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Installing RMagick on Debian Lenny

Just a quick reminder to myself on how I installed RMagick on a Debian 5.0.4 “lenny” VPS. All commands to be run as root.
Build ImageMagick from source
curl -O ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvzf ImageMagick.tar.gz -C /usr/src/
cd /usr/src/ImageMagick-6.6.6-6/
./configure
make
make install
Install the RMagick Gem
gem install rmagick
Bingo!
As an interesting aside, ImageMagick handles a lot of image formats via delegate libraries. I previously [...]

2010 12 25 Ruby
Tech Comments (0)

Minder – a simple web-app monitoring tool written in Ruby

Background
A few months ago I was tasked with migrating and maintaining a bunch of legacy Rails apps and a couple of them were misbehaving. Requests were hanging which was tying-up the front-end Apache child processes and resulting in all the web-apps on the server becoming unresponsive
At the time I didn’t know what was causing the [...]

2010 12 13 Ruby
Web
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MySQL database backup with remote storage

Prevent a disaster
After reading Jeff Atwood’s backup failure last month I decided to finally get around to doing something I’d been intending to do “one of these days” but had in actual fact been putting off for years.
Here’s the steps I took to ensure the databases on my webserver were backed up every night and [...]

2010 01 04 Tech Comments (2)

# shutdown -h now

I’ve just shutdown the beige box that was home to this blog for just over a year and a half until I started renting a VPS.
I had intended to shutdown this machine since the start of the year but never got around to it and after a techie chat on IM with Dave Dripps earlier [...]

2008 07 27 Meta
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Belfast Linux meetings restarted on last Wednesday of month

Johnny has kicked the wheel off and BLUG meetings are starting up again on the last Wednesday of the month, starting this evening at 6pm in The Tap House, Lower Crescent, just off Botanic Avenue, Belfast.
Some additional information is available on the BLUG Facebook group and on the Belfast Linux newsgroup.
See you there!

2008 06 25 Geek Comments (0)

command line history – me too

I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs recently so I thought I’d give it a go on the VPS this site is hosted on:
steve@decaf:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}’ | sort -rn | head -10
190 ls
80 cd
24 cp
22 sudo
19 rm
14 svn
12 history
11 tar
10 wget
10 vi
And as root:
172 [...]

2008 04 16 Distractions
Geek Comments (1)

Updating WordPress via Subversion: it works!

The last time a new version was released I decided to update my WordPress installation with Subversion with the idea being that this would make future updates easier.
Well, the good news is that this technique works
All it took was 3 simple steps:

$ cd /var/www/sickbiscuit.com/blog
$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ .
launch wp-admin/upgrade.php via web-browser

To be [...]

2008 04 01 Tech Comments (0)

Updating WordPress via Subversion

I read a few months back that Stuart Langridge was using Subversion to keep his WordPress up-to-date and I thought: “that’s clever” and didn’t do anything about it.
Today I was talking to Matt and he mentioned updating one of his WordPress installations and I noticed I was due an update myself. I downloaded the latest [...]

2008 03 05 Meta
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Site migration

I’ve just finished migrating sickbiscuit.com from my home development machine to my new VPS.
DNS records have been updated and decaf is now handling mail and web traffic for the domain allow the only thing I’ve copied over is this blog.
Hopefully this will give me the motivation needed to spruce things up a bit as the [...]

2008 01 04 Meta
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ISP style mail server on Debian VPS

Last month I decided to invest in a VPS from VPSLink.
I had been considering this for a while, especially after my experience using an Ubuntu VPS with Infurious and after 2 power failures within as many weeks due to building work nearby to my home, my hand was forced. No more hosting on a Linux [...]

2008 01 01 Tech Comments (0)