When checking pages with option httpchk against an apache server with virtual hosts setup, you have to remember to put the full domain to what you want to check. This is because if you don’t have the domain, Apache won’t know which virtual host to sent the request to, and you could get pages that are UP showing DOWN, or worse, pages that are DOWN showing UP.

Another thing to remember is using option forwardfor, which passes the domain along with the request, so it will go to the right virtual host.
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Tags: 37signals, apache, haproxy, rails

Posted: September 16th, 2008 under Computers, Ruby on Rails, apache.
Comments: none

For real. Sorta. I gave a lightning talk about God+Merb at this year’s Ruby Hoedown in Huntsville, Alabama. It’s not much, but here is my 5 min. rundown of what I’ve done to god, and how I use it. It’s available here from the confreaks website.

Source Code

View Video Online Here

Download Here

Tags: github, god, hoedown, huntsville, ruby, talk

Posted: August 26th, 2008 under Projects, Ruby on Rails, git.
Comments: none

Jeremy McAnally has a post about model_stubbing that pretty much explains how to do what you need to do in your test to use it. It’s a pretty meaty post, and has a couple of tricks in it, so if you’re dying from fixture usage, check it out at omgbloglol.com.

Tags: jeremy mcanally, model_stubbing, rails, rspec, ruby, spec, stubbing, testing

Posted: August 20th, 2008 under Projects, Ruby on Rails.
Comments: none

At work, we have a couple of internal applications powered by Ruby on Rails, such as our jobs board, and our customer management system. We use several technologies to make sure that our internal applications have 99.999% uptime. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go over some of the things that we use to keep our uptime high and ease of development…umm…easy. Read more »

Tags: apache, freebsd, mongrel, rails, ruby, setup

Posted: July 8th, 2008 under Computers, Ruby on Rails.
Comments: 1

Rails 2.1 has certainly added a wealth of features for developers using the framework to take advantage of. There are enough improvements in 2.1 and edge Rails that no developer type should be unhappy… well, not for the next few weeks or so. Some features, such as Time Code based migrations, will make it eaiser to keep teams of developers from stepping on each others toes, while others, such as named scopes will keep complex conditional statements out of the way of view and controller code, making things easier to read and digest when looking at someone’s work.  There are also additional features for scalability and deployment that will make all of our lives eaiser.

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Tags: 2.1, edge, list, rails, ruby

Posted: July 7th, 2008 under Computers, Projects, Ruby on Rails.
Comments: none

Using a story to drive your development tasks is a good idea, even when there is only 1 team member. Writing stories helps you stay focused on the requirements without getting side-tracked into something that isn’t working toward the end goal of your app. There’s always time for script.aculo.us later! Using RSpec stories also means you have tests to run against your code so you know that fixing something probably didn’t break something else.

First thing you want to do is get the RSpec on Rails plugin installed, and generate the RSpec code.

$ ./script/plugin install git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git
$ ./script/plugin install git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails.git
$ ./script/generate rspec

Stories are broken down into 2.5 files:

• 1. The Story file - Where the plain text story resides
• 2. The Step file - Where the different steps in your story are defined.
• 2.5 The Story runner file - The ruby code that kicks everything off.

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Tags: bdd, internet, rails, rspec, ruby, stories, testing

Posted: June 27th, 2008 under Ruby on Rails.
Comments: none

 Playing around with the partitions on my mac yesterday, i accidently deleted the efi partition (dumb of me, i know), but I figured it was about time for a reload, so i just sucked it up and wiped the mac clean. 

Going through and installing all the stuff i needed for development, i ran into a problem installing the native mysql bindings for ruby.

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Tags: bindings, gem, installation, mysql, rails, ruby

Posted: June 20th, 2008 under Ruby on Rails.
Comments: none