The Ruby Reflector

Using tools like Chef, you can connect metal or cloud provisioning to your configuration and systems integration process. For example, you can use the tool knife to provision cloud nodes and also register them in chef. When chef takes over, these cloud nodes become managed and visible in the same console as the rest of your infrastructure. Configuration and Systems integration is not limited to solely the infrastructure layer. For example, your applications also have configuration and integration …

• Topics: Open source, IaaS, PaaS, Google App Engine, Systems

" Chef - Cooking 101" by John Williams (@j_m_williams) is up next at # rubymidwest

Chef: Automate building a server up from bare metal to a ready to deploy machine. pretty awesome. @ j m williams # rubymidwest I talked to John the night before and I think it was his first talk. He was a bit shaky. It didn't help that server set up is dry, dry stuff. And, to be honest, most of the crowd doesn't care about the topic. Sorry John but we're coders.

One …

• Topics: RubyMidwest, defunkt, RT, LuigiMontanez, Cascading Style Sheets
• Jake Scruggs: Ruby Midwest 2010 Saturday
• Intridea - Company Blog: Intridea Brings Kansas City Barbecue to Ruby Midwest

…Entertainment and White Pages among the users of its Opscode Chef tool. More and more individual and corporate contributors have signed up to the Chef development effort, including Rackspace, RightScale and - an especially strategically significant win - the SpringSource division of VMware."_

451 Group Report on Opscode Platform - 02 July 2010

• Topics: Opscode, Battery Ventures, Entertainment, Research, Pages
• English - AkitaOnRails.com: What happened to Rails Summit Latin America?
• High Scalability: Hot Scalability Links for July 2, 2010

The TV show Top Chef uses an internet marketing business model - a membership site with training - to generate additional revenue. It was only a matter of time .

• Topics: Television, Giles Bowkett
• Dmitry Belitsky Blog: How to become successful Rubyist
• Rails on Edge: The Ruby Hoedown
• Ruby Inside: Interesting Ruby Tidbits #32: DataMapper, Screencasts, IP Addresses, Euruko 2010 and more
• Rails Envy » Home: Reports of This Podcasts Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
• Litany Against Fear: 5 Great Talks Notes
• A Fresh Cup: Double Shot #647

Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.

Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support ( LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.

We've treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, …

• Topics: Lucid, Ubuntu, Monit, Sphinx, Phusion Passenger
• MySQL Performance Blog: Pacemaker, please meet NDB Cluster or using Pacemaker/Heartbeat to start a NDB Cluster
• Slicehost - VPS Hosting - Blog: 32-bit Images Now Available
• Daddy Fixes Everything: Elk M1 Security System Control with Perl Script
• OmniNerd: Ubuntu 10.04 Accesses all iPhone Data by Default
• blog.webandy.com | Andy Atkinson: Rails Deployments

…to retrieve the ‘rails' user password. If you're using config management systems like Chef or Puppet this is likely the only laborious aspects of configuring your box. No longer!

Now, whenever a new box is deployed, the SSH keys of all the technical contacts on your Brightbox account are automatically pre-installed for the default ‘rails' user. To add your own SSH key, edit your user profile within the control panel and paste in your SSH public key using …

• Topics: Secure Shell, Puppet, John Leach, Brightbox
• PeepCode Products: Smash Into Vim
• Dead Programmer Society: Configuring Hybrid Ruby on Rails Applications On EY-Cloud
• Andrzej on Software: Remote pair programming
• terrbear.org: Love/HATE
• Codeshooter's Weblog: Setting up your Ruby on Rails application in an Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) server with Nginx, MySQL, Ruby Enterprise Edition
• redemption in a blog: Setting up virtualization on Ubuntu with KVM

Cooking with Chef - Your Servers will thank you

Great introduction to the essence of Chef and how easy it is to write your own cookbooks and recipes. I agree with lots of the things James talks about here, and the their way of using Chef comes pretty close to how we're using it on Scalarium .

The gist of all of them for me: They're a lot less about Ruby or even Rails. Personally I'm pretty bored of hearing yet another talk on these topics, or stuff …

• Topics: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, BERT, Bytes, Cucumber
• Ruby Inside: Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from Ruby
• Opscode Blog: Opscamp San Francisco
• The "Tech. Arch.": Camping light (nosql) with MongoDB
• the evolving ultrasaurus: jruby on google app engine
• Intridea - Company Blog: In Memory of Zigzag Chen
• Alloy Code - Home: ActiveRecord vs. Core Data

Odds and ends...

jQueryPad - Tool for playing with jQuery, on Windows only.

Ubiquo - Another Rails CMS framework.

jQuery Presentation Plugin: Say NO to Keynote! - Another way to do purely-web presentations.

A Turing Machine - Someone actually realized a classic Turing machine in hardware. Nifty.

Puppet versus Chef: 10 reasons why Puppet wins - The article is flamebait, but the comments are worth reading.

• Topics: Turing programming language, Presentation, Plugin, Content management system, Microsoft Windows
• Vineet Gupta | Computer Programmer: Crypto 101

Chef Fundamentals ( 3 Days)

Chef Fundamentals is a three-day comprehensive class covering the basic architecture of Chef and all of the underlying components. We will be covering installation basics of Chef Client and Chef Solo. Other topics will include: creating Chef repositories, creating cookbooks and advanced using of the new command line utility called Knife. This class will include lecture, labs and some comprehensive case studies.

Register for the class here

• Topics: Fundamentals, Chef Solo
• OnRails.org: MWRC 2010 - Notes from Day 1.
• English - AkitaOnRails.com: From Solo to Full Chef
• Brightbox Blog: New: Automatically add SSH keys to new Brightboxes
• Ruby Inside: Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from Ruby
• Giles Bowkett: Internet Marketing Meets TV Meets The Web
• Labnotes: Necktie: dress to impress

…of Chef . With today's announcement, the Opscode " Chef Fundamentals" class will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The class is being made available free of charge to partners and customers who are interested in providing specialized Opscode training. Chef users are invited to request a copy of the training materials here: http://info.opscode.com/opentraining .

"Cloud infrastructure should be more …

• Topics: Opscode, Training, Fundamentals, Aria, Bay
• English - AkitaOnRails.com: What happened to Rails Summit Latin America?
• High Scalability: Hot Scalability Links for July 2, 2010
• Riding Rails - home: Community Highlights
• Edd Dumbill's Weblog: Behind the Times: Speaking about Chef at RailsConf
• Signal vs. Noise: Nuts & Bolts: Configuration management with Chef