Monthly Archives August 2012

My new Favorite cross platform text editor is Sublime Text 2. It works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and i am very happy with it. My only problem is the path to start it is not exactly easy to type… So, with the help of PowerShell, my new favorite command line tool on Windows, i added an alias:

Set-Alias subl 'c:\program files\sublime text 2\sublime_text.exe'

I added this to my Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 file in Documents\WindowsPowerShell folder. If you don’t have one of these files, check out this Computer Performance.Co.UK post on Creating PowerShell profile files and then edit the file and add the line above… Now, I can edit files in PowerShell with Sublime Text 2 by typing:

subl filename

Happy days!

I have a few Amazon EC2 instances running on a project, and one of these instances was known as the Zombie Instance! Every time i killed it, it came back to life a few min later… I found out that i, at some point, set that instance to be in an AutoScaling group. Any time the instance died, Amazon would check and restart the instance. So, how did I kill this undead instance? Check out “Auto Scaling with Amazon EC2 II” on LLOVIZNA’s blog. They had the same issue i had (trying to kill the Auto Scaling group gives an error) and figured out how to do it. Handy stuff. Now the instance is dead, and hopefully it wont come back any time soon… Mind you, When AutoScaling works correctly, it can be very cool indeed!

So, this site is brought to you by GIT, Jekyll and Magic… here is how i did it…

• I have a Linux VM running the site. Its an Ubuntu 12.04 server. On that i installed Jekyll.
• I also have gitolite installed for personal git repos.
• In the Git Repo for this site, under the hooks directory, I added a post-receive file which I got from here originally.
• Apache is set to serve the directory that Jekyll produces… That’s what you are reading here.
• If you are interested, you can find the code and config for this site on my github repo