A tip to speed up commands on ssh significantly, especially for long running sessions. (Note – All the instructions are only for Ubuntu 12.04)

1. Put the following in ~/.ssh/config

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 Host *
    ControlMaster auto
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/auth/%r@%h:%p
    ControlPersist yes

1. chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config
2. mkdir ~/.ssh/auth

and Voila!

In my testing, the ssh connect and exit time to a test instance, dropped from 5.25-5.28 sec to 0.84-0.87 sec.

From our own experience designing and operating a highly available, highly scalable ecommerce platform, we have come to realize that relational databases should only be used when an application really needs the complex query, table join and transaction capabilities of a full-blown relational database. In all other cases, when such relational features are not needed, a NoSQL database service like DynamoDB offers a simpler, more available, more scalable and ultimately a lower cost solution.

            — Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com on when to use RDBMS

I came across this quote in an article while researching DynamoDB. As much as I respect Werner, I would suggest take his recommendation on the criteria on database selection with a pinch of salt, due to the obvious conflict of interest — He has a database to sell.

I have been thinking to revamp the site for quite sometime and finally got around it. The old version was hosted on github, courtesy github pages which was a fairly simple one page setup, with links to my blog, github repository etc. For the new site, I needed to have one place to maintain the blogposts and webpages, so I started looking for jekyll style static page generators so that I can keep using github for hosting (for free! :D ) and really liked what Octopress had to offer.

I have the website hosted on mohitranka.github.com (see here on how to do it and mohitranka.com is merely a CNAME for it).

Hello Octopress!

Octopress is a blogging framework written on top of Jekyll. It has nifty little commands to create new pages and posts using markdown, growing number of themes and plugins, which are everything you need for your static content based website.