In Scribd we have tons of analytics data generated daily that should be somehow processed. Currently we use MySQL to store all this stuff, but that is not the best option for logging lots of data. So we’ve decided to try some more specialized tools, which could help us to store and process our data. The most interesting thing which could simplify analytics data collecting was Scribe. As it turned out, installation process is not so simple as expected so here you will find a few steps manual on how to install Scribe on a developer machine.

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Last week I have posted an article on how to write ssh host name on the iTerm’s background. I have been looking for something like this for a while, and this is that killer feature, which forced me to switch to iTerm from classic Terminal app. Here I will show what settings I have tuned to get iTerm more comfortable to use as for me.

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How many ssh session do you open usually? In Scribd we have about 50 machines, and most of the time I have to connect to several of them to do my work. But there is a big problem — it’s hard to distinguish among different tabs in iTerm. Of course, you can see the host where you connected to in the tab title, but the title is really small, low contrast, etc. So I had a dream since I’ve started using Mac — to get current host written with large letters on the background.

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I have not posted anything here for a long time. It’s hard to start blogging again, so I will write a short tips and tricks series called “Memo“. Today I’m going to talk about two Ruby gems I’m using in all my Ruby on Rails project: mysql and memcached. Every time I try to install or update those gems on Mac OS X following error occurs:

And then I’m googling on how to install these gems. It’s time simplify my life and post commands here.

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