Carl Mercier's blog » Uncategorized

Announcing IsItJruby.com

Carl Mercier — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:41:18 +0000

Ever wondered if a certain Ruby Gem works on JRuby? Wonder no more. I just launched IsItJruby.com, a community-driven Gem compatibility website. If you’re familiar with IsItRuby19.com, you’ll notice a lot of similarities (ie: blatant rip-off). It’s simply because I forked Brightbox’s GitHub project to build isitjruby.com. Brightbox should get all the credit.

Although I didn’t change the UI (because it’s so gorgeous already!), I added the following features:

Gem page lists dependencies
Warning when Gem contains C extensions (since they don’t work on JRuby)
Ability to specify the JRuby version against which the Gem was tested

I accept patches, so fork away!

Announcing ec2-extra-tools

Carl Mercier — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:49:48 +0000

Hola! I just started a new project on GitHub, I’m calling it ec2-extra-tools. It’s basically a set of extra command line tools that I find useful on Amazon EC2. Right now, it only has 2, but I will add more in the future and encourage other people to collaborate on the project.

Here’s what’s included so far:

ec2-identify-instance: returns the current EC2 instance id
ec2-identify-volume: returns the EBS volume id of a device

I needed ec2-identify-volume to automate EBS snapshots, so I thought I’d release my work on GitHub.

Here’s what I added in /etc/crontab to automate EBS snapshots:

0 2 * * * root ec2-create-snapshot `ec2-identify-volume /dev/sdj` >> /var/log/ebs_snapshots

The great thing about this line is that I don’t need to know the volume id beforehands. If a new volume is attached at /dev/sdj, I don’t have to change my crontab file either. In my situation, this is very convenient.

Hope you find ec2-extra-tools useful!

The art of losing a customer

Carl Mercier — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:12:21 +0000

If you sent me an email in the last few months and you just received a confirmation e-mail from a company called SpamArrest, you can ignore it.

I’m trying all sorts of crazy things to once and for all solve my e-mail spam problem. Gmail ain’t cutting it for me. I decided to give SpamArrest a go even though I’m not a big fan of the Challenge/Response principle.

The company lost my business within 2 minutes. They fetched mail from my inbox and sent a challenge/response to everybody who had an email sitting there… about a thousand people! I don’t need retroactive service thank you! I already dealt with those emails thank you.

I’m truly sorry about this. I’m out of SpamArrest already. Any other suggestion?

iPhone 3G, you know you want it!

Carl Mercier — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:30:40 +0000

Camilo just sent me that… so true! You know what I’ll do tomorrow (click to enlarge)

Podcast: Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs

Carl Mercier — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:41:08 +0000

If you’re interested, the podcast for Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs @ SxSW was just released. I was on the panel with Avi Bryant (DabbleDB), Leah Culver (Pownce), Ari Steinberg (Facebook) and Ben Vinegar (Freshbooks). Not a bad line-up!

Here’s the podcast

I hate captchas

Carl Mercier — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:00:16 +0000

Here’s what Google just showed me…

I’m sorry, but I can’t read that. Camilo could, but I couldn’t. Spammers are getting better at OCR‘ing captchas, and in return, captchas are getting harder to read. I think this one just crossed the line… now even humans can’t read them!