Frustrating experience with AWS Beanstalk

I have used Azure's Paas services before. For a friend's website, I was trying out AWS's Paas offering today. The experience is nothing less than just frustrating. I have a fully functioning rails application. It is working fine locally. However, when I tried to upload the application using the beanstalk command line, I am seeing the following error.

ERROR: [Instance: i-002808929ac3e534b] Command failed on instance. Return code: 1 Output: (TRUNCATED)...SyntaxError: Invalid CSS after "": expected selector or at-rule, was "{"
(sass):1
/opt/rubies/ruby-2.3.1/bin/bundle:23:in `load'
/opt/rubies/ruby-2.3.1/bin/bundle:23:in `

'
Tasks: TOP => assets:precompile
(See full trace by running task with --trace).
Hook /opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/pre/11_asset_compilation.sh failed. For more detail, check /var/log/eb-activity.log using console or EB CLI.

Now the complete log is not available here. You need to log into the instance and check it. However, as the lines show, it is a problem with asset pre-compilation. I tried running asset compilation locally; but I do not see this error. Interestingly, the instance created by the CLI did not allow permission for SSH. It's acceptable source was set to some other IP. It seems to me they launched their product in a hurry.

Skype uses its own DNS

Skype is a really interesting software. Its text chat UI is mature and audio and video chat facility are very nice. Skype has this interesting ability of working independent of the DNS configuration of your system. Even when the DNS server your system is configured for, gets poisoned, Skype does not get affected.

In fact, I leverage this ability of Skype to detect network issues due to DNS service being down. On such an occasion, when the browsers were not working but Skype was, I pointed my DNS configuration to Google's DNS servers (listed below) and the browsers worked fine.

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

To take a deeper look, I tracked the connections Skype was making. I used the following to do that.

netstat -taucp | grep skype

Initially it was sending out packets from port 51395 of my localhost. After I logged in, I find the following connections:

tcp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                     LISTEN      19207/skype      
tcp        0      1 H:47078          111.221.77.159:40016    SYN_SENT    19207/skype      
udp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 localhost:51395 *:*                                 19207/skype


H about is the hostname of my system and the IP 111.221.77.159 is owned by Microsoft, Microsoft Singapore to be specific. Interesting sequence of connections, when I lookup a contact and open the corresponding chat window.

tcp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                     LISTEN      19207/skype      
tcp        0    516 H:46808          193.95.154.39:33033     ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
tcp        0      0 H:47078          111.221.77.159:40016    ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 *:33626                 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 *:41980                 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 localhost:51395 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 H:32897          *:*                                 19207/skype


The IP 193.95.154.39 maps to Skype Technologies. After sending a line of text on  the chat window, the following connections were made.

tcp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                     LISTEN      19207/skype      
tcp        0      0 H:46808          193.95.154.39:33033     ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
tcp        0      0 H:47078          111.221.77.159:40016    ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
tcp        0    236 H:44172          157.56.123.82:https     ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
tcp        0      1 H:45020          91.190.216.9:www-http   SYN_SENT    19207/skype      
tcp        0     75 H:48246          78.141.179.14:12350     ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 *:33626                 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 localhost:51395 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 H:32897          *:*                                 19207/skype


The IPs 157.56.123.82, 91.190.216.9, 78.141.179.14 map to Microsoft Corp Redmond, Skype and Entreprise des Postes et Telecommunications respectively. After that, when I was not doing any more activity on Skype, the following network activity was seen.

tcp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                     LISTEN      19207/skype      
tcp        0      0 H:47078          111.221.77.159:40016    ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
tcp        0      0 H:47362          db3msgr6011307.ga:https ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
tcp        0      0 H:48246          78.141.179.14:12350     ESTABLISHED 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 *:42520                 *:*                                 19207/skype      
udp        0      0 localhost.localdo:51395 *:*                                 19207/skype


db3msgr6011307.ga does not have any DNS entries. Suggestions for digging further are welcome.

When "justified" is not justified

While using Microsoft Office, "justified" alignment is not properly implemented.

Funny Windows

I am using Windows 7 Service Pack 1. Windows might have got a bit more secure and flashy than Windows XP; but it continues to be funny. Today morning only, I encountered the following queer incidents.

1. In the (My)Computer window, I wanted to see Properties for each drive. So, I directly right clicked on them. However, each time it took me to System Properties. To get to Properties of a drive, I had to first select the drive and then right click on it again and select Properties.

2. While cleaning up my C: it showed 730mb will be cleared. Before cleaning, my C: had 6.77gb free and after cleaning it had 8.33gb free. Strange calculation indeed.

3. Last night, I had just put the lid of my system down and slept. According to my Settings, the system should have gone to Sleep mode too and most likely it did. In the morning, I was unable to connect to my wireless network. After banging my head for being forced to use such a system that does not offer any clue as to what the error was, I decided to try a restart. During restart, I found some disk corruption was causing the trouble. [Using Linux on the same machine for years, never gave me a disk corruption.] Also interestingly after recovering from corruption, I found that my wireless card was set to configure to IP address 192.168.190.1 with subnet mask 255.255.255.0 though I had set it to obtain the IP address automatically.

Mouse vs keyboard

Over the years, we have had a conflict between two groups of users: GUI-friendly and CLI-friendly. Mostly the CLI-friendly people think that the keyboard is faster than mouse while the GUI-friendly people think that the mouse is faster. A research by Apple shows that actually it is the mouse that is faster in most cases although people think the keyboard to be. However, it is not the metrics that matter; but the mentality that is developed.

A programmer typing in full flow is very unlikely to break his flow and hold the mouse. He probably would prefer the whole window to be controllable from the keyboard. That way the interface is letting the programmer do his job without being distracted towards using a mouse. Emacs is a classic example of this.

However, people who work primarily with the mouse like desktop users who are copying files or playing music can use the mouse with ease letting the other hand rest.

Apple and Microsoft provide a nice GUI interface and are doing good business because most of their users are GUI-friendly. However, linux allows choice. There are great GUI windows managers like Enlightenment and there are also tiling window managers like awesome.

Rtf file size comparision

Recently, I was experimenting with rtf files. I found something really interesting. An rtf file containing 14 unformatted character created in Microsoft Word turned out to be around 30 kb in size, while an rtf file containing 54 formatted chars created in OpenOffice was only 2kb in size.

I was doubting Microsoft when I read the following line in the rtf specification v1.0:
"All styles in the document's style sheet can be included, even if not all the styles are used." However, when I actually tested them, I found their software to be producing even larger files than I expected.