This is a brief video and tutorial on building your first VR experience in the Decentraland VR platform and getting you started with the tools, a-minus syntax. By the end of this tutorial you will have an area of land with a Lambo on it you can walk around. Publishing the land to the Ethereum blockchain will come in a later video.

Sorry for the fan noise, the client seemed to have killed my CPU 🙂

Since my first IT job ever, I’ve taken part in a tradition started by the guy I was replacing. A tradition known to us as escape.pl, and something people in my local Linux Administrator community have kept with for well over a decade now.

The Most Important Script You’ll Ever Write?

The first time I saw it it was written in Perl, I’ve since written them in Bash, Java and now Javascript. I’ve just seen one written in AWK. Some are cleverer than others, some just do the bare minimum. Some are executed by hand, others are run each time a new terminal is opened thanks to .profile, .bashrc or whatever’s managing your shell environment.

We’re using an old version of Upstart, on Centos, to manage stopping and starting our Node.js daemons, and one of the things the script does, like any good deamon, is change the user of the deamon process from root to something more applicable, security and all that 😉

The scripts look a little like this

!upstart
description "Amazing Node.js Daemon"
author "idimmu"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown
env PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
env NAME="amazing-daemon"
script
export HOME="/root"
cd /opt/idimmu/$NAME
echo $$ > /var/run/$NAME.pid
exec sudo -u idimmu /usr/bin/node /opt/idimmu/$NAME/server.js >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log 2>&1
end script
pre-start script
echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (upstart) Starting $NAME" >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log
end script
pre-stop script
rm /var/run/$NAME.pid
echo "[`date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%T.%3NZ`] (upstart) Stopping $NAME" >> /var/log/$NAME/stdout.log
end script

Which is nice, as it means we can use Upstart to stop/start/status deamons really nicely. The equivalent init.d script looked really horrible.