A couple of posts back, I wrote about how you can get status info out of a long running dd process by sending it a signal. The functionally is something you can bring to your own Ruby scripts.

OK, so you know how to get data into AWS S3, what about getting it out? Previously, we uploaded entries from an imagined photo contest into a bucket. We sent a pair of files, a JSON file with the form data and the image. Let’s presume there’s a Rails app, it’s details don’t matter, but it has a model ContestEntry and we want to populate it from the S3 data. We’re going to write a script to do the import.

dd is the *NIX byte copying utility. It’s typically used for copying disks, creating disk images, or initializing disks from images. It can also be using to recover damaged files that can’t otherwise be copied. I mostly use it to make create bootable USB sticks for server installs. However, it’s also pretty opaque.

A couple of posts back, I walked through uploading an image to AWS S3 without the need for a server of your own. This has the advantage of being a fully standalone, browser client only solution. Of course images by themselves aren’t very useful. Likely we want to collect some additional information.

Previously, I covered uploading to S3 from a Rails app using a presigned-url. This works just fine, but means the data flows from the visitors computer to your server before heading to S3. I’ve previously showed how to upload the file directly to S3, which requires a world-writable bucket.

There’s also a hybrid solution that has the server generate a presigned-url which the browser then uses to go direct to S3, allowing the data to bypass the server. Let’s look at two ways to do this.

Last time, I walked through directly uploading an image to an S3 bucket from the browser with no server involved. That last bit is important. If you are using a server, then PreSigned URLs are a better choice as they do not require a world-writable bucket.

Want to upload an image directly to S3 from the browser? Here’s what you need.

Previously, I worked through how to get messages from an IMAP server and work with the message headers. Let’s look at extracting data from those messages.

There’s a really solid, tried and true, Internet wide messaging queue. It’s been around for decades and has first class support in Ruby. What is it? Email. That’s right, email.

Here’s something slightly random and the exact opposite of technical, the Bullet Journal.

I’ve tried just every to-do/productivity app/site out there. OmniFocus, Things, Trello, Evernote, Org Mode to name five. But, I never stick to them. They start of well enough, yet end up cluttered with things I’m never going to do. Or things I sort of did. Or things that are too nebulous to be meaningful.