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AWS SSO and Jenkins - One of the benefits of using Amazon’s SSO (Single Sign On) service is the ability to use it to provide authentication to other applications via...

VPC Subnet Addressing - There are a lot of ways to build VPC subnets in AWS and most of them are wrong. The most common problem I run across...

Encrypting Secrets For CloudFormation - One of the great things about CloudFormation is the ability to store all of your configurations in Git (or some other version control software). The...

Counting Deployments in AWS - I recently needed to know how many deployments we had in our CodeDeploy environment. This is an easy enough process if you have a small(er)...

KangarooWho‽ has moved to Jekyll! - Well, I’ve officially moved off of Blogspot and onto Jekyll hosted on Github and I have nothing but good things to say about it. Blogspot...

(Ab)using Chef in AWS OpsWorks. - AWS OpsWorksAWS OpsWorks is a wonderful tool that I'm growing more and more fond of every day.  However, not being familiar with Chef I've been...

Setting your own ID using AWS::Record::HashModel - June 2014 Update: This no longer works with the newer versions of the AWS SDK.  This information is retained merely for historical reasons and you...

Rake task to deploy to AWS OpsWorks - IntroductionI've spent the day building a deploy Rake task for my AWS OpsWorks environment and I thought I would share it with you.My project is...

Integrating ELB into an OpsWorks stack - UPDATE: Amazon has now built ELB capability into OpsWorks, so you no longer need to use this workaround.As you might have guessed by my recent...

Rack Applications under AWS OpsWorks - AWS OpsWorksFirst a bit about AWS OpsWorks, it's Amazon's answer to operating your own datacenter.  With OpsWorks you can do things like easily autoscale your...

Programming Choices - IntroductionI frequently ask myself what languages are on top in my mind.  In the past I've loved almost everything from PowerBuilder to Perl to Java....

Resizing a VirtualBox guest hard drive - Recently, I needed to expand the hard drive on my Ubuntu VirtualBox guest machine from 8GB to 20GB.  At first it looked like I was...

Authlogic: Restricting simultaneous sessions - I'm building a Rails based application for a client, which they are in-turn licensing to their customers on a per-seat basis. This means that they...

Switching Ruby platforms on Debian - My favorite Linux server distribution is Debian and I use it whenever possible. Its sane layout and APT system make working with it easy and...

Flash video player stutters and drops frames... - Why, oh why do Flash video players not work properly? I mean, I'm on a reasonably powerful Mac Book Pro running the latest browsers and...

The International Council of Manlaws, Ltd. - I found this in an old email today and thought I would repost. :)The International Council of Manlaws, Ltd.Under no circumstances may two men share...

Debian Squeeze and an old Dell PE1650 - I recently had to put Debian testing (Squeeze) on an old Dell PowerEdge 1650 server. Here's a little tip to save you some time if...

Ruby-AAWS & Rails - On August 15, 2009 Amazon begin requiring all calls to their AWS servers to be cryptographically signed. This caused MynaStuff, our home inventory website, to...

Backing up your database with logrotate - I use BoxBackup in lazy mode to back up my systems. This works well for things like normal files and directories but not so well...

Generating PDFs in Rails using Prawn - In my current Rails projects (Gradesheet & MynaStuff) I have the need to create reports as PDFs. Prawn is a relatively new library that does...

Why would I give up my iPhone for a Palm Prē? - With the recent announcement that the Palm Prē is going on sale June 6th for $300 $200, I am very excited and can't wait to...

8 iPhone Faults & Missing Features - I've compiled a list of things I think the iPhone fails at but could be easily corrected. "Easily" in this case means no hardware fixes,...

External Monitoring - I have been trying to do a little external monitoring and statistics for the KangarooBox main website, but haven't had much luck. Basically, my T1...

More Rails action - I've been working on getting my routes right the past couple of days and I'm happy to report that its working, as far as I...

Rails Headaches - Our new project is written in Ruby on Rails. This is the first time that I've been able to get down and dirty with a...

Getting better every day - I know that a lot of people are worried about the recent economic downturn but I think that it will make Open Source an even...

Me @ OLF '08 - OLF2008_096Originally uploaded by kudzu13Just a small picture of me winning a book (DoJo) from the guys over at the Linux Link Talk Show. We had...

Is there a SO? - OK, here you can see my Wall 'O Cans. I'm just wondering, do you think I drink too much soda for one person? Remember, this...

Ohio LinuxFest 2008! - Great news! KangarooBox is sponsoring the Pre-Event Party for the Ohio LinuxFest and we're giving away free T-Shirts to commemorate the event. Come on down...

StartupNation Contest - Well, KangarooBox has entered the StartupNation contest to find the top 100 home based businesses. While we're technically not "home" based we are small enough...

Posting Screencasts to Blip.tv - Click to Play As you can tell from the above movie, I've been experimenting with video tutorials. My thinking is that its much easier and...

Appliances vs Hosting vs In-House - I'll be honest, my company is in the appliance based computing market and this post is heavily influenced by that. There are certain advantages and...

Dropbox FTW! - I have been playing with Dropbox this morning and I have to say that it is nice. There have been other products and other ways...

NewEgg steps up to the plate - This is a followup to my previous post talking about a never ending loop I got caught up in with NewEgg, Gmail, and Firefox. It...

Firefox & Gmail Dialog Box Deluge - UPDATE: It looks like NewEgg realized its mistake and is fixing it.Well, this is a new one on me. Firefox and Gmail are fighting over...

Screenshots the easy way - I needed to update the KangarooBox web site with some enticing screen shots of our Anteater product and to be honest, I wasn't looking forward...

Getting your SAN to play nice. - Well, I think I'm finally on the road to SAN heaven; or at least workability. After wrestling with it for what seems like forever I...

Redirecting... Lighttpd! - I've been fighting with Lighttpd for the past few days and I think I've finally won. The problem was that I had old hosts hanging...

Spell checking an entire website. - While building the new KangarooBox site I ran into something that I thought would be pretty simple. Surely there are folks out there in web...

Packaging a RoR app for Debian Linux - Well, it appears as if I might be the first person in the world to package up a Ruby on Rails application for Debian. Let...

Mounting the SAN - After getting my Coraid SAN hardware up and running I was having trouble deciding on how to use it. I mean it does the RAID...

Debian Packaging II - A simplified experience - In my last post I showed a fairly complex command line that parses the output of licensecheck into something more usable for the new debian/copyright...

Debian Packaging - A new experience - Well, I've decided to package up the redmine program for inclusion into Debian Linux. It's not the most simple software in the world but it...

SilverStripe CMS - On our recent family vacation to Myrtle Beach, SC I got to playing with a new content management system called SilverStripe. In a nutshell, a...

XBox 360 Love/Hate Affair - OK, I'll be honest with you - I don't really like the XBox 360. I really like some of the games (Halo {2|3}) but the...

Save The Internet! - I just signed up with SaveTheInternet to post my story and plead for Net Neutrality. I firmly believe that in order for the Internet to...

Non-Silent Running! - Well, I got the Coraid SAN device hooked up and boy is it loud!! I know that rack mounted devices are not supposed to be...

Running out of memories... - So, a couple of weeks ago I was thinking about storage and how we didn't have enough of it. There were two solutions to the...

Apple Store FTW! - If you remember a couple of weeks ago I took our family iMac in for service and it turns out if was even better than...

Another reason Apple rocks! - Our family iMac has been ill for quite a while now. About a year ago I noticed it rebooting randomly; we would come back to...

iPhone Annoyances - Gripe On!I've had my iPhone since day one and I wouldn't trade it for (almost) any phone on the market. It does most things very...

New Fotolog Account - Well, I've gone ahead and set up a Fotolog account for KangarooBox. I realized that I have been collecting pictures of the office and other...

Ok, so I cut my finger. Big deal. - So there I was doing my part to save the dolphins when I cut my finger and passed out. Nothing big right? Well, I didn't...

Locked out! - For some reason my fancy electronic key wont open the front door on Sundays. :( I'm guessing that the former owner of the key was...

New Beginning - Well, KangarooBox is officially started. We got the funding we needed and I'm in the process of booting up the office. Painting is done; furniture...

APC SmartUPS - Grrrr... OK, I think I'm almost over being angry at APC. We have one of their SmartUPS 3000 systems installed at school and the other...