Technical Ramblings, page 2

Since the base AMIs we are using for the servers are now using a more current Ubuntu version, there are some things that have to be changed in how we provision the servers with Chef. One of those happened to be background scripts. In the older version of Ubuntu they...

Okay so we needed a specific version of Ruby to get old gems and code compiling at a base system level. 1.9.3 something or other. But we had users that needed specific ruby versions, like 2.3.0 so their code could compile. It’s a weird layering, but we needed it. So...

The Craftsman Articles are a series of posts written about clean code. Their original home is dead on the internet, but with the power of the way back machine and helpful people, there are backups made, like the one linked. The posts follow the apprenticeship of Alphonse as he learns...

Okay so for the past couple of weeks myself and another been wrestling with an infrastructure set up for deploying in-house apps. The point of it was to set up a staging environment for another app. That was all that we wanted to do. Simple, right? Not really. Why? The...

Zsh is a shell that is basically an extended bash. The power of this lies plainly (to me, anyway) in oh-my-zsh. With oh-my-zsh, you can add plugins and themes and other additions to make the terminal a ‘nicer’ experience. I tried it for a little bit. It was definitely more...

After a short stint with Vim, I’ve begun to experiment with Emacs, as well, I’m working with someone who uses Emacs extensively and I’ve used Emacs before and remembered not completely hating it. I feel the same lack of dislike having tried it again. This time though, I tweaked Emacs...

JMeter is one of many tools that can do server load testing. The notable others being Apache Benchmark and HTTPerf. I couldn’t get either of them to work for a few annoying reasons, so I put all my effort in getting JMeter working, which, unlike the others, actually has a...

I’m working on a project where we are trying to provision and setup a Ubuntu environment with a specific version of Chef. A version of Chef that is three years old and extremely outdated. This is causing quite a mess because it needs a particular version of JSON that is...

Vim is apparently used widely. I’ll repress my snarky comments, but know that they exist. Being used by many, that means I need to know how to use it. So I’m working on it. I’m using MacVim some of the time and Vim in the terminal. I prefer the earlier....

Another part of the tests I was supposed to pass with my Java HTTP Server was making it be multithreaded. Basically making it so it can handle multiple requests at the same time. With the power of Java libraries, and Java in general, this actually isn’t that difficult. Java has...

I was looking for something to use to make a new test for an arbitrary server, so I looked at the wikipedia page for HTTP status codes. It was a vaguely interesting read, but most of the major codes had already been implemented into the testing suite I was using...

So with my Java Server I have these series of classes that are responsible for controlling the server routes. They get the bytes to display and know which http code they are and their content type and so on. The problem I had with them was what to call them....

Software Craftsmanship by Pete McBreen is yet another book on software crafting ideals and practice. This one in particular, however, focused more on the differences between the idea of software craftsmanship and software engineering. It approached the terminology and how each affects management and programming methodology. The author considers software...

The basic Java HTTP server I’ve made can serve a variety of different things. Files. Images. Directories. Forms. A page to display parsed parameters. Logs. And so on. At first it was simple to just put in the main server class the logic to display the initial type, directory serving,...

Moving on from the comfortable world of Clojure and Tic Tac Toe, I have started my Java HTTP Server. The point of it being to serve files and show a directory. But that really isn’t the point of this post. It is about the most basic part of a server....

Because I was a bit bored and saw it on a shelf, I decided to read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I was drawn to it because of its title as I recalled hearing about it from somewhere and as I thought of Moby Dick when I heard it. I really...

The original settings page for my Tic Tac Toe game was pretty unintuitive and horrible. Neither visually pleasing nor having a great amount of utility. So I was tasked with improving it. I had to create three different design mock ups, test it with three different people, timing the time...

A continuation/vaguely enlightened reflection on a previous post. So. Cookies and sessions. Why would you use one or the other? Well, I did some researched and have compiled some reasons why. Cookies Pro: Can be set for a duration of your choosing Does not necessarily end when the browser session...

In my web tic tac toe Clojure app, I had been originally hardcoding in HTML and other things within the stencil/mustache file and a for things like the board and settings page. The board was especially hard-coded. To display the game board I was assembling strings of HTML together in...

Cookies and sessions are two different ways of retaining data when a client and server begin interacting. Below is a relevant picture describing this general process. The session keeps the data locally on the server side, but when the client initially requests and the session is creating, a unique key...