Thoughts on web development, hosting and scalability
31August2009
Posted by Greg Benedict under: apple; development; ruby; ruby on rails; snow leopard.
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.
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29August2009
Posted by Greg Benedict under: apple; hosting; ruby; ruby on rails; thin.
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.
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19August2009
Posted by Greg Benedict under: photography.
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) ? Time.now.utc : Time.now
end
What was
Delayed::Job.enqueue PollTwitter.new(), 0, 1.minutes.from_now
has now become
Delayed::Job.enqueue PollTwitter.new(), 0, 1.minutes.from_now.getutc
Four hours is a large difference.
Note: Normally I would just run this as a cron job, but Heroku will only run cron once per hour.
1April2009
Posted by Greg Benedict under: apache; development; ruby; ruby on rails.
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:
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31March2009
Posted by Greg Benedict under: ruby; ruby on rails.
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:
Quite a few of us hang out on IRC during the day and late at night. It’s a great way to see what some of the best Ruby developers are discussing and get some help when you’re stuck.
2December2008
Posted by Greg Benedict under: photography.
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.
27November2008
Posted by Greg Benedict under: apache; hosting; mongrel; nginx; ruby; ruby on rails; thin.
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.
20August2008
Posted by Greg Benedict under: ruby; ruby on rails.
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 anyone who is interested, please visit http://www.tgfi.net/2008/08/12/come-work-with-us/.
Thanks! ~Greg
26March2008
Posted by Greg Benedict under: wordpress.
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 quick screen cast as an overview of the major changes compared to earlier 2.x releases. It’s well worth the look
Also, if you are going to upgrade to any release of 2.5, check out the official which plugins work and which don’t list before upgrading. Once you’re in the clear, go install. The admin tool is so much better.
20March2008
Posted by Greg Benedict under: wordpress.
Update: Wordpress 2.5 has gone final. Great work from the teams at Auttomatic & Happy Cog, along with all of the contributors.
Yesterday I was working through my latest feed updates in Google Reader when I came across more information on the new Wordpress 2.5 changes on Jeffery Zeldman’s blog. I kept it unread so I could come back to it later, but after what I saw, I kept thinking about it all day. Could it really be that good?
Tonight I pulled a copy of the site down to my laptop and did a test upgrade. Everything checked out( themes and plugins), so I went for it on the live site. Don’t worry, I backed up first.
I really enjoy the new editor – TinyMCE 3. Especially since it works correctly in Safari 3. I prefer Safari for its superior font rendering and speed, but I was relegated to Firefox under 2.3.3 and below.
Hats off to the team at Happy Cog. They’ve done some great work here. For more details, Techosailor has a full write up on the changes that is worth a read.
Also, Matt from Wordpress notes this is production ready, but they wanted feedback on the design before finalizing 2.5. Don’t be scared of that RC1 name, go upgrade!
