ianneubert.com

I previously published a Ruby script that essentially duplicates an Amazon S3 bucket. I use it to copy my production bucket into a testing bucket that I can then use in my staging environment, without fear of killing off something important.

Anyway, this script used to take around 18 minutes to complete a full copy of a bucket with about 2,000 keys. What a pain when I had to run this script multiple times for some testing!

So I finally got around to rewriting it today, and wow, what an improvement!

I upgraded the delete and copy operations to run multithreaded, and boy does it fly.

On my main bucket (with about 2,000 keys) it now only takes about 1.5 minutes to complete! That’s 12x faster than it used to be!

So if you are looking for a multithreaded Amazon S3 bucket copier or duplicator, check it out!

Continuing my new trend of publishing code that I use, I’ve released a new fork of RightScale’s right_aws ruby gem. This gem makes accessing Amazon’s S3, EC2, and other web services a piece of cake through ruby.

One problem with (at least) the latest release of right_aws is that it tries to connect to the Amazon API at the bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com. This causes the connections to the API to thrash when you are working with more than one bucket. I’ve taken out the code that makes that connection so that it will now only connect to s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name by default.

You can find the code on GitHub. And see extra documentaion here.

I just published some more code on github today. This new repo contains some ruby code that I use to manipulate my Amazon S3 buckets.

Right now there are just two simple scripts, one deletes a whole bucket, the other copies everything from one bucket to another, with an optional prefix to limit what is copied.

I’ve been using these scripts for a few months now, they are very stable and do some basic error handling.

Here is the README file.

I just thought I’d post this quick tidbit on how to change the timezone on a Ubuntu server after is has been installed. Simply rerun the timezone configuration:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

I’ve just published my PHP backup script to github.com. If you are looking for an easy to use, PHP based backup script to send things to S3, check it out.

Download the source at github.

It’s been in production for over a year at various sites. Works fine for me.

Here is the feature list:

• Simple to use
• Backups all databases on a MySQL server
• Backups and compresses (using bzip2) directories and files
• Uses URL type storage keys, so it’s easy to browse the backup bucket
• (optionally) Removes old backups according to a grandfather-father-son based schedule

I’ve been trying to figure out how to disable time/clock synchronization in a VMware Fusion guest for the past few months, and I finally stumbled upon the answer! This will prevent the VMware Fusion guest from getting the correct time from the host OS on boot or restore.

The following lines need to be added to the .vmx file inside the virtual machine package:

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.continue = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.restore = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.resume.disk = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.shrink = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.tools.startup = "FALSE"

VMware KB #1189

Apple announced the 3G iPhone today. It’s a pretty small feature enhancement, only three new things:

• 3g Network
• GPS built in
• $200 for 8gb, $300 for 16gb

I think the best upgrade is the price. I was hoping for a lot more I guess, because that just doesn’t seem all that exciting. There are still a bunch of holes:

• No MMS support
• No stereo Bluetooth
• No video recording support

They basically just changed the chipset inside and called it a day. Whoopie.

UPDATE: The price is not cheaper in the long run, it’s a lot more expensive. The new iPhone 3G plan will cost me $75/mo, compared to $60/mo for the original. That means I would end up spending $160 more for the new iPhone over 2 years, versus the original.

After noticing some trouble with the twitter feed on ianneubert.com, I checked the site: istwitterdown.com and guess what it said?

I’m really tired of twitter being down all the time. I probably won’t be using it much longer.

I’ve signed up for a twitter account again. Now that I use Facebook, it has some neat integration to control the current status messages that many people seem to be using nowadays. Now I can sync status updates across Facebook, Twitter, and my own web site. Sweet!

I’ve also removed the last.fm flash player from my site’s side panel. It felt like it was slowing down the site too much. I just replaced it with a simple link to “Listen to my music“.

A friend of mine asked me to help him fix his Windows machine from a virus that he got infected with. Since I switched to a Mac a couple years ago I really hadn’t thought much about viruses, they’ve really gotten pretty evil. This one compromised the machine and then tried to extort him to buy anti-virus software to cure it! Lol.

Anyway, as I was reinstalling Windows I got this screen:

It reads:

Surfing the Internet: safe, fast, and flexible

Windows XP includes the most secure version of Internet Explorer to date.

That’s reassuring.