in fact, the new homepage URL. Oops! :)

To rectify this, I had to do a couple of things:

First, I installed a YADIS service discovery file in the docroots of both sites:

  <xrds:XRDS 
      xmlns:xrds="xri://$xrds" xmlns="xri://$xrd*($v*2.0)" 
      xmlns:openid="http://openid.net/xmlns/1.0">
    <XRD>
      <Service priority="1">
        <Type>http://openid.net/signon/1.0</Type>
        <URI>http://www.myopenid.com/server</URI>
        <openid:Delegate>
	  http://tobydipasquale.myopenid.com/
	</openid:Delegate>
      </Service>
    </XRD>
  </xrds:XRDS>

Then, I installed nginx rewrite rules on both sites to handle OpenID providers seeking authentication:

  if ($http_user_agent ~* openid) {
    rewrite   ^(.*)$    /yadis.xrdf   break;
  }
  if ($http_accept ~* application/xrds\+xml) {
    rewrite   ^(.*)$    /yadis.xrdf   break;
  }

This gives me two OpenID’s, one for the old site and one for the new, both of which are backed by the same OpenID provider and delegate. All set, right?

As it turns out, though, Clickpass, which I use for Hacker News, does not support YADIS. I had to install the following rewrite rule in both sites to have my OpenID work correctly with Clickpass:

  if ($http_user_agent ~ URI::Fetch/0.08) {
    rewrite   ^(.*)$    /index.html   break;
  }

I installed this rule under the others so that if Clickpass ever gets their act together, they will get the YADIS file instead.

As well, for the old site, I had to add a dummy index.html, and install the old method of OpenID delegation on both sites by adding the following tags to the <head> section of the HTML:

  <link rel="openid.server" 
        href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
  <link rel="openid.delegate" 
        href="http://tobydipasquale.myopenid.com/" />

This works, but sucks because an OpenID provider has to suck down the whole page in order to get those two lines.

In any case, both of my OpenIDs are working now. I hope this post will help others change their OpenIDs sanguinely!

Movin' On Up!

2008-12-18T00:00:00-05:00

Yesterday, I moved the blog from Slicehost to Linode and consolidated it with my regular site, cbcg.net. Linode is pretty awesome so I decided to move there for hosting.

You’ll also note a complete site redesign which is thanks to the handy-dandy, static site generator Jekyll. I’m pretty excited about this move. It allows me to concentrate on the site itself and not the stuff powering it. That means: no more monit emails about Ruby processes using up too much RAM and being cycled, no caching problems, etc. I’ve only got two things between you and I now: nginx and the filesystem. In any case, you should expect to see more from this space given that the impedance barrier is now a lot lower.

I hope I got all the redirects working right from blog.cbcg.net to cbcg.net. If not, please let me know! Thanks and I hope everyone had a great holiday season!

ruby-sendfile 0.9.3 released

2008-11-30T00:00:00-05:00

I got a patch this afternoon from one Damon Morda which fixed ruby-sendfile to compile again on Mac OS X Leopard. I’ve included his patch and done a new release of ruby-sendfile which is now available via RubyGems (you can get the source tarball from Rubyforge ).

Bye bye, blog

2008-10-21T00:00:00-04:00

This blog has been basically dead for a while now. I suck at blogging. Therefore, I’m declaring this blog open only for future essays I might write. Don’t expect any kind of timely updates from this space. If you want to keep up to date with me, follow me on Twitter. Thanks!

Chariot TechCast on Hadoop

2008-08-02T00:00:00-04:00

The podcast I did a little while ago just hit the Interwebs: check it out here and listen to us talk about Hadoop, MapReduce and related stuff. Thanks!

Cloud Cover: An Unauthorized Biography on EC2

2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

I gave that talk last night to the Philly Lambda group and about 15 people showed up! It seemed like people were into it and enjoyed the presentation and I hope people got a more rounded perspective on what its like to work with EC2 for real, day to day. The slides are listed on my talks page; enjoy!

Mac System Info Script

2008-07-28T00:00:00-04:00

Little script for getting system info on a Mac in one shot:

Single-Bit Errors Caused Massive S3 Failures

2008-07-26T00:00:00-04:00

This description of the recent Amazon S3 failures serves as a cautionary tale to all developers wishing to create “simple” services at scale: its the little things that kill you.