dambalah

A few blog posts I’ve written lately

Luc Castera — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:00:34 +0000

I haven’t been blogging much lately here but I’ve been writing on the Intellum Blog. You can read my posts here:

The traveling German carpenters

Building Sproutcore with Garcon

Using Riak session store with express.js

Ronaldo means so much more than soccer for my generation

Lean Startups and Sproutcore

Cheers!

ErlangDC: An Epic One-Day Erlang Conference in Washington, DC

Luc Castera — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:14:56 +0000

It’s been pretty quiet here lately, mostly because I’ve been super busy with work and I’ve been travelling a bit. Spent 3 months last winter in Montevideo, Uruguay which I absolutely loved.

Since I got back to Washington DC, I’ve been trying to get the local Erlang group running again. So far it’s been great. We’ve managed to have a meeting a month with some interesting speakers and now we are announcing a one day conference on Erlang at the end of the year.

Rusty, Ram, and I have been working together to organize ErlangDC: an Epic One-Day Erlang Conference in Washington, DC. The event will be held at the AOL Headquarters in Dulles, VA on December 3rd, 2011. We have now opened registration so if you are interested in joining us, please visit the site and sign up.

The conference will consists of a training session in the morning and followed by a single-track conference. We are currently accepting talk proposals.

Life update + a couple of talks I gave recently

Luc Castera — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:08:50 +0000

I haven’t blogged for a while but I’m back. Here is a quick update of what I’ve been up to:

I’ve joined Intellum last year and we are about to launch the product I’ve been working on: GroupDock. We are currently in private beta. I’m pretty excited about what we’ve built and would love for you to check it out. If you want a beta invite, please post a comment below with a way for me to send it to you (email, twitter) and I’ll send you one.
Since I work from home, I’ve also taken the opportunity to travel a bit. This year, I’ve spent 3 months in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2 weeks in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I’m about to leave for Montevideo, Uruguay in a few weeks. I’ll be in Montevideo for about 3 months. I should be back in the Washington DC area by March/April.
With my friend Kevin, I’ve launched a cool website for foodies called TastyTogether.

I gave two talks in the last two weeks and I wanted to post them here also.

I gave the first one at the DC Ruby Users Group. The topic was SproutCore as I’ve been working with this new web framework recently. Below find the video of the talk. The quality is not great. I recorded it with my Flip camcorder but I had placed it next to the projector and it seems to have caused some interference.

However, most of the presentation is me doing some live coding and I had created a screencast where I went through the same tutorial. You can see this one below:

You can also download the whole screencast as a single file from here: Download Full Video Tutorial.

Also, yesterday, I got to talk about GroupDock at a local meetup. The event is called Startup Rockstars and it gives entrepreneurs a venue to showcase what they’ve been working on. The talk was very short (less than 6 minutes) and you can find the video below:

Hope you get to watch the videos and please give me some feedback/comments below.

I’ll try not to let a whole year go by before my next blog post

A message for amputees in Haiti

Luc Castera — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:53:57 +0000

About 2 weeks ago, I read an article about the number of Haitian amputees following the earthquake in my motherland of Haiti. At the time, there were talking about more than 50,000 amputees caused by the quake. Today, the numbers cited are more than 100,000 amputees.

As devastated as I was after reading about this, I remembered seeing the videos of Josh Sundquist, an inspirational/motivational speaker, book author, and overall great guy who goes around the country giving speeches of hope. At the time, I thought his message was very inspiring and powerful and I had emailed it to my family for them to watch also.

Josh and I share a common friend: Stephen Douglass. So it was about midnight when I sent Stephen an email asking him for Josh’s contact information because I think the Haitian amputees need to hear his message of hope and resilience. I wake up the next day at 7:30am and already have an email from Josh saying he thinks it’s a great idea and wants to help. From then on, he basically made everything happen, incurred all the video production costs, so that we can share his message of hope in Haiti and also raise funds to help those in need.

For more information on how we plan to distribute this video in Haiti and how you can help Josh help Haiti, please read the announcement on his blog: a message for amputees In Haiti

So without further ado, here is Josh’s message for the Haitian amputees.

DCRUG: Enumerators & MongoDB [Videos]

Luc Castera — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:45:45 +0000

On Thursday evening, the DC Ruby User Group held its December meetup. There were three speakers scheduled to talk:

Doug Peterson on the Basics of Ruby Enumerators
Kyle Banker on MongoDB
Camille Bell on Ruby Refactorings

There is an effort started by Ross Karchner to try to record as many DC Tech Events as possible so I’m going to start bringing my Flip Mino camera to events I attend. I had it with me yesterday and recorded the first two talks before I ran out of battery.

So here is the fist talk by Doug:

And the second talk by Kyle:

Unfortunately, I ran out of battery before Camille talk so I could not record that one. But if you are interested in her topic, you can pick up the following two books which she recommended:

Refactoring by Jay Fields, Shane Harvie, Martin Fowler, & Kent Beck
Refactoring in Ruby by William Wake

Arlington/DC Erlang September Meetup: Kevin Smith on webmachine

Luc Castera — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:15:07 +0000

On September, Kevin Smith of Hypothetical Labs will be speaking about webmachine: an erlang REST toolkit which makes it easy to develop HTTP interfaces using Erlang.

Kevin is the author of the Pragmatic Programmers ‘Erlang in Practice’ screencasts series (one of the best resource to learn Erlang) and doesn’t reside in Washington DC so don’t miss this chance to come see him talk.

If you plan on coming, please RSVP at meetup.com.

Screencast: Install Google Wave Server

Luc Castera — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:02:44 +0000

In this screencast, I show you how to install the reference server implementation of the Google Wave Protocol, which was released by Google recently. To learn more about Google Wave, visit wave.google.com.

Install Google Wave Server Video

The audio on the Vimeo version of the video is not as good as the original Video which you can download here:

Note: This is my first attempt at creating a screencast so excuse the mumbling and incomplete sentences. I’ll get better with practice

Resources:

I recorded the screencast on my Ubuntu laptop, using the same setup as Remi.

http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/w/list

Rubynation slides: Concurrent Programming with Ruby and Tuple Spaces

Luc Castera — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:38:26 +0000

Here are the slides from my talk at RubyNation today.

I enjoyed giving the talk and I appreciate all the great questions that followed.

Using cron to treat my strained muscle

Luc Castera — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:43:40 +0000

Last night, I strained my right thigh 5 minutes into a soccer game. It sucks because it was an important game and I really wanted to win. Had we won, we would have made the playoffs. But we lost and it is the end of the season for the Raiders FC.

What sucks even more is that I have another big game on Sunday with my other team: Reds United. We are playing the one team that we need to beat to finish on top of the league. That means I have 3 days to recover from my injury. That’s not a lot so I’m trying to be as disciplined as possible in treating it.

Based on what I could have found on the web (Wikipedia has been my doctor for years now), I should treat it with ice. However, applying ice for more than 15 minutes is bad and you need to let the leg warm up again for at least 45 minutes before icing it again.

It’s easy to get lost in work and forget to re-apply the ice, or to stop icing my legs, so I’m using a combination of gnome-schedule, a nice little GUI for cron and notify-send to remind me to start/stop icing at the right time.

The GUI is super-simple to use. To install it: sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule

Then just type gnome-schedule on the command line to get it started.

You see my little schedule there, I’m using libnotify-bin’s notify-send to show me ‘growl-like notifications’ when it’s time to start or stop icing:

I use gnome-schedule together with notify-send all the time to quickly set up reminders for myself. The point of this whole post was to show you a nice way to set reminders for yourself on a Linux box.

All right, gotta go. It’s time to start icing again. I really want to play on Sunday!

Install monit from source on Ubuntu

Luc Castera — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:03:50 +0000

The Ubuntu package for monit is way out of date on Hardy (8.04 LTS): the package is at version 4.8.1 when the latest version of monit is 5.0.1. Even the Jaunty package is only at version 4.10. There are additional features such as remote mail servers that you cannot use on 4.8.1. Another issue with using the old monit package on Ubuntu is that it is out of sync with the monit documentation.

This post will show you how you can install monit from the latest source on Ubuntu Hardy.

First, we’ll use a dirty trick to obtain some Ubuntu init scripts for monit: we’ll install monit using apt-get and then remove it. In the process, the monit init scripts will not be deleted and we will be able to use them with our fresh install of monit from source.

sudo apt-get install monit

After installing, make sure that the following files are present: /etc/init.d/monit, /etc/default/monit and /etc/monit/monitrc (that’s the whole reason why we are installing monit from the package after all. Once we’ve got that file, we can simply remove the package:

sudo apt-get remove monit

Cool now we have an init script and our config files. We will modify them later to work with our new monit install

Before downloading the monit source, let’s install a few dependencies

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev bison flex

Now, get the latest monit package from their download page and untar it:

wget http://mmonit.com/monit/dist/monit-5.0.1.tar.gz
tar xzvf monit-5.0.1.tar.gz
cd monit-5.0.1

OK. You are not ready to build and install the source

./configure

Watch the output and if everything went smoothly, then:

make
sudo make install

At this point you should have the latest and greatest version of monit installed. Let’s verify that:

monit -V

It should print:

This is monit version 5.0.1
Copyright (C) 2000-2009 by Tildeslash Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Almost there, we just need to make a couple of small changes to the init script. Find the following lines in /etc/init.d/monit (should be way on top):

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/sbin/monit

… and replace them with:

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin
DAEMON=/usr/local/bin/monit

Now open up /etc/default/monit and find startup=0. Replace that with startup=1 and save the file.

You can now modify your config file located at /etc/monit/monitrc as you see fit. Once you are done, verify that the config file is OK:

sudo monit -c /etc/monit/monitrc -t

If the syntax of your file is ok, you are ready to start monit:

sudo /etc/init.d/monit start

That’s It I hope this helped!