RabbitMQ Highly Available Queues and Clustering Using Amazon EC2

Using RabbitMQ on Amazon EC2 is an easy, performant way to operate a service oriented application. It’s pretty trivial to set up and once you do, you can usually forget about it and go about your day. Until Amazon has an EC2 outage. And your bus goes down. And you don’t have a plan for getting back up quickly. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fortunately, since version 2.6.0 (I believe…I could be wrong…) RabbitMQ has supported Highly Available queues (basically replicating queues across nodes in a cluster) to ensure that you don’t need to be choked by a single point of failure in your messaging infrastructure and can still be performant and scalable. Read On →

How Do I Download ImgBurn?

Which one of these gets me ImgBurn? All I want to do is burn a DVD. Why is this so hard?

Exploring Jasmine BDD Framework for Javascript

It has been AGES since I’ve put anything down on paper. I remember when I was at least writing something here (…anything) that my communication skills only improved. I can tell in the past year my skills have deteriorated a bit as I have not been required to write as much. This must be remedied, and I’ve found a great candidate that I think both is personally applicable and hopefully will benefit someone out there as well. Read On →

Programmatically Uploading Videos to YouTube Using C#

Recently I spent some time investigating the Google Data .NET Client library. Specifically, I was interested in the YouTube Data API. What I wanted to do was programmatically upload a video file to my YouTube account. I ran into a couple of (minor) speed bumps along the way, and noticed there were a few things that weren’t as clear as they should have been. Hopefully I can clarify the problems I encountered, in case future developers run into the same trip ups. Read On →

Here's to New Beginnings...

Today I started a new chapter in my life. Today was my first day as a Senior Software Engineer for Mediafly in Chicago, IL! I don’t believe I’m at liberty to discuss details of the underlying architecture out of my respect to my colleagues, but in short I will be working on a C# content distribution system that allows users to receive audio & video content anywhere (there are mobile applications for almost every major phone platform, among others). Read On →