UPDATE [2012-10-03]: RightScale has ongoing issues with the stability of their command-line tools. In particular: rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with a timeout error. You can’t just retry, because sometimes the script you were trying to queue was queued despite the error, and there’s no way to tell. rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with an error “Failed to process… Read More »
UPDATED 9/4/2012: I accidentally had a hard-coded AWS_VOLUME_IDS setting in the script, which I inserted while debugging my own copy of the script and forgot to remove before posting the script here. I’ve removed it. D’oh! UPDATED 8/19/2012: The logic in my original script for determining which backups to preserve was incorrect. It is updated… Read More »
At my current gig, we’re hosting our blog on Amazon EC2, at least until we have become so wildly successful that a single EC2 instance can’t keep up with our blog traffic. We wanted to make sure we wouldn’t lose our blog in case of an EC2 failure, so we configured our (Linux) blog instance… Read More »
UPDATE [2013/01/08]: As of the recent Galaxy S III update to Jelly Bean (Android 4.1), most of the text below is obsolete. The connect-within-3-seconds limitation appears to no longer exist, and you can connect to and disconnect from the phone multiple times without unplugging and replugging it. I’ve tested mtpfs, go-mtpfs, and simple-mtpfs with my… Read More »
I pre-ordered a Samsung Galaxy S III from Verizon Wireless a couple weeks before they started shipping. Between when I placed the pre-order and when they started shipping, I had to change my credit-card number, so the number that Verizon had was no longer valid. I didn’t realize that they hadn’t actually charged my card… Read More »
I bought a ThinkPad laptop from Lenovo recently. The actual laptop hardware is quite good… it feels solid and it has a nice screen, nice keyboard, good weight to performance ratio, good price to performance ratio, and great battery life. Alas, things were not so smooth after the laptop arrived. In fact, my post-purchase experience… Read More »
Ken at Popehat reports on Pittsfield judge Bethzaida Sanabria-Vega ordering a local blogger not only to stop writing about the daughter of a local public official who was the perpetrator of a hit-and-run accident which nearly killed someone and got off virtually scott-free after the courts “lost” some of the paperwork related to her case,… Read More »
UPDATE [2013-02-13]: According to this article on Craigslist, as of February 10, 2013, they have implemented and are testing the idea I described below for fixing the problem described in this posting. I recently placed a for-sale ad on Craigslist. I anonymized my email address in the ad, which means that the published email address… Read More »
My Windows 7 laptop’s hard drive recently died, and after replacing it (with an SSD! yeah!), reinstalling all of my software including iTunes, and restoring my iTunes library, iTunes refused to play any music through my Logitech USB headset. The speakers plugged into my audio port worked just fine, but when I tried to play… Read More »
My employer uses Oracle Financials to manage its books. The user experience of Oracle Financials is truly awful. We’re in the process of upgrading to a new version of the application, after using the old version for several years. One would think in the interim Oracle would have hired a decent UX designer and some… Read More »