Greg Benedict

Thoughts on the web and creativity.

Backing Up Your Heroku Database With PGBackups

Heroku recently announced that they are changing the way you backup your app’s database. They are deprecating their bundles add-on and have added a new PostgreSQL only backup feature. This is great news as the old bundles method included a copy of your source code as well. In one instance, our backups went from 90MB [...]

Installing PostgreSQL on Snow Leopard 10.6

Good news! Whether you are using PostgreSQL for general development, or need a version to match your setup on Heroku, getting PostgreSQL 8.3 installed on Snow Leopard is fairly straight forward. However, you’ll want to make some changes so that it works right for you.

Fixing Ruby Gems, MySQL and Passenger Phusion on Snow Leopard 10.6

One of the first things I noticed after upgrading to Snow Leopard is that my Passenger based sites stopped working. I use this heavily for Rails development, so I needed it fixed. The first thing I tried was reinstalling Passenger Phusion, which led to an error.

Is Delayed Job :run_at => DateTime Giving You Fits?

I’ve been implementing Delayed Job to poll Twitter every minute for changes. However, it was immediately running everything and ignoring the run_at time in the database. Or so I thought. Upon inspection of the code for Delayed Job, it is polling the database time to UTC and not local time. def self.db_time_now (ActiveRecord::Base.default_timezone == :utc) [...]

Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition and Passenger Phusion on Mac OS X Leopard

Memory usage is getting higher, and my patience waiting on a browser to load changes is getting much lower these days. Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition and Passenger Phusion will help with both! Here’s how we’ll do it:

Indianapolis Ruby Brigade

A lot of effort has been going into transforming IndyRB into a valuable group of talented people. We’re at 116 members and growing! Here are a few ways you can interact with the group: We have a new website up at www.indyrb.org with all the details. We meetup the second Wednesday night of each month. [...]

Upgrading to the Canon 50mm F/1.4

One of the first recommendations from nearly every photographer I know was to buy a 50mm lens and just keep it on all the time. They said the f/1.8 was a great value, and i have to agree. It was the first lens I purchased and I paid around $85 on Amazon.

Why Passenger Phusion Is a Better Hosting Solution Long Term

Since we started hosting Ruby on Rails applications in 2006, many of the pieces have changed. At each step, things became a bit easier and a bit faster. Here’s how things have changed.

Looking for Ruby Developers

Update: This position has been filled. Thanks! My company, TGFI, is currently looking for two full time Ruby developers with LAMP/CSS/XHTML experience in Indy. Even if it’s just a passion on the side, as long as the person has a solid web development background and is eager to learn, that will work. If you know [...]

WordPress 2.5 RC2 Is Out

Update: WordPress 2.5 has gone final. Great work from the teams at Auttomatic & Happy Cog, along with all of the contributors. The latest release candidate of WordPress, 2.5 RC2, is out. So far I haven’t noticed any major changes from RC1, just some tweaks based on feedback. Matt (WordPress co-founder) has put together a [...]