17.06.13

(Very Very Simple) Bash Script to Delete Old Log Files

Posted in News, Random Thoughts, Tech at 3:25 pm by Liv

So here’s the deal: you have an application running on a Linux box which generates log files. And these files keep mounting up and grow and grow and grow in both number and size and you have start considering cleaning up old logs which you don’t use anymore. I know about logrotate, it’s an awesome tool — assuming that:

• your application knows to close the current log file on a signal (e.g. SIGHUP) — so logrotate can “rotate” it
• or your application is ok with being “hung” for the period of time it takes logrotate to take a snapshot of the file and then truncate the existing one
• and also your application doesn’t have an in-built log rotation mechanism itself

Now, if you happen to have a server application running which is doing a lot of extensive work, you know damn well that you cannot afford to freeze that even if it is for milliseconds, as that would deteriorate the experience to the clients “consuming” your server app. And if it so happens that the amount of logging you do is in the order of a few hundred Mb a day, then you know as well that this won’t take just a couple of milliseconds. Also, if you use something like Java — which is my case and what triggered in the end this blog post, unlikely you’ll be able to hook into SIGHUP or similar; even more, if you already use one of the Log4J’s built-in mechanisms to auto-rotate the log files (be it on size, date etc), then again, you cannot use logrotate unfortunately. However, you will still have each day a new log file being rotated (if you decided to have Log4J rotate on a daily basis) and these files keep mounting up and taking disk space; while you might keep an eye on the log files from the last week, unlikely I’d say in most cases you’d do the same with log files created 3 months ago — so there’s a lot of wasted disk space there!

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23.05.13

Dear Banks, F… Off and Leave Me Alone!

Posted in Blogroll, News, Random Thoughts, Tech at 12:10 pm by Liv

OK, this is not the same as my other previous posts about idiotic recruitment, as in fact the exploratory email I have received from the recruiter was relatively well-targeted — minus the fact that I’m actually in USA nowadays not UK, but they obviously have a copy of my resume/CV from a while back so can’t blame them for trying out really. The reason though I wanted to bring this up is not to frame the recruiter, but to actually stop all banks and financial institutions from trying to get me a job in that area — I will be pushing this particular post through all sorts of media channels and as such I hope they finally get the message. (Need I suggest that you share this on your Twitter and whatever other social media you use? )

You might know that I have written before on this blog about why as a developer I don’t want to work for a bank — the original post is here by the way — however, I appreciate that my blog is rather small so possible that it didn’t get in front of (all) recruiters at the time… which really explains this email recently. Hopefully this will stop after this post

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21.05.13

49ers Levi’s Strauss Stadium

Posted in Fun Time, News, Photos at 1:49 am by Liv

I’m a bit late with this post, granted, as this is a overdue by a couple of weeks, however, having just returned back from London, had quite a few things to catch up on, and as such I’m surely an exception can be made in this case. Special thanks go to Meg for getting me the signed poster by Kayley and Alexa — and of course to the girls themselves!

Just to shed some light into this, you would have probably seen the big launch announcement in the press:

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10.05.13

Make ShareThis “Chicklets” Look All the Same

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 3:36 am by Liv

I’ve written before on my blog about ShareThis — I do love their WordPress plugin and their analytics provide some interesting insights into my blog traffic. There is however a niggly little thing which has been bugging me for a while — and it’s all to do with the way their “chicklets” look. (If you’re not familiar with the ShareThis lingo, chicklets are those bubbles with numbers in them which show you how many times a certain piece of content has been shared per channel — e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc.)

If you are like me, always in a rush to produce the content rather than customize it (in other words, don’t want to spend too much time setting up your blog and want to dedicate most of the time to actually writing “stuff”), then you probably took the same steps to install the ShareThis plugin, accepted the defaults and then enable it. Trouble is if you do that, the chicklets by default don’t have a uniform/standard look, and you probably spotted different colors and styles being used — which gives the content a bit of a messy and disorganized look.

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03.05.13

My Niece Learned to Ride a Bike

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, Photos, Romania at 3:45 pm by Liv

Was time it seems to get Ilinca “upgraded” from a tricycle — and she got the hang of it pretty soon:

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