Campfire

Unfortunately the Linux DNS resolver has no direct support for detecting and doing failovers for DNS servers. It keeps feeding requests to your primary resolving nameserver, waits for a configured timeout, attempts again, and only then tries the second nameserver. This typically means nearly 30s delay for all request as long as your primary nameserver is unreachable. It doesn't learn to directly target your secondary nameserver so long as there is trouble. Even with the most optimal configuration, the delay will still be measured in seconds per request. For many requests, that's many more seconds. I wanted to solve this.

I often share screens with co-workers by Campfire, Github, or mail. Visualizing something can save you a lot of typing. Show people what button shade doesn't look quite right, instead of explaining in 1000+ characters. Share a load graph without saving & attaching images, or handing out basic auth credentials. The list goes on & on. Once you make it a joy to share, you'll find use-cases on a daily basis, and it is my believe you'll lose less time on typing and miscommunication.

<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!