TL;DR Applying some Bash knowhow on exit codes, you can cut down the time required for a Terraform apply if no changes are to be done. The Simple Plan and Apply Over the past couple of weeks, I’d been working on getting our alerts deployed with Terraform. The initial proof of concept was a very simple shell script with a lot of copy-paste to handle the many accounts, environments and regions that I work on.

I have begun to use Terminator quite a lot. Terminator’s quite handy when you want to connect to multiple servers on a single terminal thanks to its split pane feature. (And yes I know about tmux & screen - I have screen on my servers, don’t want to get into the headache that is nested screen panes).

Few days back we were preparing for a big migration & deploy and I was tasked upon to prepare a failover just in case the migration goes wrong. I have an automated daily backup from prod and restore to local server, I decided to restore from the MySQL dump on the local server onto the AWS instance via the automated process. Since database restores can take a bit of time, I started the restore and went over to grab some coffee. Once back, I noticed that the import was done and proceeded with a rake db:migrate and realized that rake was doing a migration going all the way back from the start… that did not look proper.

Since my new job involves lot more of Linux, shell scripting bash and automation, I’ve been trying to brush up my Linux skills. Ran into this “problem” today where there’s an init script which handles unicorn start/stop/reload and we were debugging some kinks around this. The init script had a chain of cd to the directory and the unicorn invoke script. Was trying to figure out why unicorn wasn’t starting up, till I read a bit more and dropped to using echo to understand what’s happening

This morning in my half-woken state, as I was checking Hacker News, I spotted this piece about Alienware launching the X51 with Ubuntu. I initially thought I was dreaming, and woke up immediately and read the piece, and I was left dumbfounded when I read it again to be sure. Kind of dumbfounded at Dell launching an Alienware X51 with Ubuntu https://alienware.com/ubuntu/ Not sure what’s Dell thinking - there aren’t any great native AAA games available, can’t imagine this would make studios to make Linux ports either

Couple of months ago, just about a month before #cpgweds - the engagement my Envy 14 laptop started showing signs of dying - weird noises coming from the vents, system freezing arbitrarily, system getting incredibly hot - and that’s really unusual because the Envy’s cooling system is probably one of the best that I’ve seen in a laptop. Soon enough, it became clear that a fan was not working - my idle temperatures hit 85 degrees C, and start any game or even xbmc, and the temperatures would hit 95-100 and shutdown sooner or later.

About 2 weeks ago, Wakoopa announced that they will be shutting down their social network soon & focusing on “Corporate Research”. Unfortunately that day is here. Just received an email stating that as of today, you can grab an export of your data. This is what they have to say about the export The export is a CSV file containing the following columns: application name, subcategory, category, the number of seconds you've used the application in the hour, the hour you've used the application in, the date of the usage, the operating system and your user id.

The title might be a little long so let me explain it here. This is in relation to my post on Ubuntu hanging during boot with nVidia FX 5200. A brief history: I tried to install and boot Ubuntu (all releases till date) with my card, and ACPI settings turned on. The LiveCD boot and the boot after installation, both hang halfway. My previous solution was to turn off ACPI in BIOS.

It has been quite a while since I wrote here. Did not find time nor issues to write about.

I tried to install Ubuntu 10.10. The Partition Manager did not detect my partitions. It listed my entire hard disk as one “Unallocated Free Space”. I was puzzled. Everything was fine under Windows XP. Or so I thought.

My hard disk is a 60GB one., partitioned into 10, 25 and 25 GBs. My Disk Management under XP listed thus:

I’ve used find extensively and always wanted to writeup a nice post on this, but the linked post trumps my effort! Copy pasted from his blog, as the person’s allowed to do so. Also, as a general note - before using exec with the actual command, do preview it! ` —————————————————————————————— remove empty directories —————————————————————————————— find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir ` —————————————————————————————— change various file attributes ——————————————————————————————

I did something crazy at some point that created a file called “-rf” on my filesystem. Now I can’t figure out how to delete it. I’ve tried: rm "-rf" rm -rf But these just exit immediately. Arrgh! Anyone know how to remove this file? Preferably without accidentally cleaning out my whole folder. heh. What’re the odds, eh? via Removing “-rf” file in Unix - Super User.