Nervetree

I just had to redeploy a rails site I wrote for Ameriprise to a different server. Originally I used Mongrel, then Mongrel Cluster, behind modproxybalancer, It was deployed on Ubuntu 7.10.

The new server is Ubuntu 8.04. Since it was a different version of Ubuntu, I couldn’t just tar up the /etc/apache2 directory, I had to redeploy. I had some maintenance issues with the old Mongrel cluster setup, specifically when other people screw with the server and mess up Mongrel. I heard about passenger or ”mod_rails” and thought I’d give it a try.

It was a breeze to set up. And worked as advertised, rails apps deploy as easily as a php app. Just point the virtualhost DocumentRoot to the /app/public and you are done.

It’s as fast as Mongrel and WAY WAY easier to use. I think this will be THE lynch pin that will really let the rails get big.

People don’t give enough credence to easy setup. I’ve worked with server apps that take WEEKS to get set up, and even then, you don’t really know if it’s done correctly. Difficult to setup, simply means difficult to setup, not better. I can battle with a server for 2 weeks and get some pride that I did it, or set it up easily and play with my child, and get pride in that.

Thankfully Rails in general isn’t that difficult. I’ve been coding rails since version 0.7 or so, there have been alot of different server configs to learn, each better than the last in some way. My take on the whole evolution of rails deployments is this: Even if performance is slightly LOWER, I will choose ease of use any day, mod_rails is that choice.

People really like scooters, mine in particular. Over the last week, I had a little old lady sit on it at Mississippi Market, then dump it. She ran inside and I never saw her. I was fiddling with the mirrors and some bar patrons from across the street came over and told me about it The chrome was scratched and some other minor damage, but it's drivable.

Last night someone came and tried to cut the 20mm braided hardened steel lock off of it. They tried a saw first, then a torch. But the cable was too much. What a pain. I called the police and a really nice officer came over. The officer complimented the lock, and said that there are a tonne of scooter thefts in the last week, and the most bike thefts in the officer had ever seen. The officer said that the police department had intelligence that scooter thefts were from protesters who are going to demonstrate at the RNC, they need quick, nimble, fast transport to avoid imperial entanglements ( My words, I can't picture a Wookie on a scooter however).

Maybe, maybe, that's the reason for the scooter thefts, the convention IS at the foot of a huge hill, and that hill would limit protesters ability to move quickly. I don't know how much credence I give the theory. I think the more likely reason is that gas is expensive.

If you know me you know I use a Macbook pro as my main computer. At home I plug this into a 30” monitor. At work, whatever is available. I always get the extended warranty, but usually debate whether I should or not. The last 3 laptops I have had have been replaced under warranty.

A few weeks ago the cooling fan on my gen 1 macbook pro started making noise, the playing card in spokes type of noise. I installed iStat pro widget to monitor the fan speed. About two weeks ago the noise went away. I checked the iStat and found the fan had died. Went to the apple store, to have them replace the fan. The tech there ran some scripts ( while true; do true; done; ( twice) ) to heat up the computer so the fans would turn on. I had iStat running but the temp was in Celsius. I started getting nervous when it went above 100 and said something at 130, he thought it was in Farenheight, then confirmed that the fan was toast. About a week later, I got a call from Apple, they couldn’t fix the problem, and were giving me a new laptop. Sweet. It’s a 2.4 ghz 15” macbook pro, The ironic thing is I was planning on getting a new one pretty soon. After a few days of reloading software, setting up servers and general moving in. I am getting to like the new machine alot. Apple was really cool with honoring their warranty.

The only gripe about it is headphone audio out line noise. There is a intermittent noise of 4 distinct really high pitched sounds and an omnipresent high pitched static. I can only hear them with my Shure e5c sound isolating canalphones, they are much more efficient than large cans so the quiet high pitched sound is really obvious. This is a known bug and most likely hardware. so I soldered a new 1/8th plug on my old trusty Sony mdr v6’s and am happy with the sound.

I went to the annual “Gardner Hardware Anvil Drop” on Washington ave. The band was “Savage Aural Hotbed” one of my favorite local bands.

They dropped an anvil off a 5 or 6 story building onto a car, a watermelon, and a bicycle.

Video

Site

It makes me rethink the entire Coyote Roadrunner thing.

Ikea glasses are weak. We bought a dozen small juice glasses last week, so far 4 have chipped lips. I find out they have chipped lips when I cut my knuckle trying to clean the bottom of the glass when doing the dishes.

Bandages don’t stick to knuckles. However Nu-Skin does. It’s like crazy glue with antibiotic mixed in. Trouble is, it likes to peel off and will only last a day at most. I took some 3m skin tape and placed it on top of the Nu-Skin liquid bandage. The skin tape absorbed the liquid making the bandage much more durable. I felt like I was fiberglassing my knuckles, but it works well, and is mostly transparent.

I recently made “Holy Basil Supreme” by guessing what was in it. I got pretty close and I wanted to check a recipie and see how close. When I looked online, I found THE recipie from my favorite thai restaraunt. The recipies used to be on the public website, in Thai Food Kits they used to sell. Now they reside in a disused “old-website” directory I grabbed all the recipes I could find. Read on for the recipies.

I’m doing alot of development for Honda using plone. A good way of editing files on plone is to connect to the server by tunneling webdav through ssh and mounting the webdav server via the finder. Trouble is, OSX creates a ._filename file for every file you touch or edit, It doesn’t break plone, but looks ugly.

The solution for this is:

Open up a terminal session
type:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
hit return
reboot

If you dont like this solution, Cyberduck works well. It works with:

• FTP
• FTPS (FTP/SSL)
• SFTP
• WebDAV
• WebDAV ( http/ssl)
• Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service

AND it’s opensource. If you like it, give the developers some money.

The last version 0.75b of Cocoa-MySQL had a bug, if there was a decimal data-type in a row of returned data, and you altered any portion of that row, the decimal column would be overwritten with 999999.99.

There is a new version that fixes this feature

DOWNLOAD FROM HERE

It’s beta and not widely publicized, but here it is.

My site was comment spammed by Russians recently.

I started noticing the sites load speed. It was bad, sometimes timing out. I thought that my brother, who shares this server and has a very popular game site on it may be the cause. I checked the logs and was wrong. Comment spammers had found the AJAX comments on the blog. I have disabled the comments, deleted about 70000 comment spams. but spammers now think comments are open and are submitting about 1 comment a second. Problem was, the site takes more than 1 second to load since its served by DSL. I played around with firewall rules to make them go away, but settled on an apache “Deny from all” stanza for the trackbacks directory.

Sorry for no comments, they will return with handy dandy captcha’s when the spammers get the message.

No thats not the command, but google will find it. Here are some ubuntu commands for package management.

#here is how to search apt-get for a package
sudo apt-cache search SEARCHSTRING

#here is how to see whats on your system
sudo dpkg -l | grep SEARCHSTRING

#here is how to install something
sudo apt-get install PACKAGENAME

DONE