Alex Coles (@myabc) volunteered and is now the new maintainer. He already shared with me a couple good ideas for the site, which he’ll hopefully implement soon.

Thank you, Alex, and congrats!

Although I didn’t change the UI (because it’s so gorgeous already!), I added the following features:

• Gem page lists dependencies
• Warning when Gem contains C extensions (since they don’t work on JRuby)
• Ability to specify the JRuby version against which the Gem was tested

I accept patches, so fork away!

HD Video on iTunes (missing the last 20-25 mins unfortunately):

MeshU - Part 1

MeshU - Part 2

• A quick recap of what I said.
• And Jonathan Keebler live-blogged the event at ScribbleLive.
• My slides:

I guess this is as close as it gets to being there in person! Looking forward to your comments!

I need to give credit to this page, without which I’d still be fighting with this whole thing.

This tutorial uses JRuby 1.2, Glassfish 2.1, Merb 1.0.10 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. To make my life easy, I simply fired an EC2 instance based on ami-71fd1a18. I recommend you do the same. However, it should work from just any vanilla Ubuntu 8.04.

Some important comments are in the script below, make sure to read them. Enjoy!

The process is not quite as straightforward as it should be, but it works pretty well.

The secret lies in a nifty application called ScreenRecycler.  In a nutshell, it allows you to use a monitor connected to a second computer as an additional monitor to your main computer.  So yes, you DO need 2 computers.  The good news is that the second computer can be either Mac, Windows or Linux. The bad news is that it’s slightly slower if the second computer is not a Mac. My second box is running Windows and it’s very usable for e-mail and calendaring. 

My setup consists of:

• 1 Dell 24″ 2405FPW (awesome monitor btw)
• 1 Samsung 22″ 2243BWX (vertical)
• 1 Unibody Macbook
• 1 custom-built PC

Screen configuration:

• Main screen: Pretty much everything happens on this screen
• Vertical screen (left): Mail.app (top), iCal (bottom)
• Macbook screen: Twhirl, Corporate MSN Messenger, Adium

The -really- cool thing about my setup is that, if I ever need to use Windows, I can just stop ScreenRecycler and my Windows desktop appears on my left screen.  Because I use SynergyKM (and this), I simply have to move my mouse to the left and my keyboard and mouse automatically start controlling Windows. 

For your information, clicking the image will let you see my setup it its full glory!

Here’s the link… http://startupcfo.ca/2009/02/startup-lessons-interview-with-carl.html

I’m not quite moving to the Caribbeans just yet as I’m now employed by Websense as Director of Software Development.  Needless to say, this is an exciting challenge for me and an amazing opportunity to further protect the web from all the malicious content that’s being posted nowadays.  Our users should rejoice because we have a lot of amazing ideas already cooking!

Read the official acquisition announcement here for more details...

Here’s what’s included so far:

• ec2-identify-instance: returns the current EC2 instance id
• ec2-identify-volume: returns the EBS volume id of a device

I needed ec2-identify-volume to automate EBS snapshots, so I thought I’d release my work on GitHub.

Here’s what I added in /etc/crontab to automate EBS snapshots:

0 2 * * * root ec2-create-snapshot `ec2-identify-volume /dev/sdj` >> /var/log/ebs_snapshots


The great thing about this line is that I don’t need to know the volume id beforehands. If a new volume is attached at /dev/sdj, I don’t have to change my crontab file either. In my situation, this is very convenient.

Hope you find ec2-extra-tools useful!

Ok, since you’re reading this, you’re probably already convinced of that so let’s jump to the meat.

Long story short, I had this paper document I wanted to send by email.  I could have done it in a dozen steps, but I felt lazy.  Here’s a trick I figured out to make it very quick and easy:

1. Fire up Image Capture.
2. Change Automatic Task to “Mail.app”.  To do so, click the dropdown menu, then “Other”, then browse to Mail.app in your Applications folder.
3. Give your document a name in “Name” and set all the other settings as necessary.
4. Hit overview/scan
5. Mail opens up automatically after the scanning process.  Just type in the email address of the recipient and you’re done!

Managing gems has been painful lately. Like most people, we’re freezing them, which helps tremendously. However, there’s a few problems with this approach:

• We can’t freeze C extensions because they need to be compiled for the target platform. We develop on OS X and Linux 64, but deploy to Linux i386. As a workaround, we currently freeze but recompile them on every deployment. Definitely not optimal.
• Our frozen gems directory is getting huge.
• It’s becoming complicated and quite a mess to manage multiple gem versions for different branches/tags.
• We never quite know which branch needs which gem.

Of course, we could manually install the gems we need on our servers. But the word “manually” generally leads to “epic fail”.

So I thought, why not install them at deployment time, just before restarting the Mongrels, with Capistrano? That seemed like a pretty good idea! The only problem is that Rubygems will always install a gem when asked to do so, even if it’s already installed.

That’s where install_gems.rb comes in. install_gems.rb takes a file name as an argument. This file contains a simple list of gems along with their version number. A custom installation command can also be specified.

Here’s an example:

# This is an example file. As you can see, it supports comments.
haml 2.0.3
eventmachine 0.12.2
# Notice the custom command specified after the --
termios 0.9.4 -- gem install termios -v 0.9.4 --no-rdoc --no-ri

To install the above gems, you’d simply run
./install_gems.rb input_file

install_gems.rb has a few advantages over vanilla rubygems:

• It will only install a gem if the specified version is not already installed. That’s obviously much faster than reinstalling everything every time.
• C extensions will be properly compiled.
• Using different gem versions in different branches/tags/releases is now very easy. You just have to maintain a list of required gems in your Git repository and make sure Capistrano runs install_gems.rb against this list before restarting the application servers.
• It forces us to keep an up-to-date list of the gems we need.

Of course, for this to work as expected, you’ll need to require specific gem versions in your application. Your production server will likely have multiple versions of the same gems installed and if you don’t specify which version of the gem you want to require, things might (or will) break.

I released install_gems.rb on GitHub and Daniel Haran has already submitted a patch. Feel free to do so as well, I’m a puller!