Found a great motivational post, “Fail Upwards“, that I wanted to put on my motivation board on Pinterest. Clicked my “Pin it” bookmarklet to pin the post but was greeted with this sad message:

If you want your content to be sharable on the booming social sharing site, Pinterest, then include a related and cool looking image to go with it! … or just include a cool photo ; )

This blog post isn’t so much about programming or the technical stuff I deal with day to day but I feel that it is important enough to share it here. If these two videos are not viewable on your device I apologize.

The next video is on the New York Times Opinions Page. I don’t agree with A.C. Graylings statement that there is not God but I like the rest of what he says. You can read about it and watch it at http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/10/31/opinion/100000001141283/ac-grayling.html

At work I am implementing ErrorStack, Graphite, and StatsD into our projects and tools. We are doing this so we can better understand how our users interact with our products and so we can respond faster and more efficiently to errors.

• ErrorStack helps us collect, report, and notify us of errors across all of our applications no matter where they are.
• Graphite stores and graphes analytical data provided by our products.
• StatsD run by NodeJS collects our analytical data via UDP so there is minimal impact on the performance of our applications as we collect the data.
• Cron helps us run various tasks on our servers and helps us ensure that things are running smoothly

Just a minute or two later I got an email alert from ErrorStack notifying me that Node had died. After checking the graphite graph again I saw that the total metrics received had gone back up because the Cron script was able to restart the process. I love it when a plan comes together like that.

#!/bin/bash
PID=`pidof node`
if [ $PID > 0 ]; then
  echo "node still running"
else
  echo "node died"
  curl -d "Msg=node died&_s=yourErrorStackKeyGoesHere&_r=json" http://www.errorstack.com/submit
  # command to start node server again goes here
fi

Here is some of the code that I use to report errors to ErrorStack https://github.com/MikeGrace/ErrorStack-Reporting-Tools

Bob Pearson posted on his blog today 10 things he has learned from Michael Dell on innovation and collaboration. I have taken my favorite parts and shared them here.

• We get smarter when we listen well.
• Most innovation occurs step by step. It is rarely about the big idea.
• Collaboration leads to the best ideas
• The most powerful driver of human behavior online is to help your peers.
• When companies see themselves as peers, they serve their customers well
• People get a sense of empowerment when you allow them to participate and recognize their contribution.
• The real action occurs after the idea is received.
• Let go, allow your team to try new ideas, fail occasionally and end up with a great batting average.