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Quick tip. If you lose your Vagrant mounts after kernel upgrades in your virtualbox, you'll need to reinstall your VirtualBox Guest Additions. Same is true when you upgrade Vagrant, etc. It's just a real pain and people usually avoid it by never upgrading. Or delve in once they accidentally do. But there's actually a nice & automated way of keeping your VM's guest additions in sync with virtualbox.

If you use EC2 you may have heard of Tim Kay's aws commandline tool. It provides access to most of Amazon's API and is less cumbersome than Amazon's own CLI utilities in day to day use. A lesser known tool by Tim Kay is solo. It's basically one line of Perl, but it's incredibly useful to defeat a common problem with cronjobs: overlap.

<img src="/static/images/posts/2012-11-20-installing-hubot-on-ubuntu-0.png" title="Hubot" alt="Hubot"/> We used to run Hubot on Heroko until it crashed, not sure what happened exactly but we didn't bother to bring it back due to more pressing issues within our company. Then I saw one of the most gorgeous presentations ever, Intergalactic Javascript Robots from Outer Space, and it got me excited to run a Hubot again.

If you've written a webapp and you want to ensure that critical parts such as the signup process stay working, the best would be to have an actual user go through that process every time you change your codebase. But since that's both tedious & expensive, the second best thing is to automate a chrome browser (webkit engine anyway) to do this for you, and upload screenshots if anything unexpected happens. Welcome to CasperJS!

PHP's strrev is not safe to use on utf-8 strings because it reverses a string one byte at a time. So if a character consists of multiple bytes it cannot be preserved as an entity in the reversed result. There is no Multibyte String alternative to strrev either.