arthur richards

In spite of the Orwellian title, this is about monitoring the Subversion revision control system using Monit on a Linux server. I recently set up Monit to monitor services running a server. It's pretty neat - you can tell it what services to listen to, how to decide if they are responsive, and what to do in the event that they're not. I found a bunch of simple config scripts for most of the services I wanted to monitor on their wiki, but couldn't find a cut-and-paste solution for monitoring Subversion, so I wrote my own.

For our media work with Adapting to Scarcity, we use SD cards to store much of the video and audio footage that we get. As part of our normal workflow, we make a disk image copy of the SD card before erasing it to get more footage. I wrote a really basic shell script to facilitate the process - read on to check it out.

Serious nerd alert - but if you use Drupal and/or Subversion, you'll likely find this interesting. Lately I've been dealing with a Drupal module called 'dbscripts 'that helps me track changes made in a database with Subversion (SVN). Besides a few moments requiring banging my head against the wall, it's a pretty slick module - before this, keeping track of database changes and making it easy to roll back to a previous version was not something easy to do. But one thing that's been tricky to manage with the module is remembering to add/delete the files it generates/deletes in my Subversion repository. This has had nasty consequences of forgetting to check-in a newly added database table or causing conflicts by regenerating a supposedly deleted database table during a database restore... Shell scripts to the rescue!

While trying to get some songs off of a 160GB iPod Classic (to a different computer from the one the iPod is registered with), I somehow managed to corrupt the iTunesDB file. This is a most important file, as it tells the iPod what songs are on it. Normally you can just plug the iPod into the computer it's registered with - when it synchs with iTunes, the iTunesDB file will be restored. In my case, that computer is 1500 miles away. After unsuccessfully trying a bunch of stuff on an OS X machine, I turned to Linux and GNUpod to save the day. Read on to see how it's done.