calling all cars : good podcasts?

Published on June 24, 2010

I don’t use last.fm anymore, since it became apparent I listen to far more podcasts than music.

I find podcasts as useful as Twitter or RSS for keeping up with news, but they lack the social ‘findability’ aspects (since Odeos demise) of either.

So I’m sharing my favourites here.  I hear that comment forms work for non-spam related feedback, so if I missed any good ones, let me know.

interviews and news

  • the changelog : interviews with open-source project leads. Padrino this week.
  • it management & cloud podcast @cote and @botchagalupe chew the fat. IT(SM) / devops / cloud discussion and war stories from their IBM days.
  • devops cafe : someone worth hearing every week, so far @auxesis and @allspaw
  • Pivotal Labs tech talks – audio streams of presentations. sometimes you feel the absence of slides, but interesting topics.
  • SplunkTalk : they talk. about Splunk.
  • the Basho Riak podcast : the CouchDB podcast seems to be dead, this is a good noSQL sometimes ropey audio quality, but smart cookies.

history

developer news

  • the jquery and yayQuery podcasts : if you missed the memo, javascript now rules the world. JSConf live is a lot of fun too.
  • the dev show , ruby5 , the ruby show : all great. Wish there were more bi-weekly 5-minute news podcasts.
  • a little bit of Python : there aren’t many active Python podcasts, this is consistently worth a listen.
  • herding code : .Net development. Surprising coverage of technologies I think of as coming from ‘my world’.
  • the MDN show : OSX and iPhone dev. Good to get a UI developers perspective now and again.

tutorials

These are videos, 30 minutes or under. I usually prefer audio, but  handy when there’s nothing on the telly.

  • jQuery for designers : Remy Sharps video walkthroughs. He’s not scared to debug live on camera now and then.
  • vimcasts : a bit on the hardcode side, but you will learn something useful.
  • MAKE Magazine Weekend Projects : Good to watch with the kids over Rice Crispies on a Saturday.
  • FOSSCasts : Really accessible tutorials on screen, monit, zsh, emacs etc.
  • TextMate : the most under-used popular editor in the world. This series shows off some of its hidden gems.
  • python osmosis : A Terminal-led playalong to the Python Tutorial. Brilliant. no longer updating (he reached the end of the tutorial).
  • gitcasts screencasts : demos, walkthroughs and conceptual slideshows. Really very good indeed.

things I’m missing

  • a good Android development news podcast. Or even a bad one. All I can find is app reviews.
  • google appengine development. Google Developer Podcast was close, but has been dormant for a long time.
  • Erlang. hello joe doesn’t count.
  • a Ruby tutorial. Lots of people ask me about Ruby beginner resources – there are excellent Rails video podcasts , but nothing close to Python Osmosis.

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rackspace cloudservers

Published on June 15, 2010

I found Rackspace Cloud (that’s a referral link, feel free to go direct) while looking for affordable VPSes (not for this blog, obviously – 2 posts a year is a reasonably small load).

There are dozens of good, cheap VPS services, but Rackspace ‘Cloudservers’ are also ideal for things I’d have used several Virtualboxes for until now.

the what now?

The CloudServers service supports the usual Xen VPS features, with a couple of nice add-ons.

  • no setup fee or minimum monthly payment
  • image-based provisioning and snapshot based backups
  • burstable CPU
  • a CDN offering
  • IP failover groups
  • console access
  • all guests are 64-bit
  • REST API
  • 1 public and 1 private IP per node
  • Web based, Android and iPhone management apps
  • offer all sorts of Linux, including RHEL (even windows support)

For me their 2 killer features are: hourly billing and small instances – a lot smaller (1.5c/hour) than EC2.

small instances => lots of nodes

A big chunk of my day job is developing Puppet modules to manage our internal Linux servers.
Spinning up a dozen servers for an evening to test on different distros is really handy.

If I want to play with Riak and CouchDB replication, it’s trivial to build an N-node cluster.

For these use cases, I want many nodes, but it doesn’t really matter how big they are -
and I haven’t found any other cloud providers that support such small VM sizes.

hourly billing => throwaway nodes

It’s also perfect for testing service upgrades. I’ve already upgraded a messily customized wordpress instance by cloning the live site and docroot to Rackspace, testing out the procedure and then doing it for real on the production server .For this sort of task, one big VM can be faster than a small one, and that’s when hourly billing pays off.

next steps

Next on my list is eliminating the remaining manual steps involved in node provisioning.  The iPhone app is fun, but for more than a few nodes it’s probably best to use the API, so I’m off to read over that.

Anyway, if it sounds interesting, take a look . You get a nights hacking for the price of a tube of Pringles.

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glassfish v3 ships!

Published on December 10, 2009

So, http://www.sun.com/glassfishv3 suddenly stopped 404ing.

I’ve been trying out various Prelude/Previews for a loooong time, so it’s really nice to see it finally ship.

From a (J)Ruby viewpoint,  this is the appserver that was wrapped up in the glassfish gem, only this time it’s a full-featured (and supported) product. I’ve run Sinatra / Rack apps on it with no problem at all.

Other bits that I’m looking forward to playing with are:

  • monitoring
  • the REST API (which looks pretty comprehensive : asadmin is now a http client)
  • custom profiles, like the Web Profile (if you don’t need the kitchen sink)

As ever, the docs are top notch. If you want to get the most out of JRuby on Glassfish, here’s a good tuning post.

You can even run Java apps on it if you want to.

Anyway, congratulations are in order to the GF team – there are far more knowledgeable posts than this linked from The Aquarium.

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