About Me
I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.
I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.
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Recent Posts
- Backup your Gmail
- Naming your business or product, forget the domain
- Storing Git repositories in Amazon S3 for high availability
- Acceptance Testing non Ruby web applications with Cucumber
- Code readability through conciseness
- Mac OS X gem cleanup failing
- iPhone development the easy way
- Production MySQL performance tuning
- Selenium Continuous Integration Runner
- Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
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Category Archives: Systems Administration
Backup your Gmail
Update 2017: I recommend using GMVault for backing up Gmail. It’s free, open-source, actively maintained, and relatively easy to setup if you’re technically inclined. Like all hosted services, you should never depend on one provider to both manage your data … Continue reading
Posted in Cloud Computing, Linux, OSX, Systems Administration, Technical
1 Comment
Storing Git repositories in Amazon S3 for high availability
At VolunteerMatch we’re experimenting with using Chef Solo to manage Amazon EC2 servers. The catch is that if a server is going to rely on Chef to boot up, then the Chef Recipes (which we’re storing in a Git Repository) … Continue reading
Posted in Cloud Computing, Java, Linux, Source Control, Systems Administration
2 Comments
Production MySQL performance tuning
For the past 9 years I’ve been working almost exclusively with MySQL (with a little PostgreSQL thrown in) and while I don’t do nearly as much DBA work these days, I still find myself troubleshooting a query or tuning my.cnf. … Continue reading
Posted in Database, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, Systems Administration
Comments Off on Production MySQL performance tuning
Open source caching proxy servers
Hello lazy web, I’m looking for some advice on caching proxy servers and thought you might have some good pointers! We currently front our site with 3 caching proxy servers to offload static content from the web servers and we … Continue reading
Posted in Systems Administration, Web
7 Comments
Ruby on Rails Dreamhost plugin
Update 2/11/07: Just to clarify, this plugin won’t keep your Rails site running on Dreamhost if the sum of all your running processes exceeds 200MB (which is when their process monitor kills your processes). Run ps aux and sum the … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration
15 Comments
Keeping Rails running at Dreamhost Part 2
Update 2/2/07: Per Thomas’ comment I’ve released the code below as the dreamhost rails plugin. Update 1/25/07: People have reported difficulties copy and pasting the dispatch.fcgi source code from this blog post so here is a dispatch.fcgi to download. Make … Continue reading
Posted in Linux, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web
10 Comments
Keeping Ruby on Rails running at Dreamhost
Update 1/12/07: This solution has reduced my 500 error rate down to less than 0.2% but it’s still not perfect. I continue to plug away at this… Update 1/24/07: I’ve finally solved my Dreamhost 500 error problems with a different … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web
4 Comments
Comparing Amazon EC2 with VPS and dedicated hosting
I’ve been reading all the great things about Amazon EC2 (or Elastic Compute Cloud) and lots of pricing comparisons with VPS and dedicated hosting. I finally got an EC2 account and tinkered a bit and there’s a big difference between … Continue reading
Posted in Database, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, Systems Administration
9 Comments
Trafeoffs of aggressive filesystem partitioning
Most systems administrators will tell you it’s important to partition your install into anywhere from 4-7 discrete patitions (or slices if you’re in the BSD camp). While I think it’s good advice in certain cases, the headaches of mis-guessing disk … Continue reading
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, Systems Administration
2 Comments
Hiring a senior MySQL and FreeBSD systems administrator
We’re hiring a senior MySQL and FreeBSD systems administrator to work at GreatSchools (a 40 person company) in San Francisco. If you or someone you know is interested in working on a high traffic website (1M page views per day) … Continue reading
Posted in Systems Administration
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