The Ruby Reflector

And this morning, I am feeling no urge whatsoever to buy a new laptop. Must be a sign of increasing age.

Slides " Rails & Security" from Devconf, Moscow - By Egor Homakov, who gained some notoriety by messing with GitHub and Rails.

Icenium - " Cross-Platform Mobile Development." Sort of like PhoneGap in the cloud.

Mina - An alternative to Capistrano or Vlad for deployment and server automation that claims serious speed gains.

• Topics: Ruby on Rails, XHTML, Computer security, DOM, Cross-platform
• PeepCode Products: Play by Play: Aaron Patterson
• Ruby on Rails Tutorial News: Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts, 2nd Edition
• Mike Perham: Five Common Rails Mistakes
• giant robots smashing into other giant robots: Copycopter is now open source
• Adventures with Ruby: Getting the Most out of Bundler Groups
• Engine Yard Developer Blog: Building Mobile Web Applications With Kendo UI And Engine Yard

The biggest problem with Vlad is a failed command doesn't return a neat line of shell code; instead it spits out a huge block of several commands making debugging extremely difficult. It can result in situations where the state of a failed deployment isn't clear.

Back to UNIX

After many, many bad experiences with Vlad, I gave up. However, I'm not just a lazy programmer, I'm also a lazy sysadmin, so I thought it was time to break out my vestigial UNIX skills and …

• Topics: Ruby on Rails, Secure Shell, Unix, Ruby, Bundler
• Dead Programmer Society: PostgreSQL on Ubuntu on EC2: The Installation Guide
• RubyLearning Blog: Getting started with Heroku
• Biodegradable Geek: Bash Tips for Power Users
• Andrzej on Software: Remote pair programming
• Codeshooter's Weblog: Setting up your Ruby on Rails application in an Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) server with Nginx, MySQL, Ruby Enterprise Edition
• Fingertips: Security through clarity: keeping secrets in a multi-server Amazon EC2 setup

Vlad actually used to work with Percona, as a consultant, system administrator, and team lead. Now he's the director of Professional Services at Sphinx. If I can paraphrase his session, I'd say it is about the things you don't know about Sphinx's capabilities. Many people think of Sphinx as a great search engine, but it's much more powerful than just that. It has all kinds of features that let it do things MySQL is very bad at. For example, think about …

• Topics: MySQL, Sphinx, Brendan Gregg, Vladimir Fedorkov, DTrace
• Brainspl.at: 4 years at Engine Yard, what a long strange trip it's been.
• Sphinx search engine news: Talking, blogging, coding, and meeting
• Alex R. Young : Making Thinking Sphinx Fast in Development Mode
• giant robots smashing into other giant robots: 2 years of hackfests
• Brightbox Ruby Blog: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid" now available
• Freelancing Gods: Funding Thinking Sphinx

Interesting tidbits from around the web (September 6th):

Carrer Blog: iPhone Wireframe Kit - Google Docs - via vcarrer.com Vlad puts Google Docs drawing document to good use creating an iPhone wireframe kit (with links to download it and a blank iphone template) ...

• Topics: Google, Google Docs

…hazy to me now, but probably simply because it worked, I chose to borrow a patch from Vlad Romascanu . If you want to monkey-patch the AWS:: S3 gem to use Vlad's changes then do the following (if you prefer you could of course grab a copy of Vlad's fork and build a Gem from it):

Make sure AWS:: S3 is in your environment.rb file using config.gem "aws-s3", :lib => "aws/s3"

Create a file called aws.rb in RAILS ROOT/lib/patches

Copy …

• Topics: S3, AWS, Paperclip, Option, RAILS_ROOT
• Momoro Machine: The least you should know about S3 with Rails
• p.latyp.us: Rails' distributed asset hosts
• Heroku: Config Vars for Deploy-Specific Settings
• ricroberts: Create Your Own Semantic Web-enabled Blog
• Oleksiy Kovyrin: Rails Developer for a Large Startup: My Vision of an Ideal Candidate
• Labnotes: Tools of the trade

Deploy with Vlad

Capistrano is neat, but Vlad is cleaner. I still use cap, but for new projects I always choose Vlad.

Web applications

For continuous integration I use Integrity. It looks gorgeous and, being a Sinatra app, is very easy to setup. CI Joe looks nice too, but it came out 1 week after I'd setup Integrity.

I also use GitHub and Basecamp. One of my clients is using Mingle. It's good, but it's pricey and I'm not sure if it's worth the wedge. …

• Topics: .Mac, Unix, Linux kernel, SuperDuper, Git
• David Bolton Strikes Again: My Tools of the Trade
• Biodegradable Geek: The Gmail Captcha is Optional
• railsexpress.de: RailsConf2006 Aftermath
• Blog - James Mead: National Hack the Government Day
• valibuk.net: JSSh (Firefox 3.0) with Optional Port Number
• Piotr Sarnacki: Upload progress script with safari support

Creates Vlad the Deployer deploy.rb config file

Time formats initializer

The following gems:

thoughtbot-factory_girl

rubyist-aasm

mislav-will_paginate

hpricot

RedCloth

emk-safe_erb

settingslogic

vlad

vlad-git

The following plugins setup as Git submodules:

limerick_rake

mile_marker

squirrel

rspec

rspec-rails

exception_notifier

monkey-magic

gravatar

So the next time you start a new rails app, run this command and you will have the world …

• Topics: Ruby on Rails, Git, RedCloth, hpricot, jQuery
• A Fresh Cup: Double Shot #547
• MetaSkills.net: The Ultimate OS X Snow Leopard Stack For Rails Development - x86_64, MacPorts, Ruby 1.8/1.9, SQL Server, SQLite3, MySQL & More
• Litany Against Fear: RailsConf 2009 Notes
• Rails on the Run - Home: Freezing Rails with Git
• blog.mhartl | Michael Hartl's tech blog: A security issue with Rails secret session keys
• Rails Envy » Home: Rails Envy Podcast - Episode #089: 08/05/09

…finally as far as I can tell the git commit SHA being deployed is not available in Vlad.

In the Vlad deployment script I added a Hoptoad task to replace the default Capistrano task provided by Hoptoad. task :notify_hoptoad => [:git_user, :git_revision] do notify_command = "rake hoptoad:deploy TO=#{rails_env} REVISION=#{current_sha} REPO=#{repository} USER='#{current_user}'" puts "Notifying Hoptoad of Deploy (#{notify_command})" `#{notify_command}` …

• Topics: Capistrano, hoptoad, SHA
• Andrzej on Software: A Guide to Deploying Rails Applications
• Junior developer: Faster RubyGem deploys thanks to Jeremy Kemper
• Ruby, Javascript, Erlang blog: Snakes, Gems & Coffee: Book Shelf Clearing
• dealloc.me -- Justin Palmer: Deploying Static Websites With Net::SCP
• Mark Turner: So many Ideas. No actions. I've failed. I'm going to fix it.
• SD Ruby Podcast: Episode 042: Deploying Rails on Slicehost

…user, finally as far as I can tell the git commit SHA being deployed is not available in Vlad.

In the Vlad deployment script I added a Hoptoad task to replace the default Capistrano task provided by Hoptoad.

1 2 3 4 5 6 task :notify_hoptoad => [ :git_user , :git_revision ] do notify_command = "rake hoptoad:deploy TO= #{ rails_env } REVISION= #{ current_sha } REPO= #{ repository } USER=' #{ current_user } '" puts "Notifying Hoptoad of Deploy ( #{ notify_command …

• Topics: hoptoad, Capistrano, SHA, user.name
• Riding Rails - home: Rails and the Enterprise
• Lindsay Holmwood - auxesis' musings: Func-y
• Luigi Montanez: Ruby on Rails != Its Core Team
• without_scope - Home: Hoptoad. Goes great with PHP too.
• Andrzej on Software: A Guide to Deploying Rails Applications
• Gears Within Gears: Awsymandias, or, An ode to cloud computing