I’ve been experimenting with a few things this week while trying to wade my way through Twitter’s infrastructure. One tool that’s been of extreme help in digging through source code and an extensive set of configuration files has been ack!

It’s the only piece of software I know of that has ‘–thpppt’ as an option (Install it, and you’ll see.) It’s an optimized replacement for many of your favorite awk | grep | sed combinations, and includes syntax highlighting.

In other news, I’ve resolved a number of bugs and issued new code for running mod_telemetry on 64-bit Linux. Check out the SVN trunk for the latest branch. The data that this module has been providing to me has been invaluable for researching slow points in the back end.