Live Unsigned Sponsored by 6Sync

Posted: May 13th, 2011 | Filed under: General | Tags: , , | Comments

A number of weeks ago, the lovely people at 6sync were nice enough to host Live Unsigned*, in exchange for a plug or two on this blog.  To me, this seemed like a very fair exchange, also it meant that I had a nice clean server which I could set up just as I wanted so as to handle the increasing traffic Live Unsigned is getting.

Over the next few posts I’ll be outlining how I set up the server, along with any issues and gotchas, plus I’ll most probably be talking about Biscuit – 6sync’s control panel.

For all you cynics out there, don’t worry, I’ll be maintaining my editorial integrity. This blog is not going to turn into one big advert! But, I do want to say a big thanks to Mario and the 6Sync team.

* For those of you that don’t know, Live Unsigned is a weekend project that my girlfriend Elizabeth and I are running in order to keep ourselves sane!

Rob Searles

After many years of denial I can now fully admit that I am a geek at heart. I love programming and web development, and I strive to continually learn.

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Amazon S3: easily bulk delete buckets

Posted: May 11th, 2011 | Filed under: General, Linux, Tutorials | Tags: , | Comments

With Jabbakam we save a lot of images. All these images are stored in Amazon’s S3. Recently I thought I’d delete some of the test buckets.

Not as easy as I first thought. It turns out that you have to empty buckets before you can delete them. Fair enough, but there didn’t seem to be a way to easily bulk delete hundreds of images.

After some Googling I found Robert LaThanh’s S3Nukem which looked like it would do the job. All I needed to do now was fire up an EC2 instance, install and run. The steps were as follows:

  1. Create an EC2 instance on AWS (I used Ubuntu on a medium instance)
  2. make sure it is all up-to-date
    apt-get update
    apt-get upgrade
  3. install ruby (if not already installed)
    apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev

    (not sure about ruby1.8-dev, but added just in case)

  4. install Ruby Gems
    apt-get install rubygems
  5. install right_aws and s3nukem
    gem install right_aws
    cd /tmp
    wget http://github.com/lathanh/s3nukem/raw/master/s3nukem --no-check-certificate
    chmod +x s3nukem
  6. run
    ./s3nukem -t 20 -a  -s

Several hours and over 15 million deleted images later it was all done and I shut down the instance.

Rob Searles

After many years of denial I can now fully admit that I am a geek at heart. I love programming and web development, and I strive to continually learn.

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Emacs Weekly Tip #4: Super Quick Navigation with Registers

Posted: May 9th, 2011 | Filed under: Emacs | Tags: , | Comments

If like me you are constantly bouncing about between different places within a file, or even between multiple buffers then you should save a lot of time by using Registers.

Registers are a handy little tool that enable you to save a snippet of information for the length of your session. This snippet of information can be either text, numbers, rectangles and even window configurations.

For the benefit of this tip, however, we’ll be saving a position within the register. It is so simple, it is actually quite silly.

When you are at a position you want to save, simply enter:

C-x r <space> q

This will save your current location into the register “q”. You can replace “q” with any single character. For some reason I always use “q”, “w”, “e”, “r” etc. but you can use whatever you want.

To remember this command, you simply need to think about saving a space in a register called q.

Jumping back to the position saved in the register is just as simple

C-x r j q

You are jumping to register q

Once you have the hang of it, it’s pretty effortless.

Soon you’ll be jumping about like a maniac!

Rob Searles

After many years of denial I can now fully admit that I am a geek at heart. I love programming and web development, and I strive to continually learn.

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