Author Archives: Ross

I’ve been mucking around with Python recently and have written a couple of simple Munin plugins for Boards.ie’s Solr cluster (in the hope of helping to track down some annoying performance bugs). If you’re not familiar with Munin, it’s a bit like Nagios, (and if you haven’t heard of Nagios, it’s a network monitoring tool). Munin […]

I’ve been playing on and off with Google’s new toy, Google+, for the last few days and while there are a plethora of opinion pieces all over the place, I figure what the hell, one more can’t really hurt (especially a nice short one that isn’t too gushing.) The Bad I think one way in […]

I spent way too much time trying to do this so maybe this will save someone else some time. I haven’t owned a copy of Windows for years, and have been using Ubuntu as my solitary home and office OS for some time. Last week though, I decided I should have a copy of Windows […]

This is the first in a series of posts about the design and implementation of a search engine for Boards.ie. Boards.ie recently launched a new search engine – http://www.boards.ie/search/ – which is built upon Amazon Web Services using Solr with PHP as the glue. Currently, Boards.ie users are searching nearly 30 million posts almost a […]

Log into the AWS web console, find the instance you want to create an AMI from, right click and select “Create Image (EBS AMI)”. Follow the wizard. All the top results in Google are for The Long Way™ to do this. The Long Way has a bunch of useful things to take into consideration (security, […]

This post was inspired by this TED talk from Sheryl Sandberg, which reminded me of this brilliant blog post by Jolie O’Dell. The whole women in tech thing is something which interests me (as a techie, as well as a human being), and there are loads of great discussions (and terrible ones) about it. Have […]

Leslie Jensen-Inman via A List Apart, examines the use of colour. Worth a read, especially for the tools she highlights: Graybit – see the web as a colourblind person sees it. Color Scheme Designer – impressive tool for color matching and testing. Check My Colours – Checks a URL for potential contrast problems. Clay Shirky […]