ChrisCodes - Where Art Meets Code!

The Pradipta 416

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I regularly get emailed by recruiters regarding Ruby on Rails jobs.

This morning I had one that topped them all. I get this email with a one liner about some Rails positions. I then notice that the genius who sent it put all the people he was sending to in the CC field instead of the BCC field.

I use Thunderbird and have my messages in threaded view. I wondered why it appeared to be a thread, as I hit "reply all" to send the recruiter a nice message for giving my email to over 400 people, I realize that many of those people had already done the same. Very entertaining, and one more item on my list of why I dislike recruiters.

New Projects

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My user interface and graphic designer, Dan Vinson, and I have our hands full as we've added 3 major projects to our already heavy workload.

One is a new website for a Washington D.C. based record label, that will integrate music producers with their MySpace networks via the new MySpace Developer Platform and Google's OpenSocial API amongst other things.

Unfortunately we can't say too much about the others, due to NDA's, but they'll keep us busy for quite some time.

acts_as_conference

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

acts_as_conference.attendees << self

Looking forward to acts_as_conference in Orlando this weekend.

So Long AWS, or ECS, or AAWS

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

After 4 good years, I'm saying goodbye to the Amazon Web Service store on this site. It began as an excuse to play with SOAP and PHP back in 2004. I never expected to actually make anything from the associates program, so I was shocked when I started receiving gift certificates in 2005.

Amazon's web service offerings have grown quite a bit since then, and the original service has gone through multiple version, and name, changes. I was running an old version that reaches EOL next month, and I'm currently too busy to update it.

I'll still be working with the API in some fashion, but the time has come to remove it from this site.

Sluice, the 'River of News' style feed reader

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We've just setup the public website for Sluice, the application we built for the Rails Rumble.
Stay tuned for details, and once the rumble settles down, we'll be adding features to the application there.

Rails Rumble, Officially Over... Again, For Real This Time!

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend Trevor Bramble and I competed in the Rails Rumble. Originally we had a team of 4, but two bailed on us at the last minute, so it wound up being 2 to build an application in rails in 48 hours.

What came out of it was Sluice, an alternative to Google Reader. The original intent was to build a lighter feed reader, with search capabilities, and no sidebar. Ironically, Google added those same features to Reader the day before the competition started.

Anyway, with only two of us working on it, we had to cut many of the features we had planned. Nevertheless, we got a good start on an application we've both been talking about for awhile. We'll continue to work on it over at sluice.somewhatuseful.com

Voting started today, so check out all the applications, but remember to vote for sluice!

Rails Rumble

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Rails Plugin Repository Temporarily Offline

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I've recently moved and as a result the subversion repository (svn://chriscodes.homelinux.org) that holds my Rails plugins has been offline.

If you're looking for the generate_sitemap plugin, I do have a tarball of the latest available here.
http://chriscodes.com/generate_sitemap.tar.gz

I'll post here once the subversion repository is back online.

Rotate Rails application logs with logrotate on Debian

Tue, 22 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here's a logrotate script to keep your Rails application's logs from getting out of hand. This is from a Debian GNU/Linux box, but should be similar on other Linux systems, give or take a path or two.

Create a file in the /etc/logrotate.d directory, eg. /etc/logrotate.d/rails-apps, with the following

/rails-apps/*/log/*.log {
        weekly
        missingok
        copytruncate
        rotate 12
        compress
        notifempty
        sharedscripts
        postrotate
           if [ -f /var/run/lighttpd.pid ]; then \
             if [ -x /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d ]; then \
                invoke-rc.d lighttpd force-reload > /dev/null; \
             else \
                /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload > /dev/null; \
             fi; \
           fi;
        endscript
}

This will run weekly, so if you want to test it to be sure it works first, just run:

sudo /usr/sbin/logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/rails-apps

The first line will look in each directory in /rails-apps for the log/ directory. It will rotate all files ending with .log, so if you store the rails logs, lighttpd (or Apache) access/error logs in your app's log directory, they're all taken care of.
This way multiple applications (and applications added in the future) are covered.

I'm using lighttpd, so after rotating the server is restarted

As with any Linux utility, logrotate is very configurable, so be sure and check man logrotate for all of the glorious options. Or check out one of the many articles and tutorials available

Generate Sitemap Plugin Updated

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I've updated my generate_sitemap plugin for Rails.

Little changes that ensure nil anchor tags aren't crawled, as well as links that begin with '#'.
I've also incorporated changes submitted from Steven Bristol of less everything. Steven added code to allow for full urls but still keep you in DOMAIN, and a bit that will keep going even if Hpricot chokes on a url. Thanks Steven!

More on the plugin can be found in my initial announcement, and on AgileWebDevelopment.com