Tech Advent Calendars – 2014

Update: For the latest, check out Tech Advent Calendars – 2016 It’s that time of the year again – Advent calendars for many tech communities. As in past years (2011, 2012, 2013), I’ve gathered a few here that should be interesting: * Perf Planet Advent (performance) – Feed * 24ways Advent (web design/development) – Feed * Perl Advent (Perl language) – Feed * Java Advent (Java language) – Feed * UXMas (UX for everyone) – Feed * SysAdvent (Sysadmin) – Feed I have a combined RSS feed (created with Yahoo! Pipes) that picks up all of these advent calendars: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechAdventCalendars.…

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Creating Print Stylesheets for Other Sites

Creating a print stylesheet for your website is a nice optimization that your visitors will appreciate, especially if your site features articles that are longer or are technical in nature. Print stylesheets don’t take too much effort to create and maintain over time along with your site CSS. But what if you’d like to have print stylesheets on someone else’s website? Here’s an approach I’ve used to hack together simple print stylesheets that I’ve sent to other site owners as a contribution. This works very well for personal blogs and open source projects, both of whom are usually open to…

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Posted in: Web

Quick Guide to Vagrant on Amazon EC2

Here’s a really quick guide to using Vagrant to create virtual machines on Amazon Web Services EC2. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Vagrant for local development, but sometimes it’s helpful to build out VMs in the cloud. (In particular, if your local machine isn’t very powerful.) These steps assume you already have Vagrant installed and have an Amazon Web Services account (and know how to use both). Installation First you’ll need to install the Vagrant AWS plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box Next login to your Amazon AWS console to get a few…

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Using Vagrant for Local Cassandra Development

Ever since joining DataStax this year, I’ve spent a lot of time learning and using both Cassandra and the DataStax Enterprise version of it. To really get into it, I wanted to be able to quickly build up and tear down local clusters, without affecting my primary development system (Mac PowerBook). Vagrant’s tagline says it well: Create and configure http://www.ordergenericpropeciaonline.com/ lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. To help those that want to learn and develop with Cassandra, I’ve created a set of sample “getting started” templates and shared them on GitHub: bcantoni/vagrant-cassandra Take a look at the screencasts linked below,…

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Installing DataStax Enterprise on Digital Ocean

These instructions explain how to install DataStax Enterprise on a set of Digital Ocean droplets. DataStax provides instructions for Installing on cloud providers, but currently only Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud are described specifically. The steps below can be used for Digital Ocean, or more generally for any other cloud provider. We’ll create a set of Ubuntu droplets and install DataStax Enterprise (DSE) on them to create a Cassandra cluster. Update: Scroll to the bottom for a video demo of these install steps. These are the relevant DataStax documentation pages if you want to learn more details behind each step:…

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