Recently we upgraded an external facing proxy server at work from Ubuntu 12.04 + Apache to Ubuntu 14.04 + HAProxy. Because of the number of services that this proxy handles and the need for it to be secure, we needed to configure it to work with a maximum number of devices and get at least an A rating on ssllabs.com. Continue Reading…
If you haven’t heard, there was a lockdown at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. today after a 911 call came in at 7:29 AM stating there were gunshots. The response was “swift and massive” according to ABC News.
Fortunately, there was no shooter. There were no gun shots. It was a false alarm. I’m sure this brought back horrible memories from September 2013 when a lone gunman went on a shooting spree at the Navy Yard, killing 12 people before being killed himself by police. Continue Reading…
File watchers are awesome little packages. They can be setup to watch CSS or JS files and automatically merge and minimize them for production deployment. But as I recently learned, they come with their share of problems when you try to automate TOO much. Continue Reading…
What if you could lose 3 lbs in 3 weeks? That’d be pretty cool, right? What if you could lose 6 lbs in 3 weeks? Even better! I just finished Beachbody’s 21 Day Fix and I lost 7.2 lbs in 3 weeks by working out every day, following the meal plan and drinking my Shakeology shakes every day!! I know, awesome, right!?!? That’s what happens when you combine a solid nutrition plan and a solid, yet easy to follow workout routine together.
Autumn Calabrese, celebrity fitness trainer and national-level bikini competitor is the creator of the 21 Day Fix and 21 Day Fix Extreme Beachbody programs. For the past year, I was almost exclusively lifting weights, going from a weight of 152 lbs up to 172.4 lbs. Some of that was muscle, some of that was fat, and I was in a spot where my clothes were getting a little tight and I needed to lose some weight, so I opted for the 21 Day Fix, knowing that it would get me the results I wanted, and boy was I right! Continue Reading…
I recently ran into this issue, and I wasn’t able to find any meaningful information online until I posted on StackOverflow about it, so I’m hoping that this will help someone else in the future. In an application I’m developing, UUIDv4’s are being used to load up a form from the database to dynamically display to the end-user to fill out. The hex representation of a UUID is 32 characters long (excluding dashes), and this would simply be too cumbersome to ask an end-user to enter if they needed to manually navigate to a form. Therefore I decided to use a LIKE comparison, allowing the user to specify the UUID in the URL in 1 byte increments (2 hex characters). Continue Reading…
If you’re not familiar with Beanstalkd, you probably should be. It’s an awesomely fast, simple to use, zero-config (configuration is optional) work queue. I use it with Laravel, but it works equally well for other tasks as well. We recently deployed a Laravel application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and needed to run Beanstalkd on the EC2 instances that would be spun up. Here’s a short gist that will get you up and running with Beanstalkd in no time. Just add this file to your .ebextensions folder and you’re all set! Continue Reading…
If you’re using WordPress or another web application that utilizes uploads in a load balanced and autoscaled environment, you know what a pain it can be to manage the uploads so they don’t disappear when an instance shuts down. Likewise, you need to make sure that every instance would have to have a copy of the resources because a request could go to any of them. Continue Reading…
Rather than try and reconfigure the Amazon Linux AMI to use Nginx and PHP-FPM, it was much easier to reconfigure Apache to use the Event MPM instead of Prefork, and utilize PHP-FPM. This uses the 64bit Amazon Linux 2014.09 v1.2.0 running PHP 5.5. Save this file in your .ebextensions folder in the root of your project. Continue Reading…
When you have hundreds of applications managed via a central repository which are checked out to multiple production and staging servers, it can become burdensome to manage and/or remember where every working copy of that code resides. We recently ran into this issue at my work so we needed a solution that was going to be developer friendly and easy to manage on a per-repository basis. Continue Reading…
I recently needed to write a pretxnchangegroup hook that would check if any new tags had been pushed, and if so, if they were GPG signed. I had the requirement that the changeset with the tag be signed, not the changeset that added the tag. I’m not a python coder, so I opted to go for a simple bash script to accomplish the task. The only option the script has is whether or not the hook can fail if a changeset does not have a valid signature. If the option is disabled, it will only throw an error, but the hook will still pass. Continue Reading…