The Love Shack » Ruby http://www.the-love-shack.net Yes, the B-52's. No, not pr0n. Sheesh! Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:04:35 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Ubiquity coolness http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/09/02/ubiquity-coolness/ http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/09/02/ubiquity-coolness/#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:55:51 +0000 Alex http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/09/02/ubiquity-coolness/ It’s as though the Mozilla guys knew that Google was cooking up Chrome and wanted to make sure that Chrome didn’t steal all their glory. So about a week ago, they gave us Ubiquity. If you need to know why Ubiquity is cool, I’ll let their page do the talking. But, if you already think it’s cool, and have it installed, you should visit RubyURL.

I took a quick break from working on Boxcar stuff today and, after a bit of hacking and a RubyURL API update (generously provided by Robby), we now have a working Ubiquity command for RubyURL. How easy is it to use? Well, take a look:

2008-09-02_1847
]]> http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/09/02/ubiquity-coolness/feed/ 1 Working for The Man! http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/02/14/working-for-the-man/ http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/02/14/working-for-the-man/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:57:39 +0000 Alex http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/02/14/working-for-the-man/ So, as of today, I have accepted an offer to work for The Man. Not The Man as in, “The Man is keeping us down”, but as in “You are The Man!”. Except, in this case, it’s more like The Company. :) Starting soon (hopefully Friday, if everything is ready to go) I’ll be working for Planet Argon. I’m being brought in as a sysadmin for their hosting operations. There are lots of really exciting opportunities going on here not only in the world of Ruby on Rails hosting in particular, but hosting services in general.

Companies like DreamHost have really redefined what one-click installations are all about, but I’m looking to take that further. Not just one-click hosting, but one-click virtual servers. Imagine filling out a form, submitting some billing info, and having a full-blown, ready to go virtual server available for your use (with root access to boot) within a few minutes.

With technologies like Xen allowing lightweight virtual machines, I’m hoping that we’ll soon be able to make this a reality. No more being confined to your $HOME, and trying to install software that isn’t supported by the hosting service within those confines. You’ll now be able to install software as it was MEANT to be installed, and just have it work.

With more and more Web 2.0 (is that cliché yet?) applications coming up, and with more and more developers designing said applications, it’ll be even more important to have an easy and reliable platform for hosting these applications. It’s obviously going to take some hard work and time to get it done, but I think it’ll really be a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Stay tuned for more about this. :)

Obviously, these are just my opinions and not the policy of Planet Argon, yadda, yadda. Same goes for any future work-related posts. But it’s a very exciting opportunity, and a very exciting time to be getting involved into this portion of the business.

]]> http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/02/14/working-for-the-man/feed/ 0 Ruby on Rails Coding Setup http://www.the-love-shack.net/2007/02/15/ruby-on-rails-coding-setup/ http://www.the-love-shack.net/2007/02/15/ruby-on-rails-coding-setup/#comments Thu, 15 Feb 2007 22:17:47 +0000 Alex http://www.the-love-shack.net/2007/02/15/ruby-on-rails-coding-setup/ Now that I’ve gotten over the initial hump of learning enough Ruby (on Rails) to get some productive work done, here’s my list of quite-possibly-essential tools for the job:

    1. Ruby (and Rails, if you’re doing web stuff)
    2. Ruby Interactive Reference – Currently v1.8 (ri1.8 package in Debian)
    3. A good text editor. I prefer Emacs for heavy coding, vim for quick edits. Whatever works best for you.
    4. The Ruby Documentation Bundle from ruby-doc.org.
    5. The Rails Framework Documentation (if you’re using rails). On a Debian system, this is part of the rails package. Look under /usr/share/doc/rails/html.
    6. A fast, tabbed browser. Firefox/Iceweasel are just too slow for me, so I prefer Galeon. It’s not actively maintained anymore, but I currently have 68 tabs open in two windows, and the response time is instantaneous, so I’m happy. :)
    7. This one may or may not apply to your situation, but for me it’s essential: a good music player and good music to go with it. Currently this is Audacious playing Gipsy Kings. YMMV. :)

I also use a few non-essential extras to make my life a bit simpler.

    1. Beryl is excellent for multiple desktops and transparent windows. Multiple desktops are easy enough, but transparent windows can really be handy when you’re trying to read things in one window while typing in another.
    2. A good MySQL front-end. I personally rather like the MySQL Query Browser. It’s light, easy to use, and does all of its work through queries that I can edit, so I don’t have to keep a separate shell window open for manual tasks.
    3. A tabbed terminal for multiple connections to the remote machine I’m working on. I just use gnome-terminal for this though there probably are better alternatives out there.
    4. Oh, and most importantly, a Debian system to run all of this stuff on. :)

Get a setup like that going and you too, can be Cool Like Me ™. :) Well, ok, not really. Nobody can really be as cool as me. Or maybe they just don’t want to… hmm…

]]> http://www.the-love-shack.net/2007/02/15/ruby-on-rails-coding-setup/feed/ 0