Bash

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.

If something weird is happening, you want to know everything that's going on on a server, as fast as possible. At these times, you will be very happy to have a simple alias `wtf` installed that you can type immediately after logging into a server, and see all that it's busy with.

This article in 50 words: I used to prefer spaces vs tabs, now I don't care so much, think it's more important that you can easily switch on a per-project basis. Have some thoughts on how conventions should be established, and I'll demonstrate bash code that can convert your codebase to a new standard.

I recently bought a NAS so my data is safe & available, with the benefit of being low power / noise / heat. I've considered Netgear, QNAP, but decided to go for a Synology as it was affordable, still had a big community, decent reviews & Time Machine support.

When you're debugging a tough problem you sometimes need to analyze the HTTP traffic flowing between your machine and a webserver or proxy. Sometimes you can use firebug or chrome inspector for that. But here's a lowlevel alternative that I'm pretty excited about. Meet Tshark.