sricola

bitly blog: Time Is On Your Side

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:13:02 -0400

Did you see those silly cats on Tumblr, that breaking news on Twitter, and those photos of your friend’s kids on Facebook? Different social networks have their own distinct personalities. Bitly links are shared across all social networking services, giving us a unique viewpoint on how these…

bitly blog: Race, Guns and Attention

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 01:08:19 -0400

bitly blog: Race, Guns and Attention:

bitly:

On February 26th, Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman in Sanford, FL. Martin, 17, was walking home after purchasing a snack from a local convenience store.

Recently, Bitly collaborated with Bloomberg Businessweek on a visualization showing how the media’s coverage of the shooting went…

word: Metrics - Building Clickatron

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:22:24 -0400

word: Metrics - Building Clickatron:

wordbitly:

One of the core product features of bitly has always been metrics. Unlike tools like google analytics, bitly metrics have always been a way to gather website metrics when you don’t control the website. Want metrics for a book you wrote on Amazon? Use a bitly link. Want metrics for a blog post? You…

Hearts entangled. #urbanspeedbumps (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:55:56 -0400

Hearts entangled. #urbanspeedbumps (Taken with instagram)

my month in bash history

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 04:14:00 -0400

Inspired by bitly’s own Jehiah (Jehiah - 2011 Personal Report) , I set out to make some sort of personal report myself.

At the beginning of february, I decided to lengthen the history contained in my bash_history. Doing this is simple enough, edit your

~/.bash_profile

or if you are on a linux machine

~/.bashrc

to set

HIST_SIZE=<insert large number!>

Once that was done, I went about my month, doing my thing. A couple of days ago, i decided to compile this data into something meaningful. Something visual.

I parsed my bash history by running …

cat ~/.bash_history | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c

which I fed into a graphing utility to produce …

(click the image to get a more interactive version of the chart)

SecondMarket Engineering Blog: Bye Bye SVN, Hello Git.

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:00:18 -0400

SecondMarket Engineering Blog: Bye Bye SVN, Hello Git. :

secondmarket-eng:

A couple of months ago I asked an engineer to create a branch for a particular feature and merge it back to the main development branch when it was ready. I could see the disdain in his face as he looked at me as if I had asked him to do something obnoxious. And I had. SVN was our source control…

Taken with instagram

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 04:34:40 -0400

Taken with instagram

Hate the 3D, glass dock of Mac OS - this one liner will solve that for you.

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:01:00 -0400

Would you rather look at this …

or …

when it comes to looking at your dock?

If you are anything like me, you probably hate the 3Dimensional, glossy dock that Mac OS ships with. Fortunately, the former version is still available using this one liner.

Open Applications->Terminal.app and paste in this line, and hit enter.

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

To revert back to the ugly 3Dimented, glossy dock, merely paste the following line, followed by, you guessed it, enter

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO; killall Dock

My Photo Stream

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:43:53 -0400

I like taking photos. I am not too good at it and stick to just using my phone (which has a pretty good darn camera). But I take decent ones.

p.sricola.com

amazon ec2 tools - java.net.SocketException: Network Unreachable

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:21:14 -0400

If you try running Amazon’s ec2 tools and recieve the following error, you are in the same boat I was in 4 hours ago.

java.net.SocketException: Network Unreachable

The problem is that Java throws that exception when you run anything network related on a machine that has

/sbin/sysctl -w net.ipv6.bindv6only=1

SOLUTION:
Set the following environment variable before you run any of the ec2 tools

EC2_JVM_ARGS=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

Credit to Dennis Kubes for helping figure this out - @denniskubes

use your android phone as a remote audio receiver

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:40:00 -0500

Problem: You have great music on your computer, and a great receiver and speakers. (where’s the problem sri?) They are not in the same room, or not even on the same floor.

Scenario: You have an android phone, wifi and a respectable IQ to follow along

Solution: Turns out, there is an app called ‘AirBubble’ that you can install on your Android phone that makes it listen for incoming streams of audio (much like how Apple’s AirPlay works)

After firing up AirBubble on your phone, go to your Mac, fire up iTunes, go to the bottom right and you should see your AirBubble device show up! Much like the pic below…

Now, just plug in anything with a 3.5mm headphone jack into your phone and you are done! psst. you can have as many AirBubble devices to stream to as you would like. :)

bash copy to clipboard

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:09:00 -0500

Scenario: You have written a really handy and useful bash script that does the wonders and parses the world to give you some great bit of information. This script is so useful that you constantly run it all the time. Copy’ing and Pasting the output has become your hobby.

Mac OS X: Let `pbcopy` save you. Just redirect your output to pbcopy (a built in MacOS command) and your contents go into the clipboard, ready for you to paste away. For example,

whoami | pbcopy

will copy the output of the command `whoami` into the clipboard :) Psst. There is something called `pbpaste` as well. And it does, well you guessed it. Have fun.

Linux Users: If you have X installed (I know I lost 75% of the readers right there), `xsel` does the same is a slightly ugly manner.

whoami | xsel —clipboard —input

[Mac App] Display CPU, Memory, Network and Disk usage in the Mac OSX status bar

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:51:00 -0500

Ever wanted to see what your CPU, Memory, Network and Disk usage are? In a Jiffy? Like this.

I used to use a tool called iStat Menus (http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/) which used to be free. Unfortunately for us, the followed the Growl way of doing things and suddenly went to a non-free, pay for model.

I recently stumbled upon this app called MenuMeters (http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters) that pretty much does the same and is free. Open Source++ :)

Download Link(via c|net): http://l.sricola.com/yqE90n

bash autocomplete for SSH

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:42:00 -0500

If you are like me, and you SSH to machines through out the day, you want this. Ok. You __need__ this.

The following one liner, parses your .bash_history file and attempts to autocomplete the host you are trying to SSH to. Add this line to your .bash_profile/.bashrc file.

complete -W "$(echo $(grep '^ssh ' .bash_history | sort -u | sed 's/^ssh //'))" ssh

Of course the lookup is limited to machines you have already SSH’d to. But whatevs, it __will__ save you time and keystrokes. Time which you could use to watch re-runs of My Little Pony.

SSH as root on EC2 Ubuntu AMIs (EDIT: works on Amazon Official AMIs as well)

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:31:00 -0500

Ever find yourself wanting to SSH as root into an instance launched with the official Ubuntu EC2 AMI, and you get this?

Please login as the user “ubuntu” rather than the user “root”.

If you know what you are doing and want to SSH as root, follow these steps.

ssh ubuntu@ (using your private key)
sudo -s (to become root)
emacs/vi /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
delete the lines at the begining of the file that say “COMMAND….” until you get to the words ssh-rsa
emacs /etc/ssh/sshd_config
set the variable “PermitRootLogin” to “without-password” (without quotes of course)
sudo /etc/init.d/sshd restart (bounce sshd)

24: It was a very good year!

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:28:00 -0500

I fell in love. Watched the Lion King on Broadway. Booked a flight ticket to Dallas, semi-drunk, came back the next day. Booked a flight ticket to India for 3 days, completely sober, was stuck for 4 months. Drove non-stop for 24 hours to Miami, had to do it all over again on the way back. Played cricket with proper gear for the first time, in upstate NY, of all places. I quit working for a place I loved, I quit before I found another job. Moved out of NYC, only to move back a few weeks later. Said goodbye to my biological father, he did not recognize me on my final visit. I learnt how to drive stick, the proper way.

I did 72 bus trips, 29 train rides, 13 flights, 2 road crossings into Canada and had numerous love affairs with Interstate 95 -Travelled over 30,000 miles across 6 countries and 3 continents. 413 Foursquare checkins and 548 tweets later, it has been a good darn year.

Swing hard, every single ball, its hard to miss. Love is relative.