Greg Benedict

Thoughts on the web and creativity.

Pain Is a Signal of Improvement

Be it programming or life, you have to push through your comfort zone to expand your capabilities. If you are unwilling to do that, you’ll lead a very unfulfilling life. It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength—whether it’s [...]

Progress and Persistence

This quote from Steve Jobs has nothing to do with product design and everything to do with moving society forward. Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is [...]

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.

  • Where can you find me?

    Follow me on twitter as @gbenedict.

    TGFI Web Design - My company where we build great websites and mobile apps for businesses.

  • What am I working on?

    Producing and sharing more than I consume.

    Floormingo - Buy hardwood and laminate flooring online.

    Horizon League - Watch college games live.

    IHIE - Helping 6M people in Indiana get better healthcare.