Ben McCann

Co-founder of Connectifier.
Investor at C3 Ventures.
Google and CMU alum.

Ben McCann on LinkedIn Ben McCann on AngelList Ben McCann on Twitter

Ben

Automated Play Framework Testing with Jenkins

11/26/2013

Jenkins automates builds and tests. This post describes setting up Jenkins for the Play 2 Framework. First off, you need a machine with a good amount of resources. I tried first on a small cloud machine with 2GB of RAM and it was not sufficient, so get a machine with 4GB of RAM. Next you Read More

Installing Mesos and Marathon on Ubuntu

11/23/2013

Mesos is a distributed task framework. Marathon runs long-running tasks on Mesos. Here’s how you can install the latest versions. #### Dependencies: Java & Zookeeper sudo apt-get install -y default-jdk zookeeper-bin zookeeperd #### Install Mesos ubuntu_version=”12.04″ curl -fL “http://downloads.mesosphere.io/master/ubuntu/${ubuntu_version}/mesos_0.14.2_amd64.deb” –output mesos.deb sudo dpkg -i mesos.deb rm mesos.deb #### Install Marathon sudo mkdir -p /opt/marathon sudo Read More

Installing Node.js on Ubuntu 12.04

08/29/2013

The version of Node.js that comes with Ubuntu is outdated. To install a more recent version download the binary from nodejs.org. When install packages via npm, be sure to use the -g flag. E.g.: sudo npm install -g bower sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

Running ElasticSearch in Production

08/20/2013

ElasticSearch is a very awesome tool with very awful documentation. One thing you’ll need to be sure to do is update the ES_HEAP_SIZE in your /etc/init.d/elasticsearch to use half your system’s memory in production. The default will give you awful performance. TOTAL_MEM_K=`grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo | awk ‘{print $2}’ ` HALF_MEM_K=$((TOTAL_MEM_K / 2)) ES_HEAP_SIZE=”${HALF_MEM_K}k”

Installing SimpleCV and OpenCV on Ubuntu

05/09/2013

There are many different directions for installing these two software packages and many of them do not work without modification on Ubuntu or install old versions that are broken. To install OpenCV use Jay Rambhia’s install script. And to install SimpleCV, follow the directions on the SimpleCV GitHub page.

tmux tutorial

04/24/2013

tmux is a cool tool that allows you to have multiple screens within a single terminal and to have persistent SSH sessions. The documentation and most tutorials are horribly complex, but it’s actually not that hard to use the basic functionality. Start a new session with: tmux new Detach your session with: tmux detach Reattach Read More

Setting up NX

03/26/2013

I wanted a remote graphical environment on a machine in the cloud. It’s very easy to download No Machine’s NX and install it. You’ll also have to run sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop unity-2d gdm if you’re on a server, since the server install doesn’t come with a graphical environment by default. NX 4 Note that Read More

Using Ruby on Ubuntu

02/02/2013

Do not use sudo apt-get install ruby-rvm to install the RVM that comes with Ubuntu because it will not work well. First, be sure to setup the terminal to work with RVM. Now you can install RVM and Ruby: gpg –keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net –recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable –ruby ruby -v A Read More

Connecting to SoftLayer VPN on Ubuntu

12/09/2012

SoftLayer has a private network which is accessible only via VPN. It took me a really long time to figure out how to connect on Ubuntu 12.04 running on VirtualBox. To configure the VPN connection, from the network manager icon in the top right corner click: “VPN Connections” > “Configure VPN…”. Use a PPTP VPN, Read More

Custom OS install on SoftLayer

10/31/2012

SoftLayer will allow to setup a handful of OS images by default, but requires you to jump through extra hoops if you’d like to provide your own ISO or go through the OS install screens yourself. For example, this is most likely the way you’d install LVM if you’d like to backup your database via Read More

Newer Posts
Older Posts