Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pro Tip: Fullscreen-ness of Apps Seems to be Sticky in Mac OS Lion

I've had a lot of fun the past couple days working with the Terminal app in fullscreen mode. Having entered fullscreen, I can work without distraction, but I can also switch freely back to my desktop or other running apps. Best of all: when I quit Terminal and restart it, it automatically restarts in fullscreen mode. Good job, Apple!

Friday, November 11, 2011

Installing Java on AWS EC2 Instances with Pallet

I have recently been spinning up a lot of t1.micro instances on Amazon's EC2 service. I'm deliberately using minimal / default images, and I need to install Java on them from scratch. There have been reports (and I have experienced myself) that the Java install process hangs indefinitely when installing either Oracle's JRE/JDK or OpenJDK on a t1.micro running Ubuntu. I have been able to install Java successfully by explicitly requiring a 64-bit version of the OS.

Here's how you can do that in your Pallet node-spec: