Ingredients

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 1/5 cup sugar
• 2 tbsp oil (3 desert spoons)

Directions

• Add flour to bowl
• Add sugar to bowl
• Beat eggs in a separate bowl
• Add oil and milk to eggs
• Add liquid ingredients to dry ingredients
• You are aiming for a runny batter consistency. If it is too sticky add milk, too watery add more flour. However, if you have followed the instructions above you should be fine.
• Heat up the non-stick frying pan to medium to high heat.
• Drop spoonfuls of the mixture in to form pancakes.

Look for bubbles

• Flip over with a spatula after roughly 1-2 minutes. Look for bubbles, lift up with pancake with a knife to peek underneath.

Have a peek

Fliptastic

ENJOY!

Heroku recently went live with a git-based deployment cloud hosting solution for rails applications. (mouthful!)

I recently bought a new camera and had the need for a daily uploader to flickr. Heroku have a free plan which is exciting as it essentially means that you can now reliably host a simple rails application for free.

However, there are a few barriers to entry and things to be aware of.

Git

You need to have a working knowledge of git the distributed version control system. This has an initial steep learning curve but once master is a power tool in your arsenal. The heroku documentation is a good place to start.

File Uploads

The filesystem is read-only, this means you have only one option when it comes to uploaded assets. They need to be stored elsewhere, ideally on a CDN. I used Amazon S3 which is not strictly a CDN but can be configured like so if you use Amazon Cloudfront

Heroku Platform

Spend some time reading the documentation so you know how to do things like:

• database migrations
• packaging gems
• running crons
• adding custom domains

Email

Heroku do not provide email for free accounts so if your application needs to work with email you need to outsource your email.

The best place to outsource your email in my opinion is Google Apps for your domain. You can use the action_mailer_tls plugin to interact with google in a fairly reliable manner.

Alternatives

The big alternative in the free hosting arena is google app engine (GAE). It is possible to install ruby apps on there now, and I am keen to try it out.

There is an interesting performance comparison of Slicehost vs Heroku vs Google App Engine for a simple sinatra application.

Overall, I think that heroku is amazing for hosting those simple ‘toy’ rails apps that you dont want to spend money hosting. The pay plans are a little overpriced in my opinion as they still do not compete with the price of a VPS. I would like to see how heroku copes with high traffic sites and if the platform opens up with the paid plans, eg ability to run a postfix mail server.

However, it needs to be noted in terms of heroku costings, you do not need to concern your self with system administration tasks. Although you pay more for hosting you may save a lot in man hours.

Benchmarks

I have done some basic benchmarks using httperf a great tool provided by Hewlett Packard.

Currently we have Heroku free plan versus slicehost 256mb slice running one thin instance behind nginx and mysql server on the same machine. (A cheap setup.)

I hoped to deploy the application to google app engine but it seems like getting rails applications running on this platform is currently a bit of an effort. You also need to almost design your application for the restrictions imposed by the platform. I dont like platform restrictions; while they are likely there to help large applications scale, it serves to cripple the small lightweight app.

For example, there is a 1000 file limit for GAE apps which you can easily reach with a rails app.
It is also not possible to use ActiveRecord as the database provided (BigTable) is a key/value store.

However, running something like sinatra with Datamapper as an ORM is a valid choice for a GAE deployment.
A great blog post on setting up a sinatra app with GAE.

Heroku – 58.5 requests per second stddev=3.6
Slicehost – 47.9 requests per second stddev=2.1

Surprisingly Heroku is faster than the equivalent setup on a small VPS. However, on testing earlier in the day I only managed a maximum of 25 req/s average. This means that you may be subject to competition for resources which are beyond your control.. a little like being on a shared server.

I am going to improve my knowledge / learn afresh the following 5 languages in the next few months.

• javascript
• curl
• c
• erlang
• c#

Javascript is used more and more nowadays, with powerful frameworks such as jquery and prototype and improved browser support. Internet users expect a rich internet experience nowadays and often this is made possible by a sprinkling of javascript. Whilst I have a fairly strong javascript knowledge, I would not consider myself to be accomplished. I will try and write a useful jquery plugin to further my knowledge.

Curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS and FILE. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks. Command-line network tools interest me (wget is ace) so I want to learn curl as I don’t currently use it at all.

c is a low level compiled programming language. I used it for graphics programming at university but haven’t touched it since. I want to refesh my memory, maybe I will try writing a some c code which interfaces with a ruby script or something along these lines.

erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system. The sequential subset of Erlang is a functional language, with strict evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing. For concurrency it follows the Actor model. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. The first version was developed by Joe Armstrong in 1986. It supports hot swapping so code can be changed without stopping a system. Erlang was originally a proprietary language within Ericsson, but was released as open source in 1998. (wikipedia)
Concurrency is deemed to become more important in the future, due to the current trend in processor design. Hence, I am interested to both write some concurrent code but also bend my mind around functional programming once and for all.

c# is deemed the java killer for the “I have a good job with a big company crew.”. I know an increasing number of developers that work in the .net platform. Rather than be ignorant and shout about how good the ruby platform is, I need to sample the delights of .net and specifically c# for myself. I will not however, call Scott Hanselman god.

Will keep you all updated on how I fare in these language related adventures.

Silk liner
Silk pillowcase
Down jacket
Waterproof jacket
Waterproof trousers
Light fleece
Thermal tops x2
Torch
Spare batteries for torch
Thermal bottoms
Leisure sock x1
Hiking socks
Blister prevention and treatment
First aid
Camera
Indoor shoes (slippers)
Boots
Compass
Map
Toiletries
Book
Key
Hat
Gloves
Buff

flickr

Documentation on ActiveResource is fairly thin on the ground.

If you are using ActiveResource in the real world it is likely that you will want to use different webservices depending on what environment you are in. (Staging, Development, CI, Production etc.)

Heres how to do it. This assumes the REST api has been put under the api namespace and has been setup with HTTP Authentication.

config/initializers/config.rb

  raw_config = File.read(RAILS_ROOT + "/config/config.yml")
  GLOBAL = YAML.load(raw_config)
  APP_CONFIG = GLOBAL[Rails.env]

config/config.yml

  development:
      webservice: http://username:password@localhost:3001/api/
  test:
      webservice: http://username:password@localhost:3001/api/
  staging:
      webservice: https://username:password@staging.com/api/
  production:
      webservice: https://username:password@production.com/api/

app/models/incometype.rb_

  class IncomeType < ActiveResource::Base
    self.site = APP_CONFIG['webservice']
  end

Here is a great railscast on the subject.

Djamolidine Abdujaparov is one of my childhood heroes. Here we have him crashing in the 1991 Tour De France.

I have modified Savage-Beast extensively to make it run as a rails engine under rails 2.3.x. I think that rails engines are suited to running forum systems. The modifications that I made seemed a bit aggressive (I removed internationalization) so decided a separate project was required.

I have named it Wee Beastie

Currently the install process is a bit long winded which I hope to tidy up soon, if you want to help feel free to fork and get involved.

Wee Beastie

Rewrite of SavageBeast to work with Rails 2.3.x as a rails engine.

Install

• script/plugin install git://github.com/pyrat/wee_beastie.git
• rake wee_beastie:sync_migrations
• rake wee_beastie:sync_public
• rake wee_beastie:install_plugins
• rake db:migrate
• config.cache_classes = true (environment.rb) – means restarts, sorry!
• config.active_record.default_timezone = :utc
• include WeeBeastie::UserInit to user model
• setup a user to have forum_admin attribute set to true to allow you to administer and setup the forums.

TODO

• Currently there is no out of the box way to create moderatorships. You need to add the create moderatorship links in your you administration.

Having replaced my exhaust system myself; I was recently in need of some parts manuals for gaskets etc.

I found some manuals strewn about the web and have decided to host the decent ones here. Hope this helps someone, gies a shout in the comments if it does!

1993-1996 Impreza Turbo
1999-2001 Impreza Coupe
1993-2001 Subaru Impreza

The best part of man vs wild has to be the eating of manky stuff. Here we have Bear eating a giant larvae!

git checkout master

error: Untracked working tree file ‘vendor/plugins/acts_as_list/lib/active_record/acts/list.rb’ would be overwritten by merge.

Here’s a workaround…
To go back to a branch w/o submodules

rm -rf vendor/plugins
git checkout master
git checkout vendor/plugins

To go back to a branch w/ submodules

git checkout dev
git submodule update --init

Another gotcha, when I tried to merge dev into master I got “fatal: cannot read object… It is a submodule!” A solution is:

git merge -s  resolve

Original Article

This is not a joke, but serious disco dancing from Finland!!

Ghost is a nice way to configure your development machine for subdomain based application access.

Dont you hate running out of stuff?

• Sitting on the toilet, dropping the kids off at the pool; the penny drops. No toilet paper!
• Wake up starving, put your favourite cereal (cheerios) in a bowl. No milk!
• Excited about another breakfast of champions, doh!

Im fed up of running out of things so have been developing a healthy? obsession with buying stuff in bulk. Its a good feeling when you know that you have enough supplies to eat beans on toast for another 10 days straight.

By default: rails helpers will add a timestamp onto the end of the asset so when you redeploy the file the browsers will recache the file because the timestamp has changed.

eg.

  <script src="/javascripts/all.js?1242919746" type="text/javascript"></script>

To setup mod_expires apache on debian based:

  sudo a2enmod expires

Then in your config

  ExpiresActive On
  <FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
  </FilesMatch>

You can easily add image types to this as well but often css loads images and designer often forget to use these helper methods. So in the real world just doing it with js and css makes it safer to do with maximum performance gain.

By default apache does not perform gzip compression. I recently turned this on and along with a small increase in load I noticed a large performance increase from the client side.

To turn it on (debian / ubuntu)

  sudo a2enmod deflate

Now im not a fan of copy and paste configs but included below is the mod_deflate config I am currently using. At least read it before using. (Doesnt gzip certain file type and turns off some gzipping for older browsers.)

  SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
      no-gzip dont-vary
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
      \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
      no-gzip dont-vary
  SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
 
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html