I was lucky enough to get given a Chromebook whilst attending Google IO 2011 last year and I must admit - I really like it. At first I thought I would get annoyed at the inability to install local programs (other than Chrome and the shell it comes with) - in reality however, when at home, virtually all my computer usage is on the Chromebook. I guess a browser and shell is all I need.

The other day I turned on the Chromebook to find the terminal no longer worked. The usual Ctrl+Alt+T keyboard shortcut yielded no results. I know this problem didn’t just effect me, because it also happened to my work colleague’s Chromebook. Despite this, my first port of call (a quick google) resulted in nothing useful, so I thought I’d try a reinstall of Chrome OS.

How do I get my terminal back?

Reinstalling Chrome OS only takes around 10 minutes and solved the problem for me - I got my beloved terminal back.

Follow these instructions to reinstall Chrome OS.

The good thing about being forced to run almost everything in the cloud is that when it comes to reinstalling the OS, you have nothing to lose! No local programs to reinstall. Provided you sync your settings, bookmarks, extensions and webstore apps to Google, you will automatically get them all back after the reinstall is complete.

Amazon EC2 Gotchas

Amazon EC2 is pretty awesome. In under a minute you can fire up a server in the cloud and SSH in. The SSH access combined with the fact you can run your choice of OS, makes it much more flexible than other cloud platforms as a service, such as Heroku, Google App Engine and Cloud Foundry. The down side is that there is a lot more configuration to do, so it is probably going to take a little longer to deploy your app, than it would with Heroku.

read later | read now

tags: amazon-ec2 cloudkick

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Six Reasons Scala is Awesome

Scala is a really nice programming language to work with and is easy for devs coming from the Java world (like me) to pick up, due to the fact it runs on the JVM. I thought I’d share the six main reasons I’ve been using Scala for many of my projects at the moment.

read later | read now

tags: scala

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Powering your Blog with Pelican and Git

When I decided to start writing this blog, I played around with blogger, wordpress and tumblr, but didn't really get along with any of them - they all seemed a bit too heavyweight for what I wanted. I didn't need much - just the ability to specify some HTML/CSS for the styling and then a quick and easy way to write and publish posts.

read later | read now

tags: pelicangit pelican git github amazon ec2 cloud9-ide

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pelicangit 0.1 released

In my [previous post](http://theon.github.com/powering-your-blog-with-pelican-and-git.html) I talked about my motivation for creating [pelicangit](https://github.com/theon/pelicangit). I've spent this last week polishing it up a bit and have now made v0.1 available on PyPI. If you already have pelican and pip installed on your machine, installing pelicangit is now as easy as running `sudo pip install pelicangit`.

read later | read now

tags: pelican git github pelicangit

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Documenting the JSON Schema of your Rest APIs

Recently at work I have been looking at how to document our Restful APIs. After a chat with a couple of developers we had defined the following requirements we wanted from our restful API documentation: * We needed to be able to document the URIs, HTTP methods, querystring parameters. * We wanted to be able to specify a bit of descriptive text associated with each API call. * A tool embedded in the docs that allowed the reader to call the live deployed API would be a plus. * Being able to define the schema of JSON objects returned by the APIs was a must have.

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tags: rest api iodocs mashery nodejs

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Remote Controlled Thermostat with Arduino

I was out on a walk on a cold day and thought it would be great to be able to remotely turn on the heating in time for when I got back home, which led to this; my first Arduino project. The remote control is achieved over the Internet and the form is web based, so could equally be controlled via any mobile phone with a web browser.

read later | read now

tags: arduino hack scala spring jetty

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Chrome OS Version 19

I've mentioned in my previous posts how much I like my chromebook and last week Google released version 19 of Chrome OS, with some pretty major updates. I'll be honest; I'm not a fan of the changes.

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tags: chromebook chrome-os

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You May Want to Drop that EC2 Micro Instance

A few months ago I wrote a [blog post](http://theon.github.com/amazon-ec2-gotchas.html) about gotchas when deploying applications to Amazon EC2. Despite not developing anything for EC2 at the moment, I learnt a new one today. It all started when I received a bunch of emails from Cloudkick (the monitoring system I mentioned in my previous post) stating that the API I had deployed there about a year ago was timing out. So I SSHed in to see what the deal was.

read later | read now

tags: amazon-ec2

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