Nigel Babu

Blog

  • Looking for vim

    Yesterday, I was trying to find how to get a terminal inside vim, like the embedded terminal in gEdit and Kate. Look what I found out instead!

    Facebook: Looking for vim?

    I have no words.

  • E_TOO_MANY_CHANNELS

    For the past year or so, irssi has been my primary IRC client. At first, I joined just one channel on one server. Then, it started growing. The more projects I participated in, the more channels I had. Currently, I’m on 3 networks and a lot of channels. Recently, I crossed the 100-window mark on irssi and I realized I’m missing people leaving a message or pinging me.

    Now I’m using hilightwin.pl. Its a pretty rad script that lets you have a small split window with all your hilights. Hard to miss them that way! Installation is pretty simple too. Downloading the file, place it in ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun. Then run the following:

    /run autorun/hilightwin.pl /window new split /window name hilight /window size 5

  • Working from home

    This is how my desk looks on days when I’m working from home. The one of the left has the Nagios status page and the right has my chat client (The classic numb3rs snippet about IRC) 😉

    My table!

  • Amazon RDS Timezone Hack

    ‘Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.’ – Amazon RDS Website

    Server room by Torkild Retvedt

    Amazon RDS uses UTC by default. Personally, I think systems should use UTC by default, but at my work place, all systems are in IST, which means we want the RDS to work in IST too. So, we have this hack of setting the init_connect parameter to set time_zone = 'Asia/Kolkata';. This works great, except when you have to restart RDS. We’ve had to restart our instance twice so far, both times leading to considerable downtime, pain, and grief because of this hack (thankfully, the RDS machine is a backup machine and not used in production).

    When it happened the first time, my ex-colleague did the modification and all I did note down was to remove the init_connect parameter. When it happened the second time, I remembered and set the init_connect parameter to an empty string, which I thought would work. Unfortunately, it didn’t. We talked to Amazon Support and now I know that when it happens, I should not be setting it to an empty value, but resetting instead.

    rds-reset-db-parameter-group my-params --parameters 'name=init_connect,method=immediate'

    This post is for all those poor souls who might make the same mistake as me as well as a note to myself (though I suspect I’ll never forget this lesson :P) 🙂

  • Why work doesn’t happen at work

    Often I’ve noticed that my most productive time is actually at home. So, when I have to spend a few hours of solid work that I don’t need to depend on a teammate or a teammate doesn’t have to depend on me, I work from home. I get a lot more done thanks to less interruptions.