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!

I’m trying all sorts of crazy things to once and for all solve my e-mail spam problem.  Gmail ain’t cutting it for me.  I decided to give SpamArrest a go even though I’m not a big fan of the Challenge/Response principle.

The company lost my business within 2 minutes.  They fetched mail from my inbox and sent a challenge/response to everybody who had an email sitting there… about a thousand people!  I don’t need retroactive service thank you!  I already dealt with those emails thank you.

I’m truly sorry about this.  I’m out of SpamArrest already.  Any other suggestion?

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Apple still tops the list as highest in customer satisfaction for personal computers. Apple’s customer satisfaction score reached a record 85, which was 10 points higher Dell, its closest competitor.

“We haven’t seen anything like this before, where a company scores 10 points over its nearest rival,” said Claes Fornell, the head of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), conducted quarterly by the University of Michigan.

I personally had to contact Apple a few times and every time, they exceeded my expectations.  They know how to treat their customers.  I can’t say the same for most companies I had to contact.

Read the full story here: http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/19/app-tops-customer-satisfaction-surveys/

Ok.  This definitely goes in the rant category.  I got myself a shiny new iPhone 3G.  I decided to play by the rules (this time): I didn’t unlock it, I didn’t jailbreak it.  Problem is, most of the apps I want are not available here.  What gives?

Just to name a few: Pandora, Loopt, AOL Radio, Google Mobile.  Why does technology always have to suck in Canada?  Not only we get ripped off BAD by mobile carriers, but we can’t do half of what people in the US can do with their mobile devices.

EDIT: and some more: Jott, Evernote, Yelp, Save Benjis, Ebay Mobile,

Ajaxwhois (recently acquired) is at #9, and Defensio is at #13.  Oddly enough, Defensio has a lot more traffic than Ajaxwhois.  However, API traffic is not reflected in those rankings and since 99.9% of our traffic comes through our API, Defensio is not scoring as high as it should.

I’m sure our friends from Praized will take the list by storm in the coming months.  Standout Jobs is also scoring pretty high.  Congrats to all!

If you’re interested, the podcast for Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs @ SxSW was just released. I was on the panel with Avi Bryant (DabbleDB), Leah Culver (Pownce), Ari Steinberg (Facebook) and Ben Vinegar (Freshbooks). Not a bad line-up!

Here’s the podcast