PJ Kelly pjkelly

On the iMac:

brew install --HEAD --force riak -v

On the MacBook

brew update
# get Erlang R14B03
brew install erlang

install the HEAD riak (and NOT also install HEAD Erlang.)

How to setup your VMWare Fusion images to use static IP addresses on Mac OS X

At Crush + Lovely, we use Railsmachine's Moonshine to automate the configuration of our servers. When writing our deployment recipes, VMWare Fusion's ability to take snapshots and rollback to these snapshots is a huge timesaver because it takes just seconds to roll a server image to it's original state.

When you're just configuring a single server, having a static IP address for your server image isn't too important, but when you're configuring multi-server setups, it can be useful to duplicate a number of server images and give each a static IP address so you can consistently deploy to them. While not documented well at all, it turns out that this is relatively easy to accomplish in four simple steps.

1. Determine the MAC address of your guest machine

Let's say you have a guest machine with the name ubuntu-lucid-lynx-base a

Three options:

If an apt-get package is available, use it, then tweak configuration files after installation.
If no package is available, see if the installer has a "noninteractive" mode. For instance, apt-get can be forced to auto-answer all questions with the defaults using ENV['DEBIAN_FRONTEND'] = "noninteractive".
If a noninteractive mode is not available, try feeding the installer an answer file. e.g.

pecl install apc < answers.txt

Before you start

These instructions work best on a fresh system. While I've gotten them to work on a system where I just upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion and had a previously working development environment (using an older version of Cinderella in my case), it was not without difficulty. It's much easier to start from scratch.

These instructions are for Mac OS X 10.7.x (Lion) only.

SSH Keys

If you have SSH keys setup already

Calculating Construction Cost

According to the Tiny Tower Wiki the equation for calculating how much it costs to build a given floor is:


cost = 150 × floor_number ²

A simple way to evaluate this equation in Ruby would be:

	# credit: http://crshlv.ly/qkAzW0
	#
	# I found this especially useful when trying
	# to figure out equivalent apt-get packages
	# for certain Perl CPAN modules.

	apt-get install apt-file
	apt-file update
	apt-file search URI::Escape

	# credit: http://crshlv.ly/pSqu6l

	# show all packages installed
	dpkg --get-selections

	# show all packages installed containing "php"
	dpkg --get-selections \| grep php

	require 'rubygems'
	require 'yajl'
	require 'to_google_spreadsheet'

	json = File.new('sizes.json', 'r') # file with more than one json
	parser = Yajl::Parser.new
	data = parser.parse(json)

	GoogleSpreadsheet.config do \|c\|
	c.email = "[email protected]"

	# In Rails 1.2.x, the default JSON encoder doesn't quote
	# attributes. To force quoting, set the following option
	# to false. From the ActiveSupport::JSON docs:
	#
	# When +true+, Hash#to_json will omit quoting string or symbol keys
	# if the keys are valid JavaScript identifiers. Note that this is
	# technically improper JSON (all object keys must be quoted), so if
	# you need strict JSON compliance, set this option to +false+.
	# mattr_accessor :unquote_hash_key_identifiers
	# @@unquote_hash_key_identifiers = true

	# Uninstall any pre-existing packaged
	# versions of phpunit
	sudo apt-get remove phpunit

	# Install pear via apt-get
	sudo apt-get install php-pear

	# Update existing pear channels
	sudo pear channel-update pear.php.net