Dancing in the cloud – deploying Dancer apps to dotcloud

April 30, 2011 bigpresh

Marco Fontani wrote up an excellent blog post on deploying Dancer apps to DotCloud’s beta.

DotCloud is a PaaS (platform as a service) hosting platform currently in beta, running on Amazon EC2. It promises dead-easy deployment of Perl web applications. (DotCloud announced Perl support as CaaS (Camel as a Service) recently.)

Marco’s write-up shows that it is indeed simple; push your Dancer app to DotCloud, and it figures out the dependencies, installs them, and starts it up. As the little meerkat would say, “simples!”.

Programming

Creating and pushing new remote git branch

April 15, 2011 bigpresh

A note for my own reference, as I always forget how to create a remote branch then work with it later:

Create a new remote branch topic/add_awesomeness with, e.g.:


git push origin :origin:refs/heads/topic/add_awesomeness

Create a new local branch to track it:


git checkout --track -b add_awesomeness origin/topic/add_awesomeness

The unintuitive way to delete a remote branch is:


 git push origin :heads/topic/doc_cleanup

(There must be a better way than that…)

Linux, System Administration

Incremental backups with rdiff-backup

April 15, 2011 bigpresh 3 Comments

My current backup solution is using rdiff-backup to do incremental backups. I’d previously been using plain rsync, but I wanted snapshots too, so I could retrieve a file as it looked at some point in the past (as Sod’s law guarantees that if a file was mistakenly deleted/clobbered, rsync will run between that happening and you noticing, so the backup will be clobbered too).

My setup involves the backup box running rdiff-backup, connecting to the machine to be backed up via SSH, using a passwordless SSH key for authentication. The entry in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the machine to be backed up allows that key to be used only to run rdiff-backup, nothing else, and only from the backup host, to provide as much security as possible.

I thought I’d document my setup here, both for easy future reference for myself when adding other boxes to back up, and for anyone else who may find it useful.

So, the steps I use are as follows:
Continue reading Incremental backups with rdiff-backup →

Perl

11 million CPAN testers reports

April 11, 2011 bigpresh

On 11th March 2011, CPAN testers reached the milestone of 11 million CPAN testers reports.

That’s an awful lot of code testing! CPAN Testers are damned useful, automatically testing CPAN modules on various platforms to make sure all is as it should be – a very valuable part of the CPAN ecosystem.

Gaming, Non-geeky

A bit of nostalgia with DOSbox…

April 4, 2011 bigpresh

For a bit of nostalgia, I decided to use DOSbox to run a few old DOS games on my laptop.

Here’s “The Incredible Machine”, from way back in 1993:

I have fond memories of US Navy Fighters, a rather impressive for the time flight-sim (way back in 1994)…

I did chuckle when installing it, when the installation program tells you that the Full Install option requires 16MB of disc space – “use this if you have plenty of disc space” :)