At work I’m doing some old school C programming, which made me think of the OS class I took at BU. Just for shits and giggles I looked up the man page for longjmp(). The best part of the page, by far, is the NOTES section: longjmp() and siglongjmp() make programs hard to understand and maintain. If possible an alternative should be used. Understatement of the millennium (and the last millennium too). Read more

There are a couple of cool new technology releases today: Google Gears is a browser extension providing a set of Javascript APIs for offline web applications. Review Board is a web based code review application from the folks at VMWare. No CVS support (yet), sadly.

I got an email today from Amazon Web Services saying that the S3 (Simple Storage Service) prices will change on June first. Now S3 will be even cheaper: Storage $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used Data Transfer $0.10 per GB – all data uploaded $0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded $0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded $0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB Read more

I just upgraded to version 1.99 of Capistrano, the remote deployment tool most commonly used for Rails projects. This is a prerelease of Capistrano 2.0 and installed easily with the following commands: sudo gem install highline sudo gem install -s http://gems.rubyonrails.com capistrano Highline is a new (at least on my machine) dependency for Capistrano and needs to be installed separately because it isn’t present in the gems.rubyonrails.org repository. Following the upgrade instructions I ran capify . Read more

I had a chance to play around with Capistrano this weekend. It’s a cool little tool and it works very well.

Over the past, oh, year and a half or so, I’ve followed the rapid ascension of Ruby on Rails to the top of the web development heap. In the process I read a lot of blog entries, a lot of “Hello World!” introductory articles and a lot of best practice documents. A big part of the thinking behind Rails is Test Driven Development (TDD) – the idea that you should write automated tests before writing code to make sure that a) you know what the code is supposed to do before you write it and b) once the code is working there is a quick, easy way to make sure it keeps working as you further develop your application. Read more

There’s a whole lot of very cool web music technology in the works right now. Services are popping up to facilitate tour tracking, music blog tracking and seamless music experiences. I don’t really have much to say (for now) but here’s a good list of some cool stuff. Hype Machine – See what music all the cool kids are blogging about. Tour Filter – Track the latest and greatest live shows in your area. Read more

I’ve switched this blog to Typo. this is exciting and fun and it means that you can comment without waiting for me to read your email and add it to the post. It only took one day of that for me to get tired of it. All the old content is still here except for the few comments that were left; for that I apologize. But I won’t apologize for anything else! Read more

Amazon announced the beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) today; it’s pretty exciting. The basic premise of the service is that you can get any number of virtual machines and pay for what you use as far as the number of machines, disk space and bandwith go. I’m absolutely bursting with different ways to use this technology, from web hosting to streaming radio to batch processing to QA. I signed up for an Amazon Web Services account today, hoping to play, even if only a little, with EC2, but the beta is full already. Read more

This morning I woke up to an email from Amazon. I finally have my EC2 account! Hooray for me. Now I just need to find out why making a large (greater than 60GB) S3FS freezes my machine.