Ben’s Blog

On the subject of S3, if you do any amount of S3 admin on OS X you should check out S3Hub.

Among other goodies it:

• doesn’t seem to crap out on buckets containing large numbers of keys
• allows you to check and set arbitrary HTTP headers on your objects (with a great auto-suggest dropdown!)
• has a nice dialog for creating timed links to objects w/ signatures

Panic, are you listening?? I still want to believe Transmit is the best file transfer software on earth.

This is the easiest way I’ve found to take advantage of S3’s reduced redundancy storage using the RightAWS gem. Secret sauce is the x-amz-storage-class header.

headers = { 'x-amz-storage-class' => 'REDUCED_REDUNDANCY' }
@s3 =  RightAws::S3.new( AWSCredentials.access_key, AWSCredentials.secret_access_key)
@s3.bucket(bucket_name).put(key_name, data, {}, 'public-read', headers)

Interestingly, to determine storage type for an existing key you can check the storage_class attr which will either be REDUCED_REDUNDANCY or STANDARD.

>> puts @s3.bucket('my-bucket').key('my-data-file.xml').storage_class
# => "REDUCED_REDUNDANCY"

Amazon states pretty clearly that

You should expect the same latency and throughput as standard Amazon S3 storage when using RRS.

which seems to actually be the case: I tried several series of 100 PUT requests on a 4kb file: both reduced and standard redundancy hovered around 300ms/req.

Try:

find . -type f –name "*.txt" | tar -T - -c –z –v –f my-tarfile.tar.gz

Others on the ‘net have the command as tar -T - -czvf which doesn’t work for me: apparently using -T - requires all other flags to be specified as individual args.

• 25MEYER - NYC restaurateur: key is focusing first on employee energy/morale, customers second. Success will follow.  “A.B.C.D.,” always be connecting the dots.
• 25CORNER - Critical quality in a hire is ability to make decisions beyond the SOP: these are the moments that, in the aggregate, make or break businesses.  Also, turns out the Starbucks CEO is pretty cool.
• 25NOTICED - high schoolers maintain online identities independent of their names
• 25LOVE - is marriage inherently material?
• HALPERIN-T - customary reviews of new books from Karl Rove and Mitt Romney, but notable excerpt from Romney who’s concerned that America will become “the France of the 21st century — still a great country but no longer the world’s leading nation”
• 25FRIEDMAN - proposal for a Green Tea Party

If you work on OS X and get tired of copy/pasting from Terminal (or that Textmate popup window) when hacking a quick ruby script, you’ll appreciate this:

IO.popen('pbcopy', 'r+') { |clipboard| clipboard.puts html_out }

Better late than never:

• 18CORNER - business-as-sport, not so original — but some interesting thoughts on where young/junior employees fit into the process
• 0418-BACKDROP - mountain climbers photoshop an Argentinian mountain to illustrate notable stock charts
• 19METS03 - the print edition had a fantastic banner head: “LONG STORY SHORT: METS WIN”
• KIRN-T - Best bad book pan I’ve read in a while, from the author of “Up in the Air”

The print web refer is always a tricky animal: to get real traction, you have to come up with something that’s either

• compelling enough to get people to interrupt their newspaper
• memorable enough that they don’t forget by the time they see the website

Earlier this week folks over at the Daily News had one of the best I’ve seen in a long time:

PRIVATE SHOW: See more naughty stripper pix that weren’t fit to
print! nydailynews.com/gossip

1. SCHUESSLER-T - The current generation of e-readers works hard to look and act like a printed book:  different media, same interaction.  Could technology alter/”improve” the act of reading as we know it?
2. 11IGER - Robert Iger is a smart guy.  Interesting notes on his business philosophy and how he grew into it.
3. 11RUSSIA - The ultimate top-down approach to innovation.  Note how messy the wiring is in their racks, how will they ever achieve??

Official SVN support for Integrity is in the works, but in the meantime Jeremey Hinegardner rolled a solid implementation on his github svn branch.

I pulled Jeremy’s patch into a gem to make installation easier, especially with existing Integrity installs.

To get started, install the gem:

sudo gem install bkoski-integrity-subversion –source http://gems.github.com

and then add

require “integrity_subversion”

to Integrity’s config.ru. Then, paste your svn repo’s URL into Integrity’s git repo field–and off you go!

Source is over on github.

I’m definitely looking forward to officially supported SVN, but I’m hoping this will be helpful to others looking for a quick patch in the meantime.

Integrityapp is a fantastic CI engine, with great support for Git push hooks. But if you don’t want to go through your repos and roll custom post-commit hooks–or if you’re using Integrity with SVN–there’s no builtin support for triggering builds from a cron or daemon.

iamruinous has a great integrity-subversion-watcher script that I shamelessly borrowed, tweaked a little to allow builds for all Integrity projects, and then gemified so setup is as easy as:

sudo gem install bkoski-integrity-watcher –source http://gems.github.com

and then adding

integrity-watcher check all –config=/path/to/integrity/config.yml

to your crontab.

Check out the source (and additional docs) over on github.