Your voice has been loud and clear: custom Scout plugins were being treated as second class citizens, lacking many of the big wins you receive with plugins from our directory.

We’re all for equal rights at Scout – your custom plugins are now getting fair treatment.

First, update to the latest Scout agent (5.3.3 at this time):

gem install scout

The latest agent adds support for two key features: plugin options and self-service private plugins.

A bike commute leaves me more refreshed than a run in the park, a round of video games, or reading a book. David Byrne wrote about this in Bicycle Diaries:

It (biking) facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not much of the unconscious to bubble up. As someone who believes that much of the source of his work and creativity is to be gleaned from those bubbles, it’s a reliable place to find that connection.

There are lots of things I’m looking for when I’m riding a bike: cars turning right, traffic lights, pot holes, babies in strollers, tourists on Segways, etc. On the surface, these look like annoyances, but they are a secret gift: for my own safety, I’m forced to live in the moment. It’s a needed escape from a day spent coding and planning.

When Pixar was working on their first film, Toy Story, the original draft closely followed a checklist of required elements provided by Disney. Disney has been producing animated films since 1923. Lion King, released a year before Toy Story, won two Academy Awards and grossed $783 million.

Then, why was the checklist-driven draft of Toy Story so terrible that Disney shut down production?

Pixar was writing a story they didn’t own. One of the checklist items: edgy characters. Applying that edge to Woody, the main character, resulted in an unwatchable jerk.

Pixar’s crew, led by John Lasseter, rewrote the film in their own voice:

We went back to what we wanted, and that was: the characters liked each other. Because we like each other.

Focusing on telling a great story instead of a checklist worked: in the eight years since the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was created, a Pixar film has won it six times.

Each of their 11 films are among the 50 highest grossing films of all time.

Previously, if you had a large number of monitored servers on Scout it was a minor pain to navigate between them. Now it’s easier: you can filter your servers by name and servers are listed under their assigned group.

You don’t even need a mouse – let your fingers do the walking. Hit the s key to reveal the servers menu. Use up/down arrow keys to navigate between servers. enter takes you to the selected server. esc hides the menu.

It should feel intuitive and a lot like OSX’s Spotlight tool.

If you’re using Scout’s cloud server functionality, you know that new server instances in Scout are named after the machine’s hostname.

In some cases, the hostname isn’t that useful (especially if your servers are on EC2). Now, you can specify a name for the server from the Scout command:

scout --name="Memcached server" KEY ...

... for example, would name the new instance ”Memcached server”. Documentation on naming your server from the scout command is here.

As always, drop us an email if you have any questions!

One of the things I was most curious about before starting Scout was what my day-to-day life would look like as a business owner versus life as a developer. How much time would I spend writing code? Answering emails? Handling the business bits? Would I work more?

Three years after launching Scout, I’d like to help answer that question. I used RescueTime to track activity on my computer. Since almost all of my work is from my laptop, it’s an easy way to get a breakdown.