Apple Town Prince

Renew the certificate at RapidSSL (or look around for a new vendor)

In the end, all that is needed is to copy the following into /etc/ssl/localcerts

a) private key file (.key)

b) certificate file which is created by cut and pasting first the regular certificate and then the intermediate certificate

Then, run the checks below to make sure everything is working correctly.

Then restart nginx:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Note: I had some weird permission issues to it is easiest to just edit the actual files rather than try to create new ones.

Todo next time: Investigate whether it is worth the effort to generate a CSR (certificate signing request) on our server. Also, consider using Let’s Encrypt

Checking that the Private Key Matches the Certificate

The private key contains a series of numbers. Two of those numbers form the “public key”, the others are part of your “private key”. The “public key” bits are also embedded in your Certificate (we get them from your CSR). To check that the public key in your cert matches the public portion of your private key, you need to view the cert and the key and compare the numbers. To view the Certificate and the key run the commands:

$ openssl x509 -noout -text -in server.crt
$ openssl rsa -noout -text -in server.key

The `modulus’ and the `public exponent’ portions in the key and the Certificate must match. But since the public exponent is usually 65537 and it’s bothering comparing long modulus you can use the following approach:

$ openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in server.crt | openssl md5 $ openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in server.key | openssl md5

And then compare these really shorter numbers. With overwhelming probability they will differ if the keys are different. As a one-liner:

$ openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in server.pem | openssl md5 ;\
  openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in server.key | openssl md5

And with auto-magic comparison (If more than one hash is displayed, they don’t match):

$ (openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in server.pem | openssl md5 ;\
   openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in server.key | openssl md5) | uniq

BTW, if I want to check to which key or certificate a particular CSR belongs you can compute

$ openssl req -noout -modulus -in server.csr | openssl md5

I was getting the following error in Airbrake for my Rails app which uses MySQL:

Mysql2::Error: Incorrect string value: '\xCE\x94\xCE\xB1\xCE\xBD...' for column 'comment'

This was caused by the fact that many of my older tables still used legacy encoding.

To convert tables to UTF8 issue the following command at the MySQL prompt:

ALTER TABLE tweets CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

To find tables that have legacy encoding use:

SHOW TABLE STATUS;

Quote by Sterling Hayden from his book Wanderer:

“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea … ‘cruising’ it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

‘I’ve always wanted to sail to the south seas, but I can’t afford it.’ What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of ‘security.’ And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine – and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all – in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?”

Instructions for setting up an Ubuntu 12.04 virtual machine for Ruby on Rails development

1. Turn on virtualization technology in BIOS of host machine. (This is necessary to use a 64-bit Ubuntu distribution)
2. Download Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit ISO
3. Create new virtual machine in VMware Player
4. Install Rails using RailsReady script on Github
5. Add SSH key to Github
6. Setup Sublime Text 2
   1. Install Package Control
      1. Install SCSS highlighting
7. Done.

Each successive Zynga game peaks earlier but with less users. Farmville -> Cityville -> Castleville must have been alarming. And then they bought ‘Draw Something’ right at the peak. It’s going to be tough to keep filling the bucket.

What’s difficult to see on the graph is that Zynga’s Sims rip-off, The Ville, appears to have already peaked at aroudn 6.3M daily active uniques.

Spent some time tuning my MySQL database for a small website (~2K users per day). MySQL Tuner was recommending that we increase the size of the query cache above 16M but we were dubious. The relevant metrics according to this article are:

• Hit rate     = Qcache_hits / (Qcache_hits + Com_select)
• Insert rate = Qcache_inserts / (Qcache_hits + Com_select)
• Prune rate = Qcache_lowmem_prunes / Qcache_inserts

In our case we had gathered the following stats over a 48 hour period:

| Com_select                        | 1163740   |
| Qcache_hits                       |   531650   |
| Qcache_inserts                   | 1021165   |
| Qcache_lowmem_prunes     |    82507   |

| Qcache_not_cached             | 142575    |
| Qcache_queries_in_cache    | 2145        |
| Qcache_total_blocks           | 5643        |
| Qcache_free_blocks            | 1175        |
| Qcache_free_memory         | 11042672  |

So for our database:

• Hit rate     = 24%
• Insert rate = 60%
• Prune rate =   8%

We’re not too sure what to make of this. A hit rate of 24% doesn’t seem to bad but our insert rate is also quite high. For now, we’re leaving the query cache as is. Especially since the comments in the post mentioned above suggest that making it larger than 20M is futile.

This post has good information: http://blog.ertesvag.no/post/10720082458

Step 1

Edit nginx.conf file on production server and then restart nginx.

Step 2

Set up distribution on Amazon Cloudfront. Point origin to the cname set up below.

Step 3

Set up a cname on Linode. For instance: origin.example.com –> www.example.com

A phenomenal essay on a systematic approach to interactive visualization.

We have written previously about the outsourcing of the web stack. In this post, we will add more color on why the outsourcing of the entire web platform makes sense. While developers have gravitated en masse to offerings like Heroku, there is still a wider lack of appreciation for why PaaS is a major trend.

In this post, we are going to set aside the wider question of the economics of running your application on a PaaS versus hosting and maintaining your own servers. Our aim is to describe what constitutes a PaaS and how it differs from IaaS (such as Amazon Web Services) and other SaaS offerings like Salesforce.com.

The Four Pillars of a PaaS

1. No installation required. Whether your application is written in Ruby on Rails, Python, Java or any other language de jour there should be no need to install an execution environment when deploying your application to a PaaS. Your code should run on the platform’s built-in execution engine. While minor constraints are necessary, our view is that the successful PaaS providers will largely conform to the language specifications as they are in the wild. This ensures portability of your application between platforms and other hosted environments.
2. Automated deployment. A single click or command line instruction is all that stands between the developer and a live application.
3. Elimination of middle-ware configuration. Tweaking settings in Apache or Nginx, managing the memory on your MySql instance, and installing three flavors of monitoring software are now in the past.
4. Automated provisioning of virtual machines. Application scaling should happen behind the scenes. At 3am. Without breaking a sweat.

There are a few other characteristics of the new breed of PaaS services which we would regard as optional components of a platform but which greatly enhance its utility. By integrating other components into the web stack and constraining these to a few, well-curated and proven bundles, a PaaS offering can both consolidate services into a single bill but, perhaps more importantly from a developer’s point of view, ensure inter-operability and maintain a best-of-breed library. Heroku has done a great job of facilitating easy deployment of application add-ons such as log file management, error tracking, and performance monitoring.

There is often confusion as to the difference between PaaS and SaaS: a PaaS offering is an outsourced application stack sold to developers. A SaaS offering is a business application typically sold to business users.

The difference between PaaS and IaaS is more subtle and over time the dividing line is likely to blur. Today, the PaaS platforms begin where the IaaS services leave off: IaaS effects the outsourcing of the hardware components of the web stack. PaaS platforms effect the outsourcing of the middleware components of the web stack. It is the abstraction of the repetitive middleware configuration that has caught the imagination of developers. PaaS saves time and expedites deployments.

It is a great time to be a web software developer. Over the last decade the components of web development which have little strategic advantage to a start up have gradually been eliminated and outsourced to such an extent that today the gap between writing code and deploying a new application is often bridged with a single click.

Whereas ten years ago deploying a new application required provisioning a new server, installing Linux, setting up MySQL, configuring Apache, and finally uploading the code, the process today has dramatically less friction. On Heroku, one powerful command line is now all that stands between a team of developers and a live application:

> git push heroku master

Let’s take a closer look at what is happening. The code residing in the repository is uploaded directly to, in this example, Heroku’s cloud platform. From that point onward, the long list of tasks involved in maintaining and fine-tuning a modern web stack are outsourced. The platform provider handles hard drive failures, exploding power supplies, denial-of-service attacks, router replacement, server OS upgrades, security patches, web server configuration … and everything in between.

The implications of this trend are bound to be far-reaching. As common infrastructure is outsourced to vendors such as Amazon, Rackspace, Google and Salesforce.com, the base of customers for hardware and stack software will become increasingly concentrated. As the platform vendors function both as curators and distributors of middle-ware for associated services such as application monitoring and error logging, new monetization opportunities will arise for those companies, such as New Relic, providing these tools.

Just as the arrival of open-source blogging platforms eliminated the intervening steps between writers and audiences, so the new breed of platforms has reduced the friction between developers and their customers.

Most importantly, though, the barriers for new private companies to compete have been permanently lowered. Today, $100 per month can buy you a billion dollar data center.