AGORA GAMES

As a SysAdmin, my job more-or-less exists by knowing miscellaneous arcana that most software engineers aren’t aware of.

When a particular co-worker here at Agora has a problem with his Linux machine, I provide advice and show him how to fix it. Some months after he had joined Agora, I discovered that after each troubleshooting session, he copy-and-pastes the entire text terminal log into a text file that he keeps on his desktop. He has dozens of transcripts at this point; I bet if I were to look through it, it would read something like the Tao te Ching or Bhagavad Gita, only concerning UNIX instead of right living.

(Of course, there’s not much of a difference between UNIX and right living, but that’s a topic for another day.)

In the spirit of allowing you to build your own little collection, here is a simple trick that came in handy to me yesterday.

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Yesterday I started looking at ways to do inter-application communication. In a number of projects we’ve done here at Agora Games, we’ve used queues to make that happen. Redis has been on my radar for awhile now, but yesterday I drove my Chevy to the levee and guess what? The levee is NOT dry people. I mean, who drinks rye anyway these days? Old people.

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I had occasion tonight to give a quick demo of CouchDB.  This is so simple its almost not worth blogging about, but hey, good software is supposed to be simple.

Install
On your Mac:

sudo port install couchdb
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install couchdb

You’re done; now to play.

Futon Admin Interface
This allows you to create a DB, create records, etc.

1. Open http://localhost:5984/_utils/
2. …
3. Prosper

Using our old friend curl

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/mlg/ #create a db
curl -X GET http://localhost:5984/mlg/ #get a whole bunch of info about the db
curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/mlg/ -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d '{"body": "Here is a paragraph"}' #create a record