Me Hungy

Issues trying to increase EBS root disk size

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 22:12:33 -0800

I was running out of space on my EC2-hosted system and Eric Hammond’s instructions for increasing the size of the root disk offered a fantastically simple solution: just run 2 commands from the EC2 tools and I’ll be all set. Except it didn’t work for me. A little googling made it clear that this worked for others, but it was a total mystery what was different in my case. After futzing with it with it for a couple of days, I eventually found a sequence that did work for me, and the key was to manually register a new AMI (using a snapshot of the under-sized source volume).

Prior to that, I had tried using the existing AMI, as well as creating a new AMI from the web GUI (via “create image (EBS AMI)” on the instance’s right-click menu), but the instance would never boot (e.g. detailed monitoring showed no cpu activity) and the volume seemed to be stuck in “attaching” (instead of the typical “attached” state).

So, here is what I did, in just 2 commands:

First, create a snapshot and then register it to create a new AMI:

ec2-register -s snap-1234 -a x86_64 -d “xxx” -n “yyy” —kernel aki-1234 —ramdisk ari-1234

IMAGE ami-1234

Now, you can spin up your instance with a larger size (was 15GB, now 50GB):

ec2-run-instances ami-1234 -t m1.large -k mykeypair -g mysecgroup -b “/dev/sda1=snap-1234:50:false”

RESERVATION r-1234 599377512345 mysecgroup INSTANCE i-1234 ami-1234 pending mykeypair 0 m1.large 2010-12-19T05:05:11+0000 us-east-1a aki-1234 ari-1234 monitoring-disabled ebs paravirtual xen

Yay, my instance boots and shows the new space:

# df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda1 50G 13G 35G 26% /

Then finally, don’t forget to run resize2fs within your new instance to use the new space.

RIM is in trouble - A case study in customer adoption and losing it.

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 11:18:21 -0800

RIM is in trouble - A case study in customer adoption and losing it.:

An analysis of RIM’s predicament, making the case that the Blackberry market share started shifting over 2 years ago, but this was masked by good top-line results, largely from users upgrading their phones to new models introduced in 2009. This is the classic death spiral where the company is on the wrong side of a market shift, and he proposes two remedies: 1) stabilize your existing market with innovations specifically differentiated for their current installed base, and 2) restructure their fractured development process for new products around a product czar. Maybe it’s too late…

Awesome big wave video

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 10:38:04 -0800

Awesome big wave video

Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc? - Quora

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0800

Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc? - Quora:

Just came across this old question, where Adam D’Angelo (Quora founder, ex-CTO of Facebook) argues for MySQL. He goes on to ask about MongoDB at Foursquare, which was ironically answered 5 months later in a post-mortem by the MongoDB creator on the now infamous Foursquare crash.

Hide yo kids, wife, and husband from this costume.

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:32:39 -0700

Hide yo kids, wife, and husband from this costume.:

For $39.99, you can be Antoine Dodson. Hide yo money!

The Social Network = Lord of the Rings?

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 15:18:34 -0700

The Social Network = Lord of the Rings?:

Maureen Dowd - Lord of the Internet Rings - NYTimes.com

Permalink to my TechZulu interview

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:57:23 -0700

Permalink to my TechZulu interview

Interviewed today on TechZulu Live today by Amanda Coolong, who...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:23:00 -0700

Interviewed today on TechZulu Live today by Amanda Coolong, who is super cool for making it fun and easy. Thanks Efren, for inviting me on the show, I had a blast.

Permalink: http://www.techzulu.com/ceo-to-cto-when-to-take-money-and-more-on-tzlive-with-william-chow.html

Do I build a phone app, or a mobile web site?

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:55:07 -0700

Do I build a phone app, or a mobile web site?:

This presentation has a simple breakdown of the pros/cons between going native vs going html5.

Haters gonna hate

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:34:53 -0700

Haters gonna hate

ZipRecruiter.com: auto-publish to many job sites with one click,...

Sat, 29 May 2010 15:24:19 -0700

Screen candidates with a custom quiz

Auto-post to other job boards

ZipRecruiter.com: auto-publish to many job sites with one click, and screen for real candidates with a roll-your-own quiz. Took me just 5 mins to post a job and have it propagate to about 8 job boards. And the quiz can be as light (check for a pulse with multiple choice) or as heavy (arbitrarily deep with free-form text) as you want.

Everything about this picture says "I'm an A-hole"

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:52:00 -0700

Everything about this picture says "I'm an A-hole":

Look closely…even the license plate and parking spot.

Flesh eating robots. No joke.

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:39:47 -0800

Flesh eating robots. No joke.:

The inventor, Robert Finkelstein, at least says that it eats ”mostly vegetarian”.

FAIL!: Newegg hosed me

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:05:26 -0800

WTF #1: NewEgg offers a combo/discount where you can get this HP server along with a pair DIMMs…which is fine and dandy if it weren’t for the fact that you wind up with 3 DIMMs total, for a computer that only accepts them in 1/2/4 configurations.

WTF #2: Ok, fine. So I head off to Fry’s to pick up another DIMM (by the way, no one there knows a damn thing about memory). So, I finally get the new DIMM, but then I can’t get the damn computer to boot. After trying various combinations, I discover that the original DIMM just doesn’t like to be paired up with any of the others. After a little googling, turns out that the computer came with a DIMM that is not compatible with any of the other 3 DIMMS (former is unbuffered, latter are “registered”, not compatible…FAIL).

NewEgg, you suck.

Jobs in science are the lowest paid.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:15:19 -0800

Jobs in science are the lowest paid.:

“Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.” — Albert Einstein

Sneaky PayPal: just noticed that PayPal will, by default, charge...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:49:34 -0800

Sneaky PayPal: just noticed that PayPal will, by default, charge you for personal transfers. Turns out that all transfers default to being a “purchase”, which are subject to a fee of 2.9% + $0.30, unless you manually change your transfer to “personal”. I don’t know when this started exactly, but turns out PC World noticed this started back in August.

Dopey fisherman + TV cameras = Great bloopers.

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:01:10 -0800

Dopey fisherman + TV cameras = Great bloopers.

Programmer search engine by StackOverflow

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:22:20 -0800

Programmer search engine by StackOverflow:

Leverage StackOverflow’s reputation system to find programming talent.

Awesome vid: NPH as ‘Frosty the Inappropriate...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:35:00 -0800

Awesome vid: NPH as ‘Frosty the Inappropriate Snowman’

Sarah Palin quotes John Wooden...but not the Coach!

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:53:05 -0800

Sarah Palin quotes John Wooden...but not the Coach!:

HuffPo reports that the quote was apparently just lifted from The Quote Garden, where it was also coincidentally attributed incorrectly to the Coach (but since fixed).