05 January, 2013

Count string characters in Python

Simple code that calculates frequency of letters:
from collections import Counter

s = '''
She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.
The shells she sells are sea-shells, I'm sure.
For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore
Then I'm sure she sells sea-shore shells.
'''

print Counter(s)


Result:
Counter({'s': 32, 'e': 29, ' ': 25, 'l': 18, 'h': 16, 'a': 7, 'r': 7, '-': 6, 'o': 6, '\n': 5, '.': 3, 'n': 3, "'": 2, 'I': 2, 'T': 2, ' m': 2, 'u': 2, 't': 2, ',': 1, 'F': 1, 'S': 1, 'f': 1, 'i': 1})

04 January, 2013

Recover broken Amazon EC2 instance

Sometimes shit happens, accidentally.
Especially  when you lost ssh access to your virtual server (e.g. due to errors in  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, /etc/sudoers, /etc/group, /etc/shadow or another important config file).

When you catch errors like:

No supported authentication methods available

or

sudo
sudo: >>> /etc/sudoers: syntax error near line 1 <<<
sudo: parse error in /etc/sudoers near line 1
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin


Don't worry, inside the Amazon cloud you can repair almost all.

Follow these simple steps to solve the problem:
  1. Via AWS console:
    1. Launch new temporary EC2 micro-instance in the same availability zone.
    2. Stop broken instance.
    3. Detach root EBS volume from the broken instance.
    4. Attach this EBS to the temporary instance (as /dev/sdf).
  2. Via SSH console from the temporary instance:
    1. Mount this EBS:
      sudo mount /dev/xvdf /mnt
    2. Fix all problems on mounted file system.
    3. Unmount this EBS:
      sudo umount /mnt
  3. Via AWS console:
    1. Detach this EBS from the temporary instance.
    2. Attach this EBS to the broken instance (as /dev/sda1).
    3. Start broken instance.
  4. Check that broken instance now is healthy (available via ssh and everything is functioning normally).
  5. Then you can stop temporary instance (or terminate it)
I hope this article will make someone little bit happy)

03 January, 2013

Xameleon

Just released web-camflash application Xameleon
Have Fun at Xameleon :-)