Drewblas - drewblas.com - Drew Blas - Explorer
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Launch an AWS EC2 AMI instance with an EBS disk larger than the default 15 Apr 2013 | 11:57 pm
When you launch an EBS instance on EC2, you get a root disk size that is the same as what the machine image was created with. For example, the Ubuntu AMIs by default are 8GB. Typically, the best app...
Reading between the lines of the AWS outage – Why you should be worried Part 2 18 Nov 2012 | 10:25 pm
TL;DR: The real problem is there isn’t enough capacity. The us-east1 region is too big and during an outage there simply aren’t enough resources to allow users to recover their sites. In part 1 I dis...
Reading between the lines of the AWS outage – Why you should be worried Part 1 30 Oct 2012 | 11:27 pm
TL;DR: There are many very real problem with AWS that are being ignored. #1 is that they appear to have no plan for dealing with their ongoing software bugs. There has been a surprising amount of tal...
Fixing Passenger error: PassengerLoggingAgent doesn’t exist 26 Sep 2012 | 01:26 am
While doing a new install of Passenger & nginx, I ran into some strange errors: 2012/09/25 20:09:54 [alert] 2593#0: Unable to start the Phusion Passenger watchdog because it encountered the following ...
AWS VPC Error: Client.InvalidParameterCombination 24 Aug 2012 | 08:40 pm
When trying to execute an ec2-run-instances command for a VPC, you must specify both which subnet & which security group you want it to belong to: ec2-run-instances ami-abc123 \ --group sg-abc123 \ --...
A new mentorship program 1 May 2012 | 02:16 pm
I recently returned from RailsConf 2012 in Austin. I had a terrific time, learned a ton, and most importantly: I was inspired. I was inspired to return to making more contributions to Open Source a...
New Ruby Gem: AWS-SES 27 Jan 2011 | 06:11 am
I’ve release a new gem: aws-ses. This gem provides a ruby wrapper to accessing Amazon SES, allowing for you to easily send e-mail, verify e-mail addresses, and monitor your SES activity. It’s still ...
Celebrating WhyDay: My new project StatusBench.com 20 Aug 2010 | 01:58 pm
I searched long and hard for an idea on how I could celebrate #whyday. In the end, I decided to launch a new website service that I (and I’m hoping a few others) have a need for: StatusBench.com St...
Beyond Thesis: Does the GPL go too far and what makes a derivative work? 17 Jul 2010 | 01:24 am
After the analysis of several people (including myself) about the inclusion of GPL’ed WordPress code, I think the debate over Thesis has mostly subsided with Chris on the losing end. However, the rea...
An analysis of GPL’ed code in Thesis 16 Jul 2010 | 03:31 am
Introduction There has come to be a huge debate regarding whether the Thesis WordPress theme can be premium licensed when the WordPress code itself is released under the GPL. The GPL requires that a...
