Archive for the ‘Ruby On Rails’ Category

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Migrated to WordPress

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

First of all, apologies for any ‘planet spam’ caused the change to my feeds.

After what seems like an eternity (but is actually just over a year) I’ve switched the backend of this site from Mephisto to WordPress. The main reason for the switch was my overall dissatisfaction with Mephisto coupled with its lack of development (or a least stable releases) along with the fact that I was maintaining a Ruby on Rails production environment for one application. Mephisto frustrated me in many ways, from its inability to handle archives/pagination to not being able to accept pingbacks to not working with external clients. All of these were fixable, but I really didn’t have the patience or the time.

Here is my tale of migrating from Mephisto to WordPress, and how I achieved it.

(more…)

Tags: blog, Linux, mephisto, php, Python, Ruby On Rails, wordpress
Posted in Linux, Python, Ruby On Rails | 9 Comments »

A Fresh Cup

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Last night, thanks to Twitter, I got to renew a acquaintance with Mike Gunderloy (I was a big fan of his books Coder To Developer and Developer To Designer). I used to follow his Daily Grind blog as it was widely regarded as the source for Microsoft Windows related development news, but as my interest in the topic waned I dropped it from my regular reading.

Fast forward to yesterday when Mike added me as a friend in Twitter, I discovered his new (to me) site A Fresh Cup which both charts his transition to Ruby on Rails (and an Apple platform) and serves as a Rails version of the Daily Grind.

Mike’s tale is very interesting to me, especially having made the transition myself (albeit to Python, but I went via Rails and intend to revisit it soon), and I think it might inspire some others too. For obvious reasons I’d like to have seen Mike move to Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution for that matter) but, as I was discussing with Josette (from O’Reilly) and Tony (whilst convincing him to get a Rails book) at the weekend, Rails and Macs still seem to go hand-in-hand so Mike’s choice was a natural one.

Oh, and Mike is using the same platform for his new site as I use here – Mephisto.

Tags: rubyonrails, twitter
Posted in Browsing, Developing, Ruby On Rails | 1 Comment »

No one said it would be easy

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Elliot bemoans the fact that hosting a Ruby on Rails application on shared or virtual hosting is too hard, and I can attest to this.

I’ve mentioned the issues I’ve had with Typo many times, and although Mephisto is better the box is still working much harder than it should be. Rails may be a great framework for development, but hosting the results is different story all together.

Like Elliot I also have a couple of internal applications that run quite happily, but they are running on dedicated (albeit low-end) boxes – just like the big boys do. I suspect that both of these would fail if I tried to move them to shared or virtual hosting.

Tags: hosting, rails, ruby, rubyonrails
Posted in Ruby On Rails | No Comments »

Reborn!

Monday, January 1st, 2007

It took me a while to do, but I’ve finally made good on my threat and switched from Typo to Mephisto. It wasn’t as easy as advertised, but I got there in the end (I’ll follow up on this at a later date – promise).

Tags: blog, geek, mephisto, rubyonrails, typo
Posted in Ruby On Rails | 1 Comment »

Breaking up is hard to do

Friday, December 8th, 2006

This is the bit where I should point out all the good things about my blog engine of choice – Typo – before explaining to it that it’s not Typo’s fault, things just aren’t working out.

Stuff that.

Typo is good, but it is bloated and keeps dying on my server for no reason and I’ve had enough. Other RoR apps are ticking over quite nicely on this box, so why does Typo have an issue?

Sorry Typo, it’s not me – it’s you. Pack your bags and sling your hook.

Now to start trawling the classifieds to find a new blog engine before I succumb to temptation and write my own.

(This is a roundabout way of say that this site has been ** recently and I’m finally going to do something about it.)

Tags: blog, hosting, rubyonrails, typo
Posted in Ruby On Rails | No Comments »

Outgrowing my server

Friday, September 29th, 2006

I’ve been running a Linode supplied UML virtual server for the best part of two years now. I have been extremely happy with it, but I’m now repeatedly running into performance problems with it, and things will only get worse. Basically the problem is Ruby on Rails, and more specifically the Typo weblog software. Ditching RoR is not an option because I host more than one application (with more to come) on it, and whilst I could ditch Typo for something lighter (but still RoR based) I don’t want to – even though that decision is mainly based on inertia. However I need to do something because occasionally my server will be brought to its knees and I get sick of sorting it out, especially as I host other sites on this server. Although I could switch to some managed RoR hosting, my preference to to host my own because I although I don’t like solving problems, I do like causing them! :)

As I see it, I’ve got the following options:

Pay for a bigger Linode Buy another VM and move either the Rails apps or the other sites to there Switch to a Xen hosting provider Some combination of the above

Before I make a final decision, has anyone got any suggestions/advice (other than ditch Rails)?

Tags: hosting, linode, Linux, rubyonrails, uml, vm
Posted in Linux, Ruby On Rails | 2 Comments »

How not to manage a vulnerability

Friday, August 11th, 2006

Following on from my previous posts, Ruby on Rails 1.1.6 is now out along with full disclosure of the vulnerability. There is also a new Rails security announcement mailing list which can only be A Good Thing™.

However whilst I think their speed of reponse has been excellent, their initial “security through obscurity” stance was inappropriate for both a) an Open Source project and b) one written in an interpreted language, and the rapid succession of releases implies they reacted too hastily.

The issue is in fact of such a criticality that we’re not going to dig into the specifics. No need to arm would-be assalients[sic].

…means nothing.

Regarding security through obscurity, we’ll release the full details of this issue once everyone has had a fair chance to upgrade their system. Source transparency is of little comfort if you just had your system compromised before you got a chance to apply the patch.

… means nothing too. Anyone wanting to know how the vulnerability worked (i.e. attackers) simply looked at the source, whilst the people not sure if they needed to upgrade right now were left in the dark unless they knew the internals of Rails intimately (i.e. not many).

Fortunately for me, the applications hosted here are low traffic and a brief downtime was acceptable to remain secure but I bet this was a real headache for the large Rails driven sites.

Tags: rubyonrails, security
Posted in Ruby On Rails | 2 Comments »

…and another one

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Looks like the previous update isn’t as watertight as we’d like. Until 1.1.6 is out the door, here’s a workaround.

If you’re running Typo from svn, update to the head revision to get this fix.

Tags: rubyonrails, typo, workaround
Posted in Ruby On Rails | No Comments »

Mandatory Upgrade

Thursday, August 10th, 2006
They might want to replace that one

"They might want to replace that one" by Unhindered by Talent

Following the advice of the Rails core team, I have upgraded my server to run Ruby on Rails 1.1.5:

This is not like “sure, I should be flossing my teethâ€. This is “yes, I will wear my helmet as I try to go 100mph on a motorcycle through downtown in rush hourâ€. It’s not a suggestion, it’s a prescription.

Seeing as I’m currently only hosting two rails applications – this blog and Flickrlilli (which was used to source the above image) – I deemed it a fairly safe thing to do. I also took the opportunity to update this blog to Typo edge (revision 1208 to be precise).

Both upgrades were completely painless and had the minimum of downtime which is always a nice thing.

Tags: flicklilli, rubyonrails, security, typo
Posted in Ruby On Rails | No Comments »

Still Weird

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

Looks like I was wrong the other day – it wasn’t stray markup that was causing problems. There seems to be something fundamentally broken with my Typo installation.

Everytime I make a post I get the [FATAL] failed to allocate memory error. Sometimes if I repeatedly retry (with re-starting the application inbetween) it lets a post through, but it is starting to get very frustrating.

Right now I’m torn between trying to determine and (hopefully) fix the problem – although I’m hitting a brick wall with that right now – or switching to something else.

After spending some time in #typo and getting nowhere fast, I decided to try a fresh checkout from the trunk which would appear to have fixed the problem. No idea why, but I’m not complaining!

Tags: rubyonrails, typo
Posted in Ruby On Rails | No Comments »

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