SSH-Keys User access (on AWS EC2 instances)

August 8th, 2010 § 0

After you get acess to your EC2 instance via the default EC2 certificates (which you can via your AWS admin panel) using usually “ubuntu” as login name you might have to grant access to any external guy, like a web designer.

It’s not a good practise to enable password access but SSH-Keys. As this is the second time I have lost 1.5h searching for how to do this, I am detailing it here.

*on your local machine*
$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ssh-keygen -b 1024 -t dsa
Give a suitable name to your new certificate file and a password. This will generate two file, which one of them is a public key (smartly enough is the one ending in .pub).

Copy this file, let’s call it my_public_certificate.pub, to your remote EC2 instance server and append it to authorized_keys file.

*in your remote machine (EC2 instance)*
$cat my_public_certificate.pub >> /home/your_web_designer_directory/.ssh/authorized_keys

Now the *tricky* part: ensure the following directory/file permissions:
$chown 755 your_web_designer:your_web_designer /home/your_web_designer_directory
$chown 700 your_web_designer:your_web_designer /home/your_web_designer_directory/.ssh
$chown 600 your_web_designer:your_web_designer /home/your_web_designer_directory/.ssh/authorized_keys

*back on your local machine*
$ssh your_web_designer@remote_machine_IP -i ~/.ssh/my_private.certificate (not the public, hein!)

Home it saves same hour or two to anyone…

http://blog.taggesell.de/index.php?/archives/73-Managing-Amazon-EC2-SSH-login-and-protecting-your-instances.html
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?categoryID=100&externalID=1233
http://www.slackbook.org/html/essential-sysadmin-hardusers.html

Mailchimp Signup From with Javascript - Portuguese Translation

August 3rd, 2010 § 0

Imagine you’d like to embed a Mailchimp Newsletter like this one at vendder.com footer or this at the top of one store running on vendder.com and you’d like to translate the error/success messages that output from MailChimp.

Fortunately for you I have the copy&paste code here (Portuguese version).

mce_jQuery('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').show();
mce_jQuery('#mce-'+resp.result+'-response').html(msg);
}
}
}
mce_jQuery.extend(mce_jQuery.validator.messages, {
required:"Este campo é obrigatório.",
remote:"Por favor corrija este campo.",
email:"Por favor insira um email válido.",
url:"Por favor, digite um URL válido.",
date:"Por favor insira uma data válida.",
dateISO:"Por favor insira uma data válida (ISO).",
number:"Por favor insira um número válido.",
digits:"Por favor, digite apenas dígitos.",
creditcard:"Por favor insira um número válido de cartão de crédito.",
equalTo:"Por favor, insira o mesmo valor novamente.",
accept:"Por favor insira um valor com uma extensão válida.",
maxlength:mce_jQuery.format("Por favor, não insira mais de {0} caracteres."),
minlength:mce_jQuery.format("Por favor, insira pelo menos {0} caracteres."),
rangelength:mce_jQuery.format("Por favor insira um valor entre {0} e {1} caracteres."),
range:mce_jQuery.format("Por favor insira um valor entre {0} e {1}."),
max:mce_jQuery.format("Por favor insira um valor inferior ou igual a {0}."),
min:mce_jQuery.format("Por favor insira um valor maior ou igual a {0}.")
});


Note: mce_jQuery.extend is where the code start.

Access your EC2 instance with AWS private key

July 9th, 2010 § 0

OK, someone set you up a EC2 instance and now you need to get access to it.

Requirements:
- the EC2 private key (here it will be called key.pem)
- a terminal (though you can use some SSH client, I am just talking about an UNIX terminal here)
- your machine IP (here it will be 79.123.321.1)

Do the following:
1. Download your key to ~/Downloads
2. Open the Terminal
3. Go to your ssh directory $cd ~/.ssh/
4. Copy your key $cp ~/Downloads/key.pem .
5. Tight up permissions $chmod 400 key.pem
6. Test it $ssh ubuntu@79.123.321.1 -i ~/.ssh/key.pem -vvv
6.1 -i will set the path, -vvv sets verbose mode
7. Edit your config file to avoid doing -i ~/.ssh/key.pem all the time
$vim ~/.ssh/config
paste and edit this text
Host 79.123.321.1
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/key.pem
8. Access your EC2 from anywhere in your machine with
$ssh ubuntu@79.123.321.1

Beautifully Inspiring

June 19th, 2010 § 0

There are few stuff on the internet of videos that are truly inspiring. This video is one of them.

Ruby ASCII-8BIT / UTF-8 encoding distresses

June 15th, 2010 § 0

#reminder

Ruby was written in Japanese and does not stick with a specific encoding standard. That can bring you some distresses if you need latin or other special characters running on your app.

If you are running Ruby version 1.9 (or up) don’t forget about this “if & thens” :

1. if:

puts "café" on any Ruby script
brings you
invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII) (SyntaxError)

then:
use the following magic comment (as it was named)
# encoding: UTF-8
on the first line of your script

if on you .erb template:
<%= "å".encoding%>
outputs ASCII-8BIT and
<%= "å".force_encoding('utf-8') %>
outputs å and you need to be passing this ASCII-8BIT typed strings around…

then:
you’ll need to convert this strings to UTF-8
p string.encoding.name
outputs ASCII-8BIT
string.force_encoding("UTF-8")
pstring.encoding.name
outputs UTF-8

PS: Careful on partials. They also break all the stuff if not encoded.
<%= partial("admin/menu").force_encoding("UTF-8") %>

Freemium models dissected

June 13th, 2010 § 0

Some nice quotes or thoughts of mine:

“2% average customer conversion from free to premium”

“resons for free: time to understand, distribution benefit, network benefit (add value to the ecosystem)”

“might be more important indirect revenue stream (ads) than direct (recurring billing)”

“company can get a double personally due to free/paid features”

“optmize to less surprise. People prefer to pay a higher tier that necessary”

“at the very beggining launch your beta product and also beta business model.”

“limited features or limited capacity?”

“be agile and iterate your business model”

“from my study on 25 freemium model companies the free/payed convertion rate was between 3 to 5%”

“20 to 25% conversion rates? You’re smoking something…”

“entrepreneur live in a reality distortion field”

“let people go deep into your product and start love. Then they pay something”

“customers do not pay for features. They don’t pay for analytics, for better support…”

“raising prices is easier than lowering”

“in the SaaS business 50-60% of staff are in tech support on normal business software 50-60% are in sales”

“many signups, no real usage: wrong. Start collecting analytics on user usage”

“don’t make people think [about paying you on one-time payments]”

“you make what you measure”

“recurly.com and chargify.com help you out”

After the crisis…

June 10th, 2010 § 0

… let’s put the tourists rolling to Reykjavík.

My country also has some nice videos showing off Portugal.

Control - 2007

June 9th, 2010 § 3

Not so recently time ago, and from times to times, I have noticed there are some people reading and sometimes making this words worth something. I have also noticed I am more keen to burst several posts on this blog , depends mainly on the current mindset.

Control, was some DivX movie I holded on this hard-drive for a long time, never had any urge to check it out. Yesterday, I did.

First thing I thought at Sam Riley first shot was “I have seen this face somewhere”. Sam Riley, portrays the lead vocalist on the infamous Joy Division, since the very early days before joining the band through all the roller-coaster of emotions and final mental drain, eventually leading him to be found hanging at his own kitchen room. Her wife found him dead. He was only 23.

The turning point on the story happens when Ian tries to build some sanity back to his life and does that inspirational look, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, to his old room, at his parents house. This is when it flashed: I had seen this Sam Riley image somewhere else.

Ian, worst dichotomy is a fucking cross-road of love. On the one-hand his young wife, whispering a life of plenitude and dreadfulness, begging for support and care; on the other, the charm of an independent and open-minded woman, working at the Belgian embassy and spreading optimistic vibes and ferhormones around. Ian played limbo for a while, going from side to side but eventually succumbed to his own polanskian fate.

There are very few things in life I like more to do than movies. More that drugs, beer and even ice-cream. If I recall correctly, for more than one summer at the tender age of 12 to 14, I have spent most of my days devouring movies. I perfectly remember to visit my local video-club and have to visit some other because there was nothing else worth for me rent there. No guys, there was no torrents back then.

So because of this, that and more, I recommend you to buy salty popcorns and delight yourself with this black-and-white photographic masterpiece.

Upgrading Magento from version 1.3 to 1.4

June 1st, 2010 § 2

Writing about this kind of stuff on my blog is quite selfish, I suppose the only person visiting this posts it’s me, when trying to remember how I have managed to fight away some computer quirk.

Anyway, today I’ve successfully managed to bring a medium-size Magento installation from 1.3 version to to 1.4 to life.

As usual I bumped into some problems along the way. This was the first:

QLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can’t create table ‘db_xxx.catalog_product_index_tier_price’ (errno: 150)

it’s conflicting with an existing table. So go to:

/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/sql/catalog_setup/mysql4-upgrade-1.4.0.0.19-1.4.0.0.20.php

and remove the following from being executed:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `{$installer->getTable('catalog/product_index_website')}` ( ...
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `{$installer->getTable('catalog/product_index_tier_price')}` ( ....

Next, Zend cache was bringing the whole show down:
(sometimes it displays: “There was an error processing your order. Please contact us or try again later.” on order completion)

Invalid mode for clean() method

a simple $rm -rf app/code/core/Zend/Cache/ does the trick.

Now don’t forget to change the base_urls, clean cache and index db.

Vendder, gets a new face

May 18th, 2010 § 0

More info about this stuff at vendder.com

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