Access Web Servers on EC2 Private Addresses with Firefox FoxyProxy & Google Chrome SwitchySharp

There are sometimes web ui services on EC2 instances that are only accessible via the AWS private IP addresses. The one I run into most are the WebUI of HBase and Hadoop. There are probably many others.

Running a Socks Proxy Tunnel to an EC2 server

On your local system you will need to run [...]

Avoiding a series of tests with Ruby Hashes of Hashes that might have nil before the leaf hash

I’m mostly using Ruby to write Opscode Chef Cookbooks. There are a lot of hashes of hashes that contain attributes or Data Bags. Things that look like:

app['rds_database'][environment]['rds_name']

If I wanted to test if this value is set I couldn’t safely just say:

if app['rds_database'][environment]['rds_name']

because in some cases

if app['rds_database']

or

if app['rds_database'][environment] [...]

Install Pgrep and PKill for Mac OS X with Brew

My fingers still tend to do ps ax | grep some_program_name_I_want_to_kill and then do a kill 2012 to kill that process. Then I remember that I could use pgrep and/or pkill to do the same kind of thing. But then I remember I’m on a Mac which doesn’t have those commands built in, though [...]

Your Mac Won’t Reboot when Installing Mac OS X Lion – Reset Your PRAM

Overseeing the Mac OS X Lion upgrade of all the Macs at Work, I’ve seen the Lion installs generally be the easiest OS X Upgrade ever. But I wasted almost two days upgrading one of our Mac Pros. We have several Mac Pros with the same configuration, 2008 Vintage Dual Quad Core’s [...]