Lx, linuX and X-mas time

31 Dec 2014

x100 , elementary os , unix , antoniocapelo.com

In this post I’ll talk about How I made a small (but significant) improvement on my site availability. Also, I’ll share a cool JS functional library I got to know and some thoughts on my current linux distro. As usual, some photos, these were taken between a quick trip to Lisbon and Christmas with my Fuji X-100.

Improving my site availability - Linux Service

As I mentioned on my ‘Work the Flow’ post, I’m hosting my personal website on a Digital Ocean droplet, serving it with a nodeJS server. On that post I said that I just needed to run npm start for the server to start up. However, that seemed to be a weak solution against some hardware problems, such as the droplet re-booting due to Digital Ocean’s own migration process or other issues.

Clearly the best solution is to include the start of my nodeJS server on the machine boot. So (not being a Linux Pro by any means) I discovered that ubuntu comes packed with upstart, which is is responsible for starting tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running.

So I ended up with a small .conf file which defines a service meant to control my server:

Not only this config starts up automatically my server in case of a droplet re-boot, but it let’s me start it, stop it and check its status more easily:

status node-antoniocapelo-site
start node-antoniocapelo-site
stop node-antoniocapelo-site

which is the same as

initctl status node-antoniocapelo-site
initctl start node-antoniocapelo-site
initctl stop node-antoniocapelo-site

Ramda

Ramda is a functional library for javascript programmers, used on the Frontend Master’s ‘Hardcore Functional Programming in JavaScript’ course. I played around with it and its pretty cool - I know there are already some libs meant to do functional stuff with, but this one is referenced as the best in that ‘field’ - and it’s nice to review some of the basic functional programming concepts. For example, a simple fork function for making two separate operations and working over their results, with a single input and with 0 auxiliary variables is defined by:

// being _ the Ramda library:
var fork = _.curry(function(lastly, f, g, x){
	return lastly(f(x), g(x));
});

// to calculate the average, for example, we just do:
var average = fork(_.divide, _.sum, _.size);
avg([1,2,3,4,5]); // 3 :) 

Linux Distro - Elementary OS

Last week I found myself without a personal computer to play/work with (sad, I know). As it’s a temporary situation I decided to use an ‘old’ computer we had laying around by the house. Being a mac user for about 8-9 years it’s always frustrating to work with windows environments so I decided to try a new Linux distro and I chose the Elementary OS.

I must say that I’m impressed. It’s relatively quick (even on my HP Pavillion), it has a nice GUI (as a mac user I cherish that) and it’s still pretty handy for coding. I’m using it everyday for music (spotify/soundcloud), development (mainly sublime and terminal), browsing and even for gaming.

Of course it has some quirks (it doesn’t behave well on sleep/waking up, the sound is somewhat low and sometimes I have to be a little patient with it) but overall it’s a nice distro, clean, smart and it’s nice to work with.

Bellow there’s a list of the main things I needed after a fresh OS install: