Edwards Tech notes.

God process monitor 0.8.0 major improvement

God is a ruby based process monitor that has a reputation for leaking memory and hogging system resources. I have been considering replacing God with monit for some time. A couple of days ago I noticed a retweet by John Mettraux about a ruby debugging presentation by Aman Gupta. The presentation covers various debugging tools and gives a number of examples, including Eric Lindvall's work debugging the God process monitor (slide 41). Obviously I had to try it and the following is my experience.

Changing Hard Drives

I spent the weekend switching the RAID1 array of 1TB Seagate® Barracuda® 7200.11 drives on my server with the newer 1TB Seagate® Barracuda® 7200.12 RAID1 array in my workstation. There was an LVM volume group called raid1 running on top of each raid array. I had some problems because I forgot to remove the raid superblock from the first drives before adding them into the new machine, which resulted in a duplicate raid1 volume group. The following is the process I used to transfer the drives and how I resulted the duplicate volume group problem.

Creating Panoramic Photos with hugin

While on holidays in Australia I took a number of photo sequences to see if I could stitch them together into panoramic images. I used Hugins, which is a cross platform application, to stitch the photos together to produce images like the one bellow.

Long exposure drive

These are photos taken with a low shutter speed while driving at night. I like them because they capture the passing of time without any distracting details.

Typo on rails 2.3.3 makes it into mainline

Frédéric de Villamil committed my rails 2.3.3 patches to HEAD[1] last night. Frédéric had an interesting post[2] on there plans to re-factoring typo. The 2.3.3 patches have reduced the memory usage quite a lot. Once I have rebased this blogs varnish patches to the new HEAD I am going to look at getting typo running on ruby 1.9.1

1. http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/typo-list/2009-August/004922.html

2. http://blog.typosphere.org/news-from-a-summerish-typo.html

The Garden

Here are some photos I took when we visited the grandparents vegetable garden.

Porting typo blog to rails 2.3.2

After looking at some of the cool features of rails 2.3.2 (like rack integeration) and its claimed compatibility with ruby 1.9.1 I decided to port typo blog 5.3.x from rails 2.2.2. This blog is running on the result of that effort.

TLUG July 11 Technical Meeting

Here are some rather grainy B&W photos I took at the technical meeting and Nijikai.

Long exposure Hanabi

I took some long exposure photos of firecrackers. The longest photos were 30 seconds and were taken at ISO100.