Double Shot #113

Yesterday's lesson: mystery site errors may just mean that ferret has gone off into never-never land.

• AWS Scratch Pads - Turns out Amazon has built simple online forms to let you play with their various public web services. You'll need an AWS developer key to mess around here.


• Testing for ruby 1.8 and 1.9 using multiruby - How to have your code and eat it too. Multiruby lets you simultaneously run test suites on two side-by-side versions of ruby.

Double Shot #112

Spent a chunk of yesterday setting up monit to restart bloated mongrels. Gad, that sounds nearly pornographic.

• Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide - Still in beta, this Pragmatic Press book gave me a good start on getting monit set up despite a few typos.


• monit - The official site for this monitoring and management utility.


• Bowtie - Apache and monit configuration generator.


• god - Alternative to monit that I stumbled over too late to seriously consider for the current project.


• Big Medium - This looks like a nice midrange CMS for sites that don't need to be completely custom.

Double Shot #111

We had a fine Christmas here, though as I spent a few minutes of it restarting stuck mongrel instances I think I need to move forward on getting monit in place today.

• Ruby 1.9.0 is Released - The official announcement. Sheesh, I'm not done learning 1.8.x yet!


• Ruby 1.9.0 has been released - Chu Yeow's coverage of what this means for Rails (summary: it's not time to switch yet).


• Ruby 1.9—Right for You? - Dave Thomas points out that this is not a production release, and discusses how he's set up side-by-side installations with Ruby 1.8.x.


• Ruport 1.4 - New release of this business reporting toolset for Ruby.


• Paginatin' Christmas - A pile of resources around the will_paginate plugin.


• EC2 Firefox Extension is now Open Source - Looks useful for those who are managing their infrastructure via Amazon Web Services.


• Jungle Disk - I've been using Mozy for online backups, but for some reason that's been getting increasingly unreliable for me. Now that Jungle Disk can do automatic backups, I'm probably going to switch. The one thing I don't know is whether it's smart about only backing up changed files.


• Triple Christmas Present - Hobo 0.7.1 with some new documentation.


• REST In Place - AJAX in-place editor plugin designed to work with Rails RESTful controllers.

Double Shot #110

Although I'm aiming for daily updates here, I do plan to take tomorrow off. Merry Christmas!

• Tactile Pro 2.0 - Have I ever mentioned how much I detest membrane keyboards? The Mac Pro keyboard is better than most, but it still stinks. It turns out that Matias makes a mechanical switch keyboard for Mac; I've got one on order, and I'll let you know if it's as good as the Unicomp PC keyboards when it arrives.


• BetterZip - An actual GUI archive application for OS X. Not entirely sure this is worth paying for, though I do get annoyed at the lack of fine control over zip options that the OS gives by default.


• BitNami WordPress stack - This is what I used to install WordPress, and it was pretty painless. I did have to muck around in the Apache configuration files, though; by default it puts the install on port 8080 in the /wordpress folder.


• Installing ffmpeg on Mac OS X - Needed this for a client the other day; here's the easiest install instructions I could find.


• Acts_as_ferret Tutorial - Another chunk of software I'm needing to come up to speed on; this is helpful.

Oh Noes!

If you're sharp-eyed (and your DNS server has picked up the new address for A Fresh Cup, which it must have, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) you may have noticed some changes around here. The root cause is simple: I've decided to abandon the Rails-based Mephisto and move to a locally-hosted copy of WordPress instead. There were just too many little things about Mephisto nagging at me and I just wasn't finding time to fix them.

I considered putting time in to customize Mephisto, or to move forward to edge Mephisto, or to switch to one of the other Rails systems like Type or SimpleLog. But ultimately, I came to the conclusion that tweaking blog software isn't really something I want to spend time on. There are good, mature, open-source systems available, so I might as well run one of them and get on with the rest of my life and business.

The change is not, alas, completely painless. WordPress does not understand how to import from Mephisto, so I hacked together a bridge for the past content via RSS. But I didn't move tags or comments (and I doubt I will ever find the time to do so). And the URLs for individual articles have changed (bad blogger, no biscuit). But moving forward, I hope, things should be stable.